The shadows finished closing over him.
There was no moment when it happened.
One second, he could still feel the cold ash beneath him, the next, it was gone. He tried to breathe and found no resistance—no air, no water, just weight.
Like being buried in mud that refused to settle.
It pressed into his mouth. His eyes. His chest.
Vesperyn tried to scream and swallowed shadow instead.
Cold seeped into him.
His limbs felt distant, as if his body had been stretched thin and smeared across the void. He couldn't tell where his hands were anymore. Couldn't tell if they still existed.
The shadows didn't shout.
They whispered.
Not with voices. With familiarity.
A memory surfaced,
His House being destroyed.
Another.
Dropping his eyes when spoken to. Letting others decide was easier.
Another.
Then Another.
You've always been like this.
The thought wasn't spoken. It simply was, sliding into place like it had always belonged there.
The pressure increased.
His thoughts slowed.
Not because he was calming—but because something else was filling the gaps. The shadows pressed closer, sinking into him, overlapping where his chest should have been.
They weren't trying to tear him apart.
They were trying to explain him.
You didn't survive. You were carried.You didn't endure. You waited.This is just how it ends.
His sense of self began to blur. Not all at once, piece by piece.
The color of his mother's hair slipped first. He reached for it and found only static, like a word on the tip of his tongue that refused to form.
Then Darian's face.
He knew it mattered. He knew it was important. But the details softened, edges rounding off, dissolving into something generic and distant.
Panic flared weakly.
Then even that dulled.
The shadows grew heavier.
His skin, if it was still skin, felt porous, dissolving.
He couldn't tell where he stopped and they began. Every time he tried to focus, another memory was offered in its place.
Failing.Freezing.Letting go.
You're not becoming anything, they whispered.
You're just returning to what you were.
Something inside him slipped.
For a moment, he almost believed it.
Then pain surged.
It burned through his chest and spine, tearing through the numbness like a blade through cloth. The rupture flared again, a deep, grinding agony that didn't belong to the void; it belonged to him.
Vesperyn convulsed.
The pain didn't make sense here. It didn't fit.
The shadows recoiled slightly, their pressure wavering.
He latched onto it instinctively.
The agony was terrible. Overwhelming. But it was clear.
'Echoes didn't hurt.'
That was the thought that cut through the fog.
Echoes were hollow. They didn't feel this. They didn't suffer. They moved. They consumed. They repeated.
Pain meant friction.
Pain meant resistance.
Pain meant he was still separate.
Still here.
The pressure returned, harder this time, like the shadows were offended by the realization. They surged upward, forcing his head back, prying at his mouth.
The void thundered again.
"IDENTIFY."
The word crushed down on him, forcing his jaw open. The shadows pushed forward eagerly, trying to shape his answer for him.
Echo.
The word pressed against his tongue, heavy and final.
Vesperyn bit down.
He clamped onto the pain and tore.
The shock was blinding.
The shadows screamed in disruption as their grip loosened for the barest instant.
That was enough.
He didn't push them away with strength.
He didn't have any.
He pushed them with,
Spite.
A refusal that had nothing noble in it.
No.
I am not what happened to me.
The shadows peeled back, their forms distorting.
Vesperyn stayed still for a moment, afraid that moving would make them tighten again.
His thoughts felt bruised. Raw. Like he'd scraped them against something sharp and hadn't realized how deep it went.
He pushed himself upright.
The motion was clumsy. Wrong. His balance lagged, like his body hadn't caught up to the decision yet.
He nearly fell before managing to steady himself, breath coming out shaky and uneven.
Is this… what they call an awakening? Ves thought.
Harlen hadn't said it would feel like this.Hadn't said anything about the pressure.Or the eye.
His thoughts wobbled, then steadied.
'I'm still here,' he realized. I think.
Whatever this was, it hadn't finished him yet.
He forced himself to look ahead.
'If I want to move,' he thought, 'I have to pick something.'
Three gates stood before him.
The first was already open.
The Vision of The Past,
His chest tightened.
A stupid, selfish part of him wanted to step forward. Just to hear her voice properly this time. To look for something he might've missed.
The second gate stood beside it.
Closed.
The Vision of The Present
It didn't react to him at all.
He felt it anyway — the weight of it. The way it pushed back without moving. The present wasn't something he could enter.
He was already slipping out of it.
Then there was the third gate.
The Vision of The Future.
He flinched when he tried to look at it.
The pressure around it was wrong. Dense.
It didn't promise anything good.
Standing near it made his stomach twist, the way it did right before something went very badly and you knew it but couldn't stop it.
'That one will kill me,' he thought.
Vesperyn stood there, bleeding from wounds that shouldn't exist in this place, staring at three impossible choices.