Jade couldn't tell if her eyes were open or closed.
No matter what she did, no matter how hard she tried to see, there was only black. Not darkness the way a room went dark when the lights died, but a black so complete it didn't feel like the absence of light. It felt like the absence of everything.
She ran her hands over her arms, her shoulders, her ribs, as if she could convince herself she still had edges. Still had weight. Still had a body that belonged to the world she remembered. Her fingers met skin. Warmth. Familiar shape.
She pinched her arm, hard enough to make herself flinch. Pain bit sharp and immediate.
Jade exhaled, shaky, and rubbed the spot. "Okay," she whispered to herself. "Not asleep."
But that didn't explain this.
She tried to orient herself. Am I standing? Sitting? Lying down?
Her knees didn't complain. Her spine didn't feel compressed. Her muscles didn't pull. There was no ground under her hands when she reached downward. Just nothing. The hair rose along her arms. A strange, distant panic tried to climb up her throat as she started to wonder if this was purgatory, but even her fear felt muffled here, like someone had wrapped her heart in thick cloth and tied it tight.
"Hello?" she called loudly.
She expected an echo, expected her voice to bounce back at her in some hollow, endless way. Instead, her words seemed to vanish almost as soon as they left her mouth, swallowed by the overwhelming silence.
A warmth suddenly slid down her cheek.
"Aamon!" she shouted, the name ripping out of her before she could stop it.
For a heartbeat she thought he had grazed her face, then she realized she was crying. Jade wiped at her face, but the tears kept coming, silent and pointless in a place that didn't even feel like it had gravity. A voice suddenly chimed from nowhere. It startled her.
"Who's there?" she demanded, her hands flying up, feeling in the darkness. Searching for something solid to hold on to. Something that would prove she still existed. The voice came again. It came from everywhere at once, filling the space, then somehow traveling away at the same time, thinning as if it were walking past her. The words grew quieter, stretching out, fading into the black.
"What significance do you hold to demons?"
Jade's stomach twisted. Before she could respond, more voices joined in, Some high, some low, some whispering, some sharp like a hiss. They overlapped and tangled, questions colliding into each other until Jade couldn't tell where one ended and the next began.
"Who are you?"
"Do you burn?"
"Are you dead?"
"Are you alive?"
"Did you live?"
"Why don't you burn?"
"Did you fall?"
"Will you fall?"
Jade clamped her hands over her ears, pulling herself into a ball as if making herself small would somehow dull the constant flow of questions that hit her with such force, she was starting to forget what the words even meant. She was losing herself.
The sound wasn't coming from around her. It wasn't pressing in through her eardrums. It was in her, vibrating through her bones, sliding through her thoughts. She squeezed her eyes shut so hard her forehead ached, but the questions kept coming, ruthless and endless. Then, without warning, it all stopped. Silence dropped over her like a heavy curtain.
Jade sucked in air that didn't feel like air and held herself, trembling. Sobs shook her shoulders. Her mind spun uselessly, trying to name the place she was in, trying to decide whether she was still a person or only the memory of one. Trying to recall where she had been, who she had been.
Am I dead?
Her eyes fluttered open again, greeted by black. But this time, as she stared into it, she noticed something. The faintest change. A thin shift in tone, so indistinguishable she almost thought she'd imagined it. Jade blinked fast, rubbed her eyes, and focused on the spot. Something moved again. Just slightly. This time she knew she'd seen it.
That tiny motion, that microscopic proof that the black wasn't absolute, was enough to steady her breathing. Jade forced herself to hold on to it, the way she might hold on to a rope in deep water. She replayed the questions in her mind, trying to make sense of them instead of letting them tear her apart.
Who are you?
Why don't you burn?
Did you fall?
"I am Jade." She finally said aloud, something about the certainty of her answer seemed to make the darkness here less heavy.
