I fell.
Not through space, nor through time, but through something deeper—a vast, endless void that was neither dark nor light, neither warm nor cold. It was nothingness, yet it was alive.
My breath was stolen the moment the abyss swallowed me whole. A silence so absolute pressed against my skin, thick as oil, suffocating, omnipresent. Yet I could still hear.
A heartbeat.
Not mine.
It thrummed through the emptiness, a slow, ancient pulse that rattled my bones, deep as the voice of a sleeping god. The very air trembled with each resonant thud, as though the world itself was shackled to the rhythm of something far older than creation.
I tried to move, to breathe—to do anything to resist this consuming void. But the abyss had no floor.
There was no up, no down. No sense of gravity, no tether to hold onto. I was drifting in an eternal dusk, a place where shadows moved with purpose, where the air carried whispers that slid beneath my skin like the crawling touch of unseen fingers.
I wasn't alone. Something watched me. No, not watched. It knew me.
The moment I thought it, the air shifted—a pressure, immense and crushing, coiling around me like a predator savouring the scent of its prey.
Then—a voice.
"What are you?"
The words were not spoken. They bloomed within me, filling my skull with their weight, their meaning dripping into my thoughts like ink staining water.
My lips parted, but no sound came. My own voice felt insignificant here, swallowed before it could exist.
The shadows around me stirred, writhing like smoke caught in an unseen wind.
"You do not yet know."
A pulse—not a sound, but a force—rippled through the abyss. The nothingness shuddered, and suddenly, the void wasn't empty anymore.
Shapes emerged from the dark, twisted echoes of places that should not exist. A broken citadel with walls made of screaming faces. A forest where the trees had no leaves, only gnarled, clawing hands. A sky that was not a sky at all, but an endless sea of silver eyes, unblinking, watching.
I should not be here. Yet the abyss pulled me deeper.
The heartbeat quickened.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
"Do you hear it, Shadowborn?"
The voice curled around my mind, seeping into my thoughts like a whisper I had always known but never understood. The shadows parted, and for the first time, I saw it.
A throne.
Massive. Impossible. A monument carved from the bones of forgotten gods, its edges jagged, pulsing with veins of flickering light. The seat of a ruler who had long since vanished.
And yet—something sat upon it. Not a man. Not a beast. Not a god.
It had no true shape, shifting, flickering—a crown of obsidian mist, eyes like dying stars, a presence that was both immense and hollow at once.
And then, it spoke.
"You are not yet whole."
The abyss shook.
A terrible weight pressed into my soul, pushing, pulling—testing.
"Find what was lost."
The throne crumbled. The abyss collapsed. And the world swallowed me whole.