I went to the nurse for my daily checkup.
She studied my charts, nodded to herself, and delivered the same speech she'd given me every day that week.
"Your internal organs have fully healed," she said. "But avoid anything that might reopen your wounds. No combat. No heavy lifting. No strenuous activity."
"Yes, ma'am."
She smiled, satisfied. "You're recovering well. Keep it up."
I left the medical bay and wandered through the corridors, only half aware of where my feet were taking me. My mind was elsewhere — still tangled up in the night before. The party. The games. The laughter. Kaelen.
I couldn't stop thinking about her.
"Your face is turning red."
"It's... probably the room temperature."
"You're a strange surface person."
I found myself smiling at the memory.
Strange. She called me strange.
I passed the main entrance and stepped out into the morning. The sun was warm, the sky cloudless, and I let myself drift through the streets without any real destination in mind.
That was when I saw him.
Theo.
He was stepping out of a small supermarket, a bag of sweets and ice cream swinging from one hand, two other guys trailing beside him — Rogues, probably, judging by the way they carried themselves.
I walked past without breaking stride.
Theo didn't acknowledge me. I didn't acknowledge him.
We were strangers now. That was fine by me.
Still, I couldn't help wondering what he was doing all the way out in Abuja.
Then Kaelen crossed my mind again, and the thought of Theo dissolved just as quickly as it had come. I smiled to myself and kept walking.
Eventually I found an empty park — small, wedged between two buildings, with a single bench and a scattering of trees. No one else was around.
Perfect.
I sat down in the grass, crossed my legs, and closed my eyes, trying to settle into the kind of stillness Lyra had spent weeks drilling into me.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Let the thoughts drift away.
I felt myself sinking, slowly, the way a stone sinks through still water. The noise of the city faded first — the traffic, the distant conversations, the hum of a world too busy to notice one boy meditating in an overlooked park. Then the warmth of the sun faded. Then, at last, even the weight of my own body seemed to lift away.
And then I was somewhere else entirely.
At first there was nothing.
Not darkness — darkness at least has a texture, a suggestion of shape hiding just out of reach. This was white. Total, featureless, endless white, stretching in every direction with no horizon to anchor it. I lifted my hand in front of my face and, for a long moment, wasn't sure it was really mine.
"Hello?" My voice didn't echo. It simply vanished the instant it left my mouth, swallowed by all that white the way a whisper is swallowed by silence.
Then the whiteness began to change.
It didn't fade so much as bleed, dark tendrils spreading outward like ink dropped into still water. I felt the ground shift beneath me — if it could even be called ground — as the white gave way to black, and the black gave way to motion.
I was standing at the edge of an ocean.
Not water, not really. This ocean was black in a way that had weight to it, thick and slow, its surface rising and falling in long, syrupy swells that made no sound at all. No stars touched its surface. No light reached it. And yet I could see every ripple with a clarity that made my skin crawl, as if the darkness had decided, on its own, to let me see exactly how deep it went.
The air pressed against me like the moment right before a held breath — cold, expectant, aware. Something about that ocean felt like it had been waiting. Not for anyone. For me, specifically, and for a very long time.
I took a step back on instinct, and the ground beneath my feet turned to stone.
That was when I saw the throne.
It rose out of the black water some distance ahead — massive, ancient, carved from something that looked like obsidian but drank in whatever faint light existed instead of reflecting it. Once, it must have been magnificent. I could still make out the ghost of that grandeur in the sweep of its frame, in patterns etched along its arms that looked less like decoration and more like scar tissue.
But it was broken.
A deep fracture split the seat straight down the middle, as though something had shattered it from the inside rather than struck it from without. Shards of black stone hung frozen above the water near its base, suspended mid-collapse in a moment that refused to finish.
My chest tightened. I couldn't explain why a broken chair unsettled me more than an impossible ocean of living darkness, but it did. Some part of me — older than thought, older than fear — recognized what that throne meant, even if the rest of me couldn't put it into words.
