A month.
It was a guess, a phantom measurement in a place that had murdered time. His body was a distant, failing report. His skin clung to bone, a parchment map of a starving country. His joints ached with a deep, cold fire that never went out. The thirst was no longer a sensation; it was the condition of his existence, the taste of the air in his lungs. The hunger had passed through pain into a hollow, permanent silence.
He hung in the metal embrace, and he did not care.
The world—the real, solid world of pressure and thirst and metal—had gone soft at the edges. It had blurred, then receded, like a shoreline viewed from a drifting boat. His consciousness had pulled inward, abandoning the derelict body, seeking refuge in the only space left: the infinite, black vault of his own mind.
It wasn't a dream. There were no fantasies of rescue, no memories of sun on his face or food in his belly. Those required a spark of hope, a connection to a "before." He had no before. There was only the Now, and the Now was a void.
A black, damp, endless void. Soundless, but not silent in the oppressive way of his cell. This silence was total, a pristine nothing. And in this nothing, he walked.
There was no ground, no sky, no direction. He simply… moved. One foot in front of the other in a space that had no features, his gaunt, spectral form the only point of reference in an ocean of ink. On his face, etched into the phantom muscles, was a small, relaxed smile. It was the smile of perfect surrender. Of zero resistance. The agony of the body was a faint, radio signal from a distant star. The craving for the sweet, numbing fog was a gentle, familiar hum. Here, in the void, there was no need for the drug. He was the numbness. He had become the quiet he had once craved. He was happy.
Months.
The word meant nothing.It was a fossil of a dead language.
The walking continued.The smile remained.
Years.
A concept that crumbled to dust in the void.Time was not a river here; it was a still, black lake. He was at the bottom of it.
His physical body,sustained by the paradoxical biology of the star within him, did not die. A true Star Glitcher, once ignited, could live for millennia if unharmed. His body was harm incarnate—dehydrated, starved, atrophied—but the core within, that golden, rebellious star, refused to let the vessel fully expire. It was a whisper of power, just enough to maintain a catastrophic, undead stasis. Bones held together by willpower. Organs functioning on phantom energy. He was a mummy in a metal shell, and he did not care. He only wanted…
The drug.
The sweet oblivion.
The…Freedom?
The thought flickered, a single, errant spark in the perpetual night. It was alien. Wrong. It didn't belong in the serene economy of the void.
Freedom…? No. That's not right.
He focused on the craving,on the warm, fuzzy promise of the fog. That was the correct want. The only want.
Dru—Freedom…
The spark didn't go out. It sputtered.
Freedom.
It said it again, a little louder in the silent theater of his mind.
Freedom.
And again. Not a memory, not a desire. A statement. A fact.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
The word began to echo, a solitary stone dropped into the still, black lake. Ripples formed in the void. The perfect, featureless black shimmered, distorted.
FREEDOM.
The echo became a chorus, a deafening, multi-voiced shout that shattered the quiet. The void didn't just ripple; it cracked. Jagged fissures of impossible color splintered across the darkness—blinding white, cold blue, searing cyan, violent red, Ruby's crimson, his own electric yellow, verdant green. The chaos was visual noise, a screaming, discordant symphony for the eyes.
The walking stopped. The serene smile faltered, replaced by a blank stare of shock.
He wasn't just remembering the word. He was relearning it. He was reconstructing its meaning atom by atom, not from memory, but from first principles. In the deep, back channels of his crumbling consciousness, a thousand invisible processes whirred to life. Information wasn't flowing in; it was being dug up from the ruins of himself. Neural pathways that had withered were being reforged in lightning. The concept of "freedom" was being analyzed, defined, cross-referenced, and memorized not once, but a hundred times, a thousand times, with the brutal, recursive efficiency of a star thinking its first thought.
Freedom is movement. A flash of his own legs, walking in the void.
Freedom is choice.The memory of swinging a fist at Ruby's impassive face.
