My eyelids felt like slabs of stone as I tried to force them open. When they finally parted, I was met with something I knew all too well.
I was staring into the face of my old friend.
Darkness. A complete, absolute void where no light dared to exist.
It was the same profound, swallowing darkness that had taken me when I died in my past life. The familiarity of it was a cold fist around my heart.
Did I fail the awakening? The question echoed in the silence of my own mind.
I had believed, deep down, that I was destined for something powerful. I'd seen myself as one of those fantasy heroes, reborn into a new world and gifted with incredible might. But in all those stories, they never described this—a perfect, endless nothing. The void was a stark, discouraging rebuttal to my quiet hopes. But I knew that my worthless soul could not be destined for heroism.
This feels exactly the same as when I died before.
The weight of the emptiness pressed down on me, and before long, I felt myself slipping back into a deep, dreamless slumber.
Time lost all meaning. I slept for what felt like days, then months, then years that bled into centuries. I had no way to measure it, only the relentless, stretching feeling of eternity.
I awoke again, hope a fragile flutter in my chest, only to be met once more with the same, unyielding void.
Did I really die for good this time?
I refused to believe it. It couldn't be.
Did that psychopath Arthur miss and kill me instead? I shook my head, the motion strange in the featureless dark. No, that's impossible. The awakening blade never misses. You either awaken, or you die.
A sudden, sharp coldness traced its way down my spine.
Confused, I tried to move my hand to touch my back. My fingers, clumsy and numb, brushed against something solid and icy.
It was a floor.
I hadn't even realized I'd been lying on a surface this entire time. The discovery was jarring.
Strange.
I pushed myself up, my limbs feeling stiff and foreign. I looked down but saw nothing but the same impenetrable black.
"This is kind of creepy…" My own voice came back to me, a hollow echo that died quickly in the vast, sound-absorbing space.
Then I saw it. Far, far away in the consuming dark, a single, steady point of light.
I had no instructions, no guide. With nothing else to anchor me, I began to walk toward it. My pace was neither slow nor hurried, but steady and deliberate, a rhythm against the silence.
I walked through the void. The void watched me, and I kept my eyes fixed on that distant pinprick of light.
It felt like an age. My legs began to ache, a deep, burning fatigue. My breath grew uneven, and a parched dryness clawed at my throat.
How long do I have to walk to reach it?
I walked until my legs trembled, then I ran until my lungs burned. But the light never grew larger, never drew closer. It remained a taunting, constant star in an empty sky, feeling more like a cruel illusion with every step.
I stopped, collapsing to my knees to gasp for air, before forcing myself up to continue. My journey had only one purpose now: reach the light.
A part of me screamed to give up, to just lie down and let the void have me. But something deeper, something primal and stubborn, insisted that if I stopped walking, I would never reach it, even if the goal seemed designed to be forever out of reach.
So I walked. I walked toward the light, toward what I desperately hoped was my salvation.
I didn't notice at first, but after a while, my feet began to splash softly. The ground beneath them had become damp. I didn't bother to wonder if it was water, blood, or something else. I had long since lost the capacity to care about anything but that solitary beacon.
Suddenly, as if summoned to break my resolve, voices filled the emptiness. Familiar voices, ones I had fought hard to bury and forget. They came from every direction and from nowhere at all.
"Give up. You're useless." A man's voice, thick with disdain.
I clenched my jaw and kept walking.
"Why are you trying so hard? Just rest. Just sleep, like you always did, you pathetic, disabled bastard." A young woman's voice hissed directly into my ear, so intimate I could almost feel her breath.
I instinctively swung my arm behind me, but it cut through empty air. I didn't look back.
Is this the trial? I wondered, a cold realization settling in. Tormenting me with the voices of the people who hurt me?
It was the only explanation. This was my awakening, my ordeal. Not theirs.
"Phew." I took a shuddering, deliberate breath and kept moving. I built a wall in my mind, ignoring the voices that now tried to insult, to comfort, to seduce me into stopping. I ignored them all. I had chosen to forget those people the moment they chose to forget me. Their echoes brought only poison and pain.
As I pressed on, pushing the voices aside, I saw it—the light was finally, undeniably, growing larger.
A spark of desperate relief ignited in my chest. If I could just reach that light, I could escape this hellish void.
I walked with renewed, aching effort. And finally, the form of the light source became clear.
It was a door. A solitary, plain white door, standing freely in the darkness with no wall to frame it.
"A door?" I murmured, my voice raw.
The radiant light spilled from its edges.
"So the light was coming from this…"
It was breathtaking. A single point of purity in an ocean of oblivion. It reminded me of the old saying: Where there is darkness, there is also light. Two sides of the same coin.
As I took the final few steps, a hand gently touched my shoulder. The touch was soft, warm.
"Lucas." It was a woman's voice, gentle and aching with affection. A voice I knew better than my own. A voice I loved and hated in equal measure.
My mother's voice.
My heart lurched, beating a frantic, painful rhythm against my ribs. A deep, sentimental ache bloomed in my chest, so powerful it was a physical weight.
I'd heard of psychological tests, but experiencing one was a different kind of cruelty altogether.
My hand shot out for the doorknob, but before my fingers could close around the cold metal, I was enveloped from behind by a warm, familiar embrace.
"Why are you leaving us?" the voice pleaded, steeped in a sadness that felt so real it tore at me. "You know I love you so much, don't you?"
My breathing became ragged gasps. My shoulders trembled. Sweat, cold and slick, traced a path down my spine. I knew it wasn't real. The thing using that voice wasn't her. But still… when was the last time I had heard my mother speak to me with such naked affection? When was the last time I had felt truly, unconditionally loved?
That yearning for love, however, didn't belong in this world. This was a world where only strength mattered. The weak had no right to love or peace. You were only worthy of affection if you were strong, or useful. Someone as broken as I had been… couldn't be loved.
I wanted, more than anything, to turn around. To believe the beautiful lie, to see her smile one more time. But something inside me, cold and resolute, held me frozen. It didn't want me to look back. I didn't know if it was my own survival instinct or something else, but I was grateful for its rigid command.
"Love is a weakness for fools," I said, my voice low but clear in the echoing dark. "In a world where only strength prevails, love has no place. That's why I will grow strong. So strong that the world will have no choice but to see me. Not that I seek their approval… this is for me. For myself only."
My fingers finally closed around the doorknob. It was cold, a shock of reality against my skin.
"I know the path will be hard. But nothing worth having comes easily. Love be damned. I have always been alone in this world, since my past life. Nothing changes. The path to strength… is a lonely one."
I twisted the knob. Without turning my head, I spoke my final words to the illusion.
"Go fuck yourself, moth—" I paused, then corrected myself, my voice dropping to a venomous whisper. "No. Go fuck yourself, you bitch."
The moment the words left my lips, the voices ceased. The embrace vanished. The silence that followed was absolute and clean, as if the torment had never been.
I felt a shift within myself, subtle yet profound. Something hardened. My heart felt encased in a layer of cool, protective ice… and I found I preferred it that way.
I pushed the door open. A blinding, pure white light washed over me, searing and wonderful. I shielded my eyes with my arm and stepped through the threshold.
I didn't know what awaited me on the other side. But anything, absolutely anything, had to be better than the hell of that void.
I closed the door behind me with a soft, final click, leaving the echoes of a false love and an empty darkness sealed away forever.
*******
Another chapter coming.