The Void was not dark.
That was the first lie the stories told you.
In the nursery rhymes of the Fray, mothers warned their children that the edge of the world was a black mouth that swallowed naughty boys. They called it the Abyss, the Night-That-Never-Ends.
But as Abaddon fell, tumbling head over heels into the expanse, he wasn't surrounded by darkness. He was drowning in white.
It was a blinding, absolute whiteness—like staring directly into a magnesium flare. It was the color of static on a dead channel, the color of a page before the ink touches it. It wasn't empty space; it was erasure.
The wind roared in his ears, a deafening screech that sounded like a million radios tuned to the wrong frequency. He flailed his arms, trying to grab onto something, anything, but his hands only clawed at the freezing mist.
'I'm dead', his mind screamed. 'I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead.'
Terror, cold and primal, seized his chest. His vision began to tunnel. He had heard the stories of the "White Monster." They said that when you fell into the Void, you didn't just die. The Void unraveled you. First, it stripped away your skin, then your memories, then your soul, until there was no evidence you had ever existed at all. You became part of the static.
His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. The gray metal of the Dredge Yards was already a distant speck above him, a shrinking island of reality in a sea of nothingness.
Then suddenly out of nowhere, he felt a tug.
It started as a pressure at the base of his neck.
It felt like a fishhook ripping through the muscle of his soul.
Abaddon opened his mouth to scream, but the air was sucked out of his lungs.
He felt some kind of limit approaching.
PING.
The sound wasn't loud, but it echoed inside his skull like a gunshot in a library.
Something broke in him.
It wasn't a physical break. It was metaphysical.
Abaddon felt some kind of connection snap.
A heavy, warm sensation of being "anchored" to the world vanished instantly. In its place came a feeling he had never experienced in his life, a sensation so alien it made him forget the fall.
He felt... loose.
It was a terrifying, vertiginous lightness. He was suddenly free. Unbound. Disconnected from the laws of physics, from the logic of humanity. He was a singular dot of existence floating in chaos. It was the most lonely feeling in the universe, a hollowness that carved him out like a pumpkin.
'Is this death?' he thought, his consciousness fading as the white mist enveloped him. 'Is this what it feels like to be nothing?'
But the Void wasn't done with him.
Just as the cold embrace of oblivion began to soothe his panic, a new sensation assaulted him.
It didn't come from the around him. It came from inside.
Agony.
It started in his spine. It felt like someone had poured molten lead into his nervous system. It wasn't the warm, orderly energy he knew; it was heavy, jagged, and violently hungry.
Something foreign was forcing its way into the vacuum left by the broken feeling.
'GET! OUT!' his mind shrieked.
It ignored him. The pain spiked, tearing through his veins, boiling his blood. It felt as though a serrated sword was being slowly pushed up through his back, coiling around his ribs, digging into his marrow. This wasn't just energy; it was a thing. It was thick, oily, and heavy—heavier than a mountain, heavier than a star.
It filled the hollowness inside him with a dark, crushing density.
Abaddon convulsed in mid-air, his body arching in a silent scream. The white blindness of the Void turned red at the edges. The pain was too much. It was rewriting his biology, burning out the weak circuits of a Rank 1 human and installing something... else.
His eyes rolled back in his head. The last thing he felt was the sensation of cold iron wrapping around his heart, squeezing it tight.
Then, the world went black.
◆ ◆ ◆
"Uhgh..."
The sound was wet and raspy, like gravel grinding in a mixer.
Abaddon coughed, his body convulsing as he expelled a mouthful of bile and static-tasting saliva. He sucked in a breath, expecting the freezing vacuum of the Void.
Instead, he tasted ozone, rust, and rain.
He cracked his eyes open.
Gray metal. Rivets. A puddle of oily water reflecting a flickering halogen light.
He was staring at the floor.
Abaddon lay motionless for a long moment, his brain rebooting sluggishly. The roar of the wind was gone, replaced by the rhythmic clank-clank of distant machinery and the soft hiss of falling rain.
He pushed himself up, his arms trembling. His head throbbed with a migraine that felt like a rusty nail had been driven between his eyes.
"What..." he croaked.
He looked around slowly.
He was back on the Dredge Yards. specifically, he was slumped against a pile of rusted shipping crates about fifty feet back from the edge. The storm had passed, leaving the deck slick and empty. The other workers were gone. The foreman was gone.
"How?" he whispered, his voice trembling.
He remembered falling. He remembered the whiteness. He remembered a Snap.
He scrambled backward, away from the edge, his heels scraping on the metal. He checked his hands, his legs. They were solid. He wasn't transparent. He wasn't dissolving.
"Bu-but I fell," he muttered, running a hand through his soaked hair.
A sudden chill wind blew across the deck, and Abaddon shivered violently. He hugged himself—and realized his skin was bare.
He looked down.
"Oh, come on!"
His tunic—his heavy, reinforced leather work tunic—was gone.
Shredded.
Tatters of leather and cloth lay scattered around him like confetti. It looked as if he had been put through a woodchipper.
"That tunic cost me twelve credits!" he groaned, the financial loss cutting through his existential dread. "I still have six installments left on the payment plan!"
He was sitting half-naked in the freezing rain in the middle of a monster-infested dock. It was a disaster. He stood up on shaky legs, intending to find a rag or a tarp to cover himself before he froze to death.
But as he stood, he caught his reflection in a pane of glass on a nearby operator's booth.
Abaddon froze.
"What is that?"
The reflection showed a lean, pale boy with dark circles under his eyes. But that wasn't what drew his attention.
It was the black marks.
Starting from the base of his neck and winding down across his chest, over his ribs, and wrapping around his left arm were intricate, pitch-black patterns.
They weren't bruises.
They weren't dirt.
They were tattoos.
No, not tattoos. They were too vivid, too sharp. They looked like... chains.
Jagged, heavy links of black iron were inked into his skin, coiling around his torso like a snake constricting its prey. They looked almost three-dimensional, disappearing under his skin at his collarbone and re-emerging at his shoulder. They pulsed faintly, a dull, rhythmic throb that matched the heavy beat of his heart.
Abaddon stared at his own chest in horror. He rubbed at the marks frantically, spitting on his hand and scrubbing until his skin turned red.
They didn't smudge. They didn't fade. They were part of him.
"I didn't have these..." he whispered, panic rising in his throat again. "I didn't have these this morning."
He touched the center of his chest, where the "chain" seemed to be anchored. The skin felt cold—unnaturally cold, like touching dry ice.
He stumbled back, his breath coming in short, panicked gasps. He didn't know what had happened down there in the white mist. He didn't know how he had gotten back up to the dock. But he knew, with a sickening certainty, that something inside him had broken.
Or changed.
He looked around the empty, eerie shipyard. The shadows stretched long and dark under the halo lamps. For a second, the shadows seemed to ripple, reaching toward him.
"Okay, I think it's time to leave," he stammered.
His head was spinning. The hunger in his gut—the one he always felt—was gone, replaced by a strange, heavy fullness, like he had just eaten a Thanksgiving dinner made of stones.
He grabbed a discarded oily tarp from a crate and wrapped it around his shoulders like a shawl. He didn't care how he looked. He just needed to get away from the edge. Away from the Void.
"Just go home," he told himself, his teeth chattering. "Just go home, sleep it off. It's the static sickness. Hallucinations. That's all. Just a bad trip."
Abaddon turned and broke into a run, stumbling toward the rusted gate that led back to the slums of Sector 44, praying that when he woke up tomorrow, the black chains on his skin would be gone.