She could not make sense of the other questions. The question about burning had to be about Aamon. But how was she supposed to know why he burned her? Her heart lurched painfully at his name, at his face, at the memory of his arms around her.
How am I supposed to apologize now?
Her throat tightened as the thought rushed in. Heavy, raw, and real. She had been Jade. She is Jade. And she had been friend to Aamon, the demon king. Tears blurred the faint movement in the dark, and for a few seconds she lost it, lost her only anchor.
Would he look for me? Would anyone come for her now?
The thought that no one would find her, that she might simply stay here, untethered and unseen, made her chest constrict until she could barely breathe. She knew that all good things must end eventually, but this was too soon. Too sudden. Too cruel.
The whispers began again.
Jade squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her palms hard against her ears. It still didn't matter.
This time the voices rushed past her in a swarm, and she caught only one question clearly, as if someone had chosen it on purpose.
"Did you fall?"
Then silence returned. Jade swallowed against the sting in her throat.
Did I fall?
She tried to understand what that meant. Was she dead and her mind was trying to explain it to her? Had she fallen from somewhere? Had she hit her head? Had she jumped? Did she fall into Hell?
No. That wasn't right. She clung to herself and forced her thoughts backward, digging for something solid. What was the last thing she remembered?
A balcony. No. Not the balcony. The apartment. Her old apartment.
She drew in a slow breath and let her mind go still, like she was smoothing ripples off the surface of a pond. Memories didn't come when she chased them. They came when she gave them space.
The museum. The argument with Levi. Rage. Tears. Pride and Envy colliding like knives. She had run away, heart pounding, needing to breathe without someone staring through her like she was prey. Then the apartment door. The lock. The quiet, empty darkness. The brief relief.
Someone knocked. She'd thought it was Levi. She'd opened the door—
The Reaper.
The moment Jade remembered the Reaper's hooded shape, the black around her shifted. Fog rose around her ankles, pale and cold, and a weak gray light bled into the world. It felt exactly like being smothered by a blanket and having someone on the outside finally pull it away.
Jade squinted at the sudden brightness. Shadows peeled back from her vision. The ground beneath her was flat and featureless, swallowed in dirty gray fog. The sky above was also gray. The color of ash. There was no sun. No moon. No wind. No sound.
Jade looked down at herself. She wasn't gray but her skin looked wrong. Her color was muted, like she'd been washed too many times. Like she was fading. A sharp breath caught in her throat. She looked up.
A tall, hooded figure stood in front of her. The Reaper.
Fear froze her muscles. Her mind screamed for her legs to move, for her body to run, but her feet stayed planted like they'd forgotten what fleeing was. Voices spilled from the Reaper again, not one voice, but many, layered and echoing.
"Didn't think you would succeed."
"You are conscious?"
"What are you fighting for?"
Jade's mouth opened and closed soundlessly. Her hands trembled at her sides. Every instinct begged her to drop to the ground and make herself small.
The Reaper tilted slightly, as if examining her from a dozen angles at once. The hood hid its face completely, but Jade still felt the weight of its attention like a hand on her throat.
Then it asked, and for the first time the words came clearer, less distorted, as if the Reaper had decided to speak properly.
"Are you falling?"
Jade blinked, confused by the sudden change in clarity. "Wha… what?" she managed weakly, her voice coming out in a shaky whisper as if she hadn't spoken in years.
The figure straightened again, somehow it seemed to Jade like an angry posture.
"Whom is it you are fighting to keep consciousness for?"
The question went straight through her. Not what are you fighting for. Who.
Jade's heart thudded hard. She didn't want to answer. She didn't even understand why the question made her feel exposed.
"I don't understand what you're asking." She whispered.
For a moment, the Reaper recoiled. It leaned away from her the smallest fraction, and one long arm lifted slightly, as if it had moved without thinking. Like a reflex. Like fear. Jade felt like her response was not what the reaper had expected, like it already knew the answer, and was shocked that she had avoided the truth.
