Silence.
The pain hadn't vanished. If anything, it grew heavier.
Shawn could no longer feel his body.
The burning in his flesh, the cracking of his bones, and the copper taste of blood flowing from his mouth all slowly receded. Faded. Until only one thing remained.
Him.
Or what was left.
He drifted through endless darkness, caught in the blank space between living and dying. No ground beneath his feet. No sky. Only a void stretching out forever in every direction.
Then something stirred.
A violent sensation erupted deep inside him without warning.
His chest tightened. His breathing turned ragged.
It wasn't pain, exactly.
It was an urge.
Overwhelming and raw.
To move.
To break everything.
To challenge.
Every fiber of his being screamed at him to rush forward, to tear apart whatever stood before him. Nothing deserved to stand above him or restrain him. Not the mountains, nor the heavens, nor the earth itself. If they stood in his path, they should be broken.
The feeling grew.
It wasn't hatred, and it wasn't anger.
It was pure instinct.
Untamed.
Wild beyond any reason.
Shawn clenched his teeth.
"...What..."
The feeling wasn't his. He knew that. Yet with every passing second, it became harder to tell where the madness ended and where he began.
Just as the violent instinct threatened to swallow him whole, another wave crashed into it.
Silence.
It wasn't a peaceful quiet. This was an absolute, suffocating silence, the kind that existed before the first sound in the universe was ever born.
The urge to challenge vanished beneath an immeasurable weight.
Shawn suddenly felt small.
Everything around him seemed insignificant. Mountains, stars, entire worlds... none of them mattered. They simply existed beneath him.
There was no arrogance in it. No excitement. No satisfaction.
Only a cold certainty.
As though supremacy required no explanation.
It simply was.
The pressure nearly forced Shawn to his knees. His thoughts turned sluggish, his own existence ready to disappear beneath that overwhelming dignity.
Then the weight shifted once more.
Everything became still.
Ordered.
Perfectly, flawlessly ordered.
The previous two instincts suddenly felt wrong.
Impure.
Unrefined.
They needed to return to where they belonged.
Back to their origin.
Destruction and domination weren't necessary. They would return simply because that was the natural order of all things.
For the first time, fear gripped Shawn.
Not the fear of dying.
The fear of disappearing entirely.
Three different instincts.
Three competing natures.
None of them belonged to him, yet all of them were flooding into his very soul.
His breathing turned uneven. His thoughts began to blur.
"...Stop..."
The instincts ignored him.
The untamed will surged again, met instantly by the ancient supremacy, while the silent order descended to crush them both. They collided endlessly. Shawn felt his mind tearing into countless pieces, unable to tell which thoughts were his own anymore.
"...Shawn."
A soft voice echoed through the darkness.
Everything paused.
The chaos around him kept moving, but he stood completely still.
"...Eva..."
He slowly turned.
She stood there.
No longer separate.
No longer fading away.
She smiled that gentle smile he had grown strangely familiar with.
Without a word, she reached out.
Their hands met.
The moment their fingers touched, the darkness rippled.
Countless strands of violet light spread outward from their joined hands, flowing through Shawn like gentle streams.
The instincts remained.
None had weakened, and none had disappeared.
Yet they stopped crashing into him.
Instead, they began to flow.
Like rivers finding the same sea.
Shawn frowned.
"...What..."
Eva slowly shook her head.
"I don't think... they want to take over, Shawn. They're just... showing you. That's all."
Shawn remained silent, listening.
The words were simple, yet everything changed.
Shawn stopped resisting.
He hadn't accepted the intrusion.
He simply understood it for the very first time.
The untamed instinct wasn't asking him to destroy.
It just existed.
The supreme instinct wasn't demanding that he rule.
It just existed.
The silent order wasn't trying to erase him.
It just existed.
None of them had ever spoken to him.
He had mistaken their instincts for commands.
The moment that realization settled in, the violent collision within him weakened.
The three instincts continued to exist, as wild, ancient, and absolute as before, yet they stopped trying to overwrite Shawn.
Shawn slowly closed his eyes.
He took one slow breath.
Then another.
His heartbeat gradually steadied.
The three instincts responded, not by vanishing, but by calming.
Like three separate storms settling beneath a single, quiet sky.
Eva looked at him and smiled once more.
"See? You don't have to change for them. Just... stay who you are."