Kelly felt like her body was on the verge of bursting apart. She had never known such wrongness before—fear so consuming it stole the breath from her throat, the biting cold that rattled her teeth, and the searing heat that clawed at her skin. The clash of sensations was unbearable, surreal, leaving her gasping hoarsely as if the air itself was trying to choke her, her consciousness dangling by a fragile thread.
Her knees buckled, crashing against the ground. Tremors racked her body as she bit down on her tongue, forcing herself to cling to that sharp, metallic sting. Against the storm of disorienting signals screaming through her nerves, the pain was nothing—but it was just enough to stop her from slipping under.
Until the man stood.
The world itself seemed to recoil. Shadows swallowed the corners of the chamber as the liquid fire snaking through the walls flared and writhed, surging with chaotic life. The blistering heat warped the air so violently it looked like the room itself was boiling.
Kelly's vision cut to black for a heartbeat. When she blinked back into awareness, a fresh terror sank its claws into her.
He was right there. His face filled her vision, his eyes blazing with flames so fierce they lit the darkness around them.
And then he spoke—except it wasn't speech. The sound thundered directly in her mind, shaking her thoughts apart with its weight.
"I will ask you one last time," the voice growled, every syllable threatening to splinter her mind. "Return my daughter to me… or I will annihilate your soul until even death envies you."
"I don't have her," Kelly forced out through clenched teeth. "A creature that calls itself an Abyssal wyrm—he sent me here—"
"Tell me." His interruption cracked through her like a blade, laced with fury… and beneath it, something else. Something that smelled like fear. "Does the beast call itself Myrrhvalen?"
Shock stabbed through Kelly, but even that was dim compared to the paralyzing dread crawling through her veins. Some part of her, the smallest and most desperate, still clung to the belief that all of this was only an illusion. That this nightmare was just the second trial's trick—a trance meant to feel real, but wasn't.
The fact that this man knew Myrrhvalen's name sent a sick chill through Kelly's chest. Something wasn't right. The wyrm was supposed to be the trial's overseer, the puppet master behind every illusion she faced. For one of these phantoms to call his name with such raw familiarity… that was impossible.
Unless…
Either the trial was so intricately crafted that even Myrrhvalen himself played a role within it—or this wasn't an illusion at all. This was real.
And if it was reality… Kelly's hand curled into a fist, her expression twisting, conflicted. That single possibility changed everything.
"Answer me, intruder." The man's voice thundered through her skull again, ragged and furious, yet trembling with something she hadn't expected—desperation. His hair shimmered, brightening into a molten glow like liquid metal spilling from a forge. "Don't test my patience," he growled, each word snapping like a whip. "It runs thinner than you imagine."
Kelly forced herself to lift her head. His eyes blazed back at her—red and green flames coiling together, so fierce she had to squint against their light. By all rights, a being of his magnitude should have seen the truth already, plucked it from the quiver of her smallest gestures when Myrrhvalen's name was spoken.
But he hadn't.
Because buried beneath the rage, beneath the power burning off him in suffocating waves, there was something else. A terror he was trying—and failing—to hide.
And Kelly realized with a chill that he wasn't demanding confirmation of Myrrhvalen's involvement. He was begging her to deny it.
Left with no choice, Kelly gave him the answer he seemed to dread. He had cornered her, left no path of retreat but to play the villain in his eyes.
"That's what he calls himself."
The silence that followed was suffocating. Hot, heavy, and absolute—so still that even a pin drop would have cracked it open like thunder. His face twisted, torn between fury, fear, and something else—something rawer, grief barely choked down.
His eyes burned hotter, spitting liquid fire as he stepped toward her. Kelly tensed, every nerve on edge. There was something different now. His movements no longer carried the weight of authority but felt… hollow. Lifeless. Empty. And that emptiness was more terrifying than his rage.
"Foreign soul…" His words slithered into her mind, calm in a way that was far more unnerving than shouting could ever be. "My daughter is dead. Dragged into Myrrhvalen's games. And it's all because of you."
Kelly's breath hitched, her skin prickling as he went on, his voice flat, detached, like the world itself no longer mattered.
"As tribute to her soul, and since I cannot kill you—since you will only crawl back to your body—I will lay upon you a curse. A curse vile enough to stain your soul forever."
His hands rose, light flaring at his fingertips.