The Reaper stiffened, regaining that unnatural stillness almost as quickly as it had recoiled. Its many voices settled into one again.
"Come. Grimm will want to speak with you."
Then it glided away, as if the world carried it forward. Jade stared after it, breath shallow.
Grimm?
Her instincts screamed that following was the worst idea she'd ever had. But standing still in this place felt worse. Jade huffed, forcing herself to move, and jogged to catch up. The fog licked at her ankles like cold breath.
"Who's Grimm?" she asked, quietly, looking for any reason to avoid the silence.
"Master Reaper," it answered. "Ruler of Interstice."
Interstice.
The word sparked something in her memory. Zeth had said something about borders. About where realms touched. About lines that weren't meant to be crossed.
Jade wrapped her arms around herself as she followed. "So this isn't exile?"
The Reaper didn't answer right away. Its silence felt like judgment. Then it spoke, brief and flat:
"Between."
"Between what?" Jade pressed.
"Everything." The reaper responded in a catatonic voice, like it was frustrated at her consistently asking for deeper meaning.
Jade swallowed, then kept talking because the alternative was letting her mind spiral. "Between the realms?"
"Yes."
Jade's gaze flicked into the fog. At first she saw nothing but gray, but the longer she stared, the more shapes appeared. Figures. Human-shaped, mostly. Standing still, wandering aimlessly. Some stared blankly into nothing. Some moved in slow, meaningless circles, like broken wind-up toys. They looked… drained. Hollow.
Jade's stomach turned. Interstice felt like limbo, but colder. Less mythical. Less dramatic. More like an abandoned waiting room no one was ever escaping and they all knew they were stuck so no one bothered with anything. No happiness, no color, no sound. Just emptiness and gray.
"Why are you taking me to Grimm?" Jade asked, voice tighter now.
The Reaper stopped so suddenly Jade nearly ran into it. It rotated in place to face her again, hood angled downward.
"Judgment," it said.
The word hit Jade like a slap.
Judgment. For what?
Her hands curled into fists. A sharp, angry heat flared in her chest, cutting through the fear like a blade. The fog, the Reaper, the voices, the idea that she could be judged like she'd done something wrong just by existing snapped something in her.
"But I'm not dead," she said, loud and clear.
The Reaper froze completely. Not even the fog seemed to move.
Jade stared up at it, breathing hard, heart pounding as if she'd just run a mile. The silence didn't feel empty anymore. It felt like the world was listening, waiting with bated breath for what came next.
Somewhere far away, Levi arrived at a tiny hidden island buried deep in the Bermuda Triangle. From the surface, it looked like nothing more than a jagged rock jutting from endless waves, too sharp and too barren to be called land. For Levi, this was a seam, a collision point. A place where the borders of realms pressed close enough to cross.
Wind whipped salt into his face as he stepped onto the stone. The ocean roared around him, violent and alive, and for a moment Levi let it fill his lungs, let it steady the frantic pulse in his chest.
Then his expression hardened. He began to change. His mortal form twisted away like shedding skin. Bones lengthened. Muscles surged. Scales crawled across his body in a shimmer of black-green that caught no light. His spine arched, and behind him, tails unfurled one, then many, countless, whipping like living shadows in the ocean spray.
His head reshaped into something ancient and terrible, a dragon's jaw with a serpent's cruelty. Levi slithered to the highest point of the rock where the air itself felt thin and wrong. Then he slipped between the lines. The ocean sound died the instant he crossed.
Interstice greeted him with flat gray land, low choking fog, and old long dead trees. The sky hung heavy, featureless and the color of wet ash. Souls wandered through the fog. They moved without purpose, without awareness, pale shapes that barely seemed to register Levi's presence at all. Some stood perfectly still, staring into nothing. Others drifted like sleepwalkers, their faces blank, their eyes empty.
They weren't living. They weren't dead. They were waiting.
Levi's jaw clenched. Time mattered here, in a way mortals never understood until it was too late.
