Nothing made sense.
And yet, somehow, everything did.
The images tangled in my mind—blood on the floor, my mother's smile, my father's fall, my brother's empty eyes. They overlapped and blurred until I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. My heart pounded as if it were trying to escape my chest, but my body refused to move.
I tried to breathe.
The world tilted.
Darkness took me before I could fall.
Flashback...
Two years ago.
That was when it began.
Alaric vanished without a word.
One day he was there—silent but present—and the next, his room stood empty. The house turned inside out as we searched for him. We searched every road and every place he knew.
Nothing.
Days passed. Then more.
I barely slept. Every sound outside made my heart leap. Every shadow looked like him. My mother prayed in whispers she thought no one could hear.
Then one night, he returned.
No announcement. No explanation.
He simply stood in the doorway—thin, pale, untouched—and utterly changed.
His eyes were the first thing I noticed.
They were... wrong.
Not wounded. Not afraid.
Empty.
As if something inside him had been scooped out and never replaced.
He spoke little after that. Ate little. He locked himself in his room for hours, sometimes days. When I knocked, he never answered. When I caught glimpses of him, he avoided my gaze.
And his eyes—
Even in the darkest rooms, they reflected light. Not warmth. Not life. Just a cold, unnatural gleam that made my skin prickle.
Once, late at night, I saw him sitting on the floor, his back against the wall. A book lay open in his hands.
The sight of it stirred something uneasy in me, though I couldn't have said why. The cover looked old—too old—but the pages were untouched by time. The letters seemed sharp, almost... alive.
I stood there, watching him read without turning a page, his eyes fixed and unblinking.
"Alaric?" I had whispered.
He didn't respond.
I told myself not to push. Told myself he would open up when he was ready. Told myself I was imagining things.
Now, the guilt burned deeper than any wound.
I should have tried harder.
The memory slipped away.
End of flashback...
Light touched my face.
I stirred, breath catching as my eyes flew open. Sunlight streamed through the broken roof of the house, dust dancing in the air as if nothing in the world had changed.
But everything had.
I sat up slowly.
My parents were gone—far away from me.
My brother was nowhere to be found.
I had nothing left.
Nothing.