Fear unlike anything Kelly had ever known smothered her, thick and unbearable, forcing words out of her throat before she could stop them.
"That's not right!" she cried. "Listen—this is just a trial! You might not even be real—"
"Ridiculous." The word left him like a scoff, as if she'd just cracked a joke in the middle of a funeral.
Kelly tried to thrash away when his hand came down to her face, but her body betrayed her. It was as if unseen chains had locked her in place, every muscle frozen.
A broken whimper slipped from her lips, her heartbeat hammering so violently she thought it might tear free from her chest.
Then his voice slid back into her mind. Cold. Hollow. Saturated with murderous intent.
"Soulbound Malady."
The words were a death sentence.
Pain detonated through her body, savage and merciless. It was as if a thousand blades ripped through her flesh, every cut overlapping the last, while her organs roasted alive in cruel, unending fire. The agony was so consuming, so impossible, that death itself seemed like mercy in comparison.
Her scream tore out, not loud but sharp—shrill and piercing, shattering into a hoarse rasp as if her throat itself couldn't withstand the pressure of such torment. Her body convulsed violently, spasms rattling through her until her eyes rolled back.
And then—nothing.
She was gone. Dead. Or so she thought.
***
How am I still alive?
That was Kelly's first thought when her consciousness snapped back. She wasn't in the chamber anymore. She floated weightlessly, suspended in an endless void. Around her stretched nothing but darkness—thick, suffocating, eternal. A place without sound, without form, without end.
And she drifted, small and alone, through the black.
"Is this the afterlife?" she wondered, the confusion in her head sounding almost amused. "Why is it so black and dull? I expected… you know, a little color. To keep things lively."
Silence answered her—big, echoing silence, the kind that reminds you you're utterly alone. Kelly scoffed; the sound bounced off the void.
"Listen, death—if you're gonna fuck me over, can you at least get me something to eat? I'm starving." She paused, like she'd remembered something important. "And hey," she added, voice dropping into a petulant growl, "give me my body back too. I can't eat without that. A mouth and some teeth would be nice. Wait—how am I even talking without them? Now this is next-level weird—"
Her rambling was cut off by a voice that slid through the darkness like a knife. A voice she knew too well—the man who'd dragged her into this black nothing, the man she now hated down to her bones.
"Oh shadow, I call through the void."
Something shifted. It wasn't loud—more like the seam of the world tearing and resealing—but Kelly felt it deep in the dark, a fundamental stitch being pulled loose.
Then his voice came again, colder, crueler, dripping with something vile and hungry.
"Break the flesh. Unravel the soul."
The void shuddered. Kelly grit her teeth, trying to steady herself, refusing to give the darkness the satisfaction of watching her freak out. It didn't help.
"Bind their grief. Let despair take root."
The sound that answered was dreadful and metallic: thick chains colliding, a wet, grinding clank that rolled through the black and then coiled around her—around whatever she had become in this place. They wrapped tight, cold and unyielding, pinning her so completely that even the slightest cry would have felt like swallowing knives. She wasn't about to feed him that pleasure.
His voice dropped to a last, poisonous whisper.
"Open the gate. Let darkness bloom."
A gate tore itself into the void—huge, terrible, the edges only half-seen in the black. When its doors threw themselves wide, a roiling storm of blue and violet spilled out like bruised light. The chains jerked; she was dragged forward, pulled toward that living, hungry color.
Powerless and exposed, fury flared in Kelly's chest. As the portal yawned, she turned toward the emptiness where Arvon's voice still hung and spat a promise that felt like a blade.
"If I survive this—and I will—not today, not tomorrow, but soon—I'll find you and I'll kill you. Not crude or senseless. I'll make it beautiful. An artful thing you'll never forget. I will make a masterpiece of your corpse."
The swirl of violet loomed, but her words swelled louder, sharp with spit and spite.
"The next time we meet face to face, Arvon, you'll wish you'd taken your chances with that giant lizard. You sniveling—son of a coward!"
She was dragged in before she could finish—yanked into the bruised storm as the gates slammed shut behind her.
Thrown into that roiling world of blue and violet, Kelly folded herself inward and shut off every sense she could. No sight. No sound. No weight. She let the colors swallow her, let the hunger of the portal decide what came next—into a hell that felt custom-made to break her. One she might not walk out of.