It began with tearing.
Not of skin. Not of flesh. But of something deeper. Something primal.
Zen arched backward, a silent cry twisting in his throat as an unseen force clawed through the core of his being. It was not pain of the body, but of the soul. An unmaking from the inside out. He screamed, but the sound was foreign. Hollow. Like an echo from a dying dream.
Then he opened his eyes.
But the lab was gone. The summoning circle was gone. Everything was gone.
He was somewhere else.
He floated, weightless, suspended in a place where direction held no meaning. No floor. No ceiling. Only a vast, colorless void, endless and indifferent. Around him, silence stretched into eternity.
His form shimmered faintly. A vessel of light and dust. Translucent. Undefined. A soul. Disembodied. Untethered.
Where am I?
He tried to breathe. But there was no air. No pulse. No warmth. Not even the memory of a heartbeat.
Then something moved.
A ripple. A presence. Not near, not far. Just... there.
Then he saw it.
Or tried to.
It defied understanding.
A shape without form. A mass coiled through dimensions beyond logic. Its limbs drifted like smoke and then hardened into bone between blinks. Chains wrapped its impossible body, etched with sigils that bled meaning into Zen's thoughts. Languages he had never heard, but somehow knew were not meant to be spoken.
And its eyes.
Two voids, vast and consuming. Like dying stars turned inward. Collapsing into infinite darkness.
Ancient.
Alive.
"You... dare... wake me..."
The voice came from all directions. It breathed from within Zen's chest. It echoed through the silence. It pressed into his skull like a whisper carved in stone.
"I had just escaped... that wretched place..."
Zen didn't need to hear the name.
Nitya.
It clawed through his mind unspoken, and he knew. The creature had come from there. The land without time.
But why was it here?
Had he died?
Was this the afterlife?
Or something worse?
Was that creature part of death?Or had it died with him?
Was this some twisted corner of hell?
The last thing he remembered was the Resonator crushing him, collapsing every part of him into screaming silence.
Now, his thoughts felt loose, fraying like threads in windless space.
Confusion churned in his fading mind. The void around him tightened.
Then, without warning, the creature turned its gaze.
And everything stopped.
Zen couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Not because his body failed, but because he no longer knew how.
"You..."
The single word shattered thought. It resonated deeper than meaning. Older than sound.
The being opened its maw. An abyss of writhing teeth and gnashing void. The cosmos howled.
He turned to run.
Or at least, he tried. His soul-form stumbled through the void, weightless yet heavy with fear. But something clung to him, an invisible force pulling him backward.
No. No!
He pushed forward, resisting with all his will.
But the pull intensified.
It wasn't grabbing him. It was unraveling him.
The tip of his fingers shimmered, then broke apart, scattering into glowing particles that drifted backward like dust on a current.
Zen gasped, eyes wide. He tried to hold himself together, but his arms followed, dissolving from the edges in.
His legs faltered. His knees crumbled into motes of light.
"No… stop…!"
He screamed, but the void swallowed his voice.
The pull grew stronger.
Chunks of his form peeled away, soul-thread by soul-thread, spiraling into the darkness behind him.
His chest cracked open, not with pain, but with loss.
As if the very idea of being was being torn out of him.
His mind reeled.
And still, he fought, until his face began to flicker, his thoughts began to scatter.
Then, in the instant before he vanished entirely.
Something else interrupted.
Something deeper.
[In....ti..a....summo...ing…]
[....ountdown…initi...]
[Bzzzzzzt....]
[Anom....ly..detec...]
[E...rr....rr…]
[Er.rr..rrr…]
[Initi..ting term....ation of…anom.....]
The broken voice rattled through his unraveling consciousness, mechanical and fractured. It vibrated in his skull like static under pressure.
And then the lightning.
Not real lightning. Not sky born one. Something older.
It struck through him like divine judgment. Every thought, every memory, every fragment of Zen was obliterated.
He exploded from the inside out scattered across unseen planes.
As his awareness finally slipped into oblivion, he heard the last, garbled whisper of a broken machine…
[Er.rr…]
[Err....rr...rr..…]
Then, silence.