There was no time anymore.
Even the sense of existence began to erode.
All that remained of Ashen was falling apart, as if his being was decomposing layer by layer in a sea of nothingness.
The giant eyes were still watching.
But they had begun to break apart.
Their endless circles turned into rivers of blood flowing toward him, piercing him, burning what was left of his soul,
opening paths inside him he did not know existed.
The process was like cosmic fusion.
No body, no soul — only a growing sense that he was being rewritten from the start.
Every pulse of that ocular blood erased meaning,
wiped away ideas,
stripped him of every definition of himself.
Even his name began to vanish.
Every letter evaporated in the silence.
Even "I"… had lost its meaning.
Then the burning began.
Not ordinary fire,
but mental fire,
fire that consumed consciousness,
devouring memory and awareness together.
Ashen felt his soul melting,
saw himself dissolving into red ash in a bottomless space.
He could no longer scream — even sound itself had been taken from him.
Everything inside him became silent… motionless… identityless.
And as he faded,
he began to hear something new.
At first it was a whisper — slow, drawn out, as if the void itself were breathing words.
Then the whisper became an echo,
then something undefinable.
It was not a sound…
but existence speaking.
The words resonated inside him without being spoken,
as if etched into the foundation of the universe since the beginning.
> "Is this your end?"
A single sentence.
But it was no ordinary question.
It carried the weight of galaxies,
the cold of the void between stars,
the arrogance of eternity itself.
There was no mercy,
no threat,
no concern.
Only absolute disdain.
Ashen did not know where the voice came from.
But he felt it from every direction at once.
From his past, from his future, from moments he had not yet lived.
As if he were hearing his own echo across millions of universes that did not yet exist.
The voice did not come from the outside —
it came from beyond existence itself.
When it spoke, even cosmic awareness shuddered.
Space melted, time broke.
Even death paused to listen.
In that moment,
Ashen no longer existed…
He was an idea clinging to survival in the face of nothingness.
But the question… the question echoed.
> "Is this your end?"
The echo returned to him,
as if rewriting every memory, every pain, every meaning he had faced in his life.
Every battle, every drop of blood, every promise left unfulfilled…
all flowed toward him again, as if summoning him to himself once more.
The void began to collapse.
Something deep within — deeper than the soul, older than consciousness — began to move.
It was not will…
but refusal.
Absolute refusal to end here.
Refusal to be just ash in the memory of emptiness.
Refusal to die without completing what he was born for.
That refusal ignited.
Slowly at first,
then with indescribable intensity.
A small flame of his remaining self flared up again,
but it was not white or golden as spirits are usually depicted.
It was red… black… flickering in the color of blood and chaos.
It grew,
blazed,
and light consumed everything around it.
The giant eyes that were melting stopped.
As if they sensed that something incredible was happening before them.
And from within the ashes,
from the depths of nothingness,
his body began to be rebuilt.
Bone by bone.
Vein by vein.
Blood poured over itself before forming.
Even his soul was poured again into the structure.
But he was no longer himself.
Everything in him had changed:
The blood was no longer just blood, but the essence of the two beings that had been watching him.
His soul was no longer human — it was something entirely different, a mixture of awareness and brutality.
And in the midst of this rebirth,
the voice still echoed, calm and exalted, as if watching from beyond time:
> "Rise, you who were never meant to die."
When he heard it, raw, immeasurable energy exploded inside him.
It was not just a new life,
but the birth of something that was never meant to exist.
The void tore apart.
Red light flooded everything.
And a great beating sound reverberated through the abyss —
the sound of a heart beating for the first time after death.