The night air grew colder, as if the whole world held its breath, waiting for something that had not yet come.
The curse inside me was no longer a whisper; it had become a loud voice demanding I listen, surrender, accept my fate. Yet a small part of me — the shard that still insisted on remaining human — clung to something called will.
She stood before me, her face calm as the moon, and her eyes held more than fear or tenderness; they were mirrors that see beyond veils. She looked at me with a strange steadiness, as if she perceived what no one else could.
She spoke in a low voice like wind whispering through trees:
— "I see past and future… I see the threads of fate writhe before me. I have seen you, again and again. I saw how your threads were cut, how the darkness fed from you then choked… and I saw your first ending. Your future was to die by my hand."
I froze. Time itself seemed to stop.
Past and mist — and her voice felt like a seal on a sentence I was not prepared to hear.
I said in a terrifying calm: — "My future? You decide the future?"
She smiled bitterly, a smile that no longer warmed me; it was like a cold realization: — "I do not decide. I only see. Eyes see, they do not control. I am a witness to what will be… but sometimes a vision can be a blade that wounds reality."
She placed her hand on my chest as if stroking a pulse only she could feel:
— "In my vision… your face stopped at one glance from me. Your blood covered me… and the world screamed a name that no longer exists. This was the ending I saw for you."
I laughed a short, harsh laugh: — "My ending? It is easy to tell me what you saw, harder to prove it is an unbreakable fate."
Her gaze did not change. There was in her eyes a mixture of mercy…and chill: — "You will know. If I do not choose it, the days will. But beware — there are things in this world that want their continuation. They do not want their course altered."
"You have become a slave to the darkness, and if the darkness clings to you, you will regret it. The abyss loves those who stare into it, and it has taken a liking to you — so it favors your dying. And you are only at the beginning of the road, are you not, Kim?"
Her words were like a hidden warning, yet a boil of rage rose in my chest I no longer tried to hide. Everything that rose from me now was concentrated fury, a will to seize control.
I stepped forward, shadow coiling about my feet like a hand gripping the edge of my flesh, but my voice was thin and firm: — "You say the future is a given vision? I tell you: the future is being written by us now. I will remake it. It is not yours to say who lives and who dies."
She looked at me for a long moment, then tilted her head as if thinking. Suddenly, with deadly cold, she began to call words I did not understand but felt like arrows slicing the air. Something shifted in her features; as if her vision no longer wished to remain mere speech, as if she were opening a door to something larger.
Then what I did not expect happened.
With a motion so quick it gave no hint, she fixed her lip to my throat — a single sharp touch — as if she were practiced at cutting threads that need a skilled cutter. I felt a patch of pain, acute and thin, then everything vanished in a flash that did not last a second. I collapsed to the ground, blood spilling from my mouth, and I saw her face above me, expressionless, as if calmly reporting her final vision: she had completed what she had seen.
I fell into the dark. The shimmer of the stars tore away from me like a curtain flipping. Death's embrace was cold but familiar. Everything turned into a black nebula that swallowed me.