He was suddenly pulled.
Not dragged, not teleported, extracted, as if reality itself had reached in and removed him from where he was never meant to remain.
The blackness peeled away.
Axiros found himself standing upon a platform of indeterminate form. It had no edges, no texture he could define, only the certainty that he was standing on something.
And yet, beneath his feet, there was nothing.
No ground.
No sky.
No horizon.
Only an endless expanse of darkness, if it could even be called space.
He slowly turned his head.
The same darkness greeted him. The same silence he had grown accustomed to over what felt like a centillion years of isolation.
And yet something was different.
This darkness felt full.
Not empty like the void. Not hungry. Not erasing.
It was saturated with presence, as if meaning itself permeated the expanse. This was not the void he had once known.
This place remembered.
Then a voice echoed.
Not from above.
Not from below.
Not from any direction that could be measured.
It simply was.
"Oh, intruder," the voice said.
"Prove that you have ever existed."
"Prove that you are you."
The words carried no malice, no mercy, only an ancient authority older than time itself. Each syllable reverberated directly within his consciousness, bypassing his ears entirely.
Axiros froze.
Prove that I existed?
His thoughts churned violently.
How?
He knew he existed. He had memories. Pain. Will. Experience.
But proof?
In a realm that questioned existence itself, what qualified as evidence?
I know I exist, he thought grimly.
But how do I prove it, when even reality seems unconvinced?
The platform remained still.
The darkness watched.
And the voice waited.
As the last thought faded from his mind, the platform beneath his feet simply ceased to exist.
There was no warning. No rupture. One moment he stood, the next he was falling.
He plunged into the endless darkness, weightless yet heavy, as if the act of falling itself was conceptual rather than physical. There was no wind against his face, no sense of acceleration, only the certainty that he was moving away from something he could no longer define.
Hours passed. Or perhaps nothing passed at all.
Time had no authority here. A second and a century were indistinguishable, and Axiros stopped trying to measure either. Eventually, even the idea of falling lost meaning.
Then, impact.
Not pain. Not force.
Just arrival.
He stood once more, feet planted on something that refused to identify itself. The darkness pressed closer now, no longer passive.
"You will lose yourself."
The voices slithered in from all directions, layered and uneven, some fractured, some ancient beyond comprehension.
"You will not survive."
They did not threaten. They stated.
Axiros exhaled slowly. His heartbeat was steady, though he couldn't tell why it still existed.
Their origin was impossible to trace. They weren't echoes, nor entities in the conventional sense. They simply were, residual assertions left behind by failures, warnings calcified into sound.
"So," Axiros muttered, rubbing the back of his neck, "I'm trapped here with a bunch of ghosts and old men?"
He waited for the joke to land.
It didn't.
No laughter followed. Not even his own.
The silence swallowed the attempt whole, heavier than before.
He clenched his fists, the humor draining from his expression.
"If this place is meant to break me," he said quietly into the dark, "you're going to have to do better than whispers." He said as he looked up into nothingness.
The voices did not respond.
But they lingered.
Watching.
Waiting for the moment when he would start to believe them.
Suddenly-
Multiple apparitions of himself began to appear.
At first it was only a few, flickering silhouettes forming at the edges of his perception. Then, within a fraction of a second, they multiplied. Thousands became millions. Millions became billions. Billions became numbers so vast they lost all meaning. Septillions. Decillions. They continued endlessly, as though the concept of quantity itself had broken.
Each apparition stood distinct, separate, complete.
They all shared his face, his structure, his essence, but none of them were truly him.
Some bore scars he did not possess, marks carved by battles he never fought. Some wore clothing he had never touched, armor shaped by cultures he had never seen. Others carried expressions he had never allowed himself to wear, serenity, madness, despair, quiet acceptance.
Yet no matter how different they appeared, one truth was unavoidable.
They were all versions of Axiros.
Versions that had failed.
Versions that had succeeded.
Versions that had reached heights he had not, and versions that had fallen far below where he stood.
They were outcomes, branches of decisions that had once stood before him. Lives that had unfolded from choices he remembered considering, hesitating over, or outright rejecting.
Some had lived longer lives. Some had burned brightly and vanished early. Some had sacrificed everything for power. Others had abandoned power entirely. Some had resisted fate. Others had embraced it without struggle.
They were similar, yet fundamentally incompatible.
They had lived different lives, in different orders, under different circumstances. Some had chosen to give, even when it broke them. Some had chosen to take, regardless of the cost. Others had simply accepted what was handed to them, letting the world shape them instead of shaping it in return.
And yet, despite all of that-
None of them were truly Axiros.
They were possibilities made real. Reflections of paths taken and paths abandoned. Proof that he could have been many things, lived many existences.
But standing there, surrounded by infinite versions of himself, Axiros understood something quietly and with unsettling clarity.
Existence was not proven by similarity.
It was proven by continuity.
And every one of them, no matter how close they looked, had diverged somewhere he had not followed.
"Prove yourself that you are the real one. Each fail will strip you of your identity."
The ancient voice stirred again.
Axiros was thrown into the infinite versions of himself, by some unknown force.
With every being, a version of himself, he touched he was thrown into an endless series of memories.