Whoever sat there is gone.
Or is still trying to be.
Then I saw the figure standing in front of it.
It stood with its back to me, facing the throne, close enough to touch it but making no move to do so. It had no clear edges. Not because it was dark — though it was — but because looking directly at it made my mind slide sideways, unable to hold its shape for more than a second before losing it again.
Tall. Utterly still. Not the stillness of something at rest, but the stillness of something choosing not to move.
It was watching the broken throne the way a mourner watches a grave.
Or the way a jailer watches a cell.
I didn't dare move. I barely dared to breathe. Every instinct I had screamed that it hadn't noticed me yet — and that this, for the moment, was the only reason I was still standing.
Then it spoke.
"What do you want?"
The voice didn't arrive through my ears. It arrived somewhere lower, somewhere in the marrow of my bones, ancient in a way that made the idea of centuries feel small and almost laughable. This wasn't the Voice from my palm — that presence was small, familiar, almost a friend by comparison, always ready with some tired, sarcastic remark. This was something else entirely. Something that had been old before the concept of age existed to describe it.
I didn't open my eyes. I wasn't sure I had eyes here at all.
"I want to protect the people I love," I said, and my voice came out small, fragile, immediately swallowed by the vastness around me.
"So you wish to be a hero."
"I guess... in a way, yes."
A silence stretched out, long enough that I began to wonder if the figure had already lost interest — already turned its attention back to the shattered throne it seemed to guard.
Then, colder than before:
"You wish to be a hero..."
The black ocean stirred. Its slow, heavy swells quickened, as if the words themselves had disturbed something moving beneath the surface.
"...yet you look like a monster."
My eyes snapped open.
I wasn't sitting anymore. I was floating a full meter above the grass, red energy crackling violently around me in a storm that had no business existing in a park this small. For one suspended heartbeat I hung there, weightless, caught somewhere between the white void and the world I actually belonged to.
Then the energy collapsed all at once, and gravity remembered me.
I fell.
THUD.
I hit the ground hard, pain lancing through my shoulder. I scrambled upright, grabbing a nearby tree to keep myself standing.
"What the hell was that?"
I looked down at my hand. A red eye had opened on the back of it — not the familiar eye on my palm where the Voice lived, but a different one entirely. Smaller. Sharper. Angrier, somehow, in a way that made my stomach twist just looking at it. It blinked once, slow and deliberate, and then began to fade.
"Am tired," it said — and even in exhaustion, the voice carried none of the warmth or sarcasm I'd grown used to. It was flat. Distant. Ancient in a way that made the words feel almost like an afterthought. "Can we talk later?"
I stared at my hand, chest still heaving.
"Yeah," I managed. "Sure."
The eye closed. I leaned back against the tree, waiting for my heartbeat to slow, and it took a long time.
What is that voice?
And what does it mean by monster?
I walked back to headquarters slowly, each step heavier than the last. The city moved around me exactly as it always did, indifferent to the fact that somewhere beneath its noise, I had just stood on the shore of a black ocean and been weighed by something old enough to make gods look young by comparison.
*"You wish to be a hero... yet you look like a monster."*
I caught my reflection in a passing window and stopped.
Same face. Same eyes. Same boy I'd always been.
*Monster?*
I shook my head, but the word didn't shake loose.
*I don't look like a monster.*
*Do I?*
I didn't have an answer. Worse, I didn't know where to look for one.
That night, I lay in bed staring at my palm, then at the back of my hand, as if watching closely enough might make either voice speak again.
The red eye was closed. The Voice on my palm was quiet too, tired in its own familiar way — the kind of silence that meant it was resting, not hiding.
But I could feel both of them. Two presences. Two voices, entirely unlike one another, sharing the same body without ever quite agreeing to.
One was tired, sarcastic, almost a friend.
The other was old. Cold. Watching something I couldn't see, guarding something I didn't understand.
*What am I becoming?*
I didn't know.
But I was going to find out.
End of Chapter