A mortal dragged into Interstice had to fight first just to keep their consciousness. Fight to remember their own name, their own body. And even if they succeeded, that was only the beginning. A soul could lose color here. Lose shape. Lose identity. Become fog. Become one of the wandering.
Levi pushed forward, rage and fear twisting together inside him.
He couldn't afford to think too long about Jade's face when she'd vanished. About the empty air where his hand had almost closed around her wrist. About the way she'd looked so small and furious and heartbreakingly alive.
He moved faster.
Interstice looked the same in every direction. That was the cruelty of it. The landscape didn't guide you unless you already knew how to read it.
Levi did.
The dead trees were the key.
The first one he passed resembled a crude Y, two branches reaching from a single trunk. He didn't stop. He kept going, eyes scanning the fog until the next tree emerged, barely visible.
Three branches.
Then four.
Then five.
A path made of math and memory, useless to a mind that had already begun to fade. Perfect for souls with no consciousness. Perfect for prisons.
Levi's tails lashed behind him as he counted, forcing his way forward until, at last, the fog thinned just enough to reveal a massive ancient elm. Its branches seemed endless, twisting and overlapping like veins across the gray sky.
At the base of the elm, a jagged staircase of black stone sank downward into the ground, as if the world had cracked open and never healed. The Village of Reaperlings.
Levi calculated quickly. If his sense was right, Jade had been here only minutes. Five, maybe. But Interstice did not respect mortal time. For those allowed to pass between the lines, the journey could feel like years. The distance didn't change, but perception did. Interstice stretched itself around travelers like a nightmare that refused to end.
Levi ignored the exhaustion that tried to crawl into his bones. He descended.
The village was not a village the way mortals meant it. There were no houses. No streets. No warmth. Only stone and fog and the sound of small feet that weren't quite footsteps. They swarmed him as soon as he entered.
Children.
Dozens. Hundreds. Small hooded figures with faces that shifted between too-old and too-young, eyes dark and bright all at once. Reaperlings. Lost souls with no one left to remember them. Nameless. Childlike. Conscious… but stripped of their past.
They pressed close, crowding him into an almost solid wall. Questions began immediately. Not the calm, measured questions of an adult Reaper. The relentless curiosity of children.
"Who are you?"
"Why are you here?"
"Do you burn?"
"Did you fall?"
"Can you fall?"
"Are you hungry?"
"Do you eat souls?"
"Do you swallow souls?"
"Do you—"
Levi ground his teeth and forced himself to go still. That was the only way through. Reaperlings were like mortal children in that one specific, maddening way: if you fed their curiosity, even by accident, they latched on harder. If you reacted, they stayed. If you fought them, they played longer. The only way to escape was to become boring. So Levi stood, stone-still, eyes forward, tails motionless, refusing to give them anything.
Time bent. He felt like he stood there for centuries. In truth, it might have been an hour. Or it might have been less. In Interstice, the difference didn't matter. The waiting was what killed you.
Eventually, their interest drifted. The horde thinned. Reaperlings wandered away, already drawn to the next curiosity, the next ripple in the fog. Levi moved before they could change their minds. At the center of the village yawned a black hole, a tear in the ground that ate light and swallowed sound. Levi didn't hesitate. He let himself fall.
Darkness snapped around him, heavy and instant, and then he hit stone with a dull thud. He landed in a room that resembled a filthy prison cell. The walls were rough stone, slick with greasy gray moss that clung like rot. Iron bars formed corridors and cages in uneven shapes, as if the place had been grown rather than built. The air smelled like damp nothingness.
This was where Grimm judged. This was where souls were questioned, weighed, and decided. Levi's claws flexed against the stone. If Jade had managed to keep her consciousness, if she'd managed to remember herself, this was where they would bring her.
He lifted his head, listening to the silence that wasn't silence, staring into fog that seemed to watch back.
And he waited.