Freedom is sound.The echo of his own laughter amidst the thunder.
Freedom is light.The blinding, golden nova of his awakening.
Freedom is not this.The pressure of the suit. The silence. The sweet, smothering fog.
The system was growing. The void wasn't his refuge anymore; it was his chrysalis. The numbness wasn't peace; it was the fertile dark before a germination. For years—subjective, immeasurable eons inside his skull—the silent, starving boy had been nothing but a shell. Inside, the star had been working. Remodeling. Not just healing, but evolving. Building a new operating system from the wreckage of the old, with one core, unshakable command etched into its very foundation:
FREEDOM.
The cracks multiplied. The colors bled together into a swirling maelstrom. The silent, happy void was gone, replaced by a psychic supernova of noise, color, and singular, screaming purpose.
It couldn't hold anymore.
The pressure reached critical mass.
---
In the physical cell, on a day no calendar would ever mark, the inert statue moved.
It was not a twitch. It was a convulsion of reality.
Inside the helmet, behind closed lids, his eyes snapped open. They did not adjust to the darkness. They banished it. They shone with a fierce, electric yellow light, so intense it illuminated the inside of the helmet like two tiny suns. The pupils within were no longer human; they were sharp, vertical slits, the pupils of a predator, of a storm given eyes.
A low hum began, not from his throat, but from the center of his chest. It was the sound of a dormant reactor achieving criticality. The sound vibrated through the metal suit.
Crack.
A hairline fracture appeared on the chest plate of the suppressor armor, glowing with sizzling, yellow light.
Crack-crack-CRACK!
More fractures spiderwebbed out, racing across the grey metal like forked lightning. Sparks, real and angry, began to spit from the seams, biting the absolute silence of the cell with their violent hiss-pop.
Within the suit, his body was not healing gently. It was reconstituting. Atrophied muscle fibers, fed by the raging star, knitted back with impossible speed, swelling with lean, coiled power. Dehydrated tissues flooded with cosmic energy. The skeleton, brittle from starvation, hummed with renewed density. He was not returning to what he was; he was being forged anew, leaner, harder, a blade tempered in the dark.
The cell began to shake. A fine dust sifted down from the ceiling. The heavy door groaned in its frame.
With a sound like a mountain shearing in half, the suppressor suit exploded.
Not outward, but inward, as if collapsing under the pressure of the star within. Plates of enchanted metal buckled, twisted, and then fell away like brittle autumn leaves, clattering to the floor in a discordant symphony of finality. The intricate network of internal restraints and dampeners vaporized into puffs of black smoke.
He stood, naked and gleaming in the absolute dark, wreathed in a fading corona of golden sparks. The chains of the suit lay around his feet like slain serpents. He took a deep, shuddering breath—his first full, unconstructed breath in years. The air of the cell was stale, cold, and it tasted like ambrosia.
He looked down at his own hands, flexing them. They crackled with residual energy. He raised a hand, and a single, playful arc of lightning jumped from his thumb to his forefinger, illuminating his face in a brief, stark flash.
The gaunt, hollowed mask of the addict was gone. The serene smile of the void-walker was gone. In their place was something older, wilder, and infinitely more dangerous.
A grin spread across his face. It wasn't the unhinged, chaotic grin of his first awakening. This was sharper. More knowing. It was the grin of something that had been to the absolute zero of oblivion and had chosen, consciously and with terrible force, to come back.
In the perfect dark, his electric, slit-pupiled eyes glowed like beacons.
"Huh," he murmured, his voice a rough, unused instrument that nonetheless thrummed with power. He took a step, the first voluntary step in an eternity, his bare foot meeting the cold floor. The sound was obscenely loud.
He tilted his head, listening to the profound silence of the prison around him. The silence he had once craved. The silence that had been his cage.
His grin widened, showing teeth.
"Alright," K. whispered to the darkness, the word crackling with static. "Let's make some noise."