Kael blinked harshly and rapidly, as if he could force the world back into place through sheer insistence. His vision refused to settle. There was no sky above him, no earth beneath him, no scent of blood or iron or smoke. Instead, he was greeted by an expanse of endless darkness — vast, silent, and absolute.
It was not the darkness of night, nor the suffocating black behind closed eyelids. This was something deeper, something that felt less like the absence of light and more like the absence of existence itself. And yet, despite the alien stillness of it, recognition crept in almost immediately.
"This is..."
Yes. This place was awfully familiar. He had stood here before — if standing was even the right word for occupying a space without ground or gravity. This was the same void he had witnessed at the end of his metanoia, the same hollow expanse that had swallowed him when his old self fractured and something else had taken its place.
Only this time, something was different.
There was a presence here now — foreign, and yet not entirely so. In the immeasurable dark, four spheres hovered at varying distances from him, suspended without support. Four dark orbs, each pulsing faintly like a distant heartbeat. At first glance, they appeared intrusive in this otherwise pristine void, an anomaly in the nothingness. But the longer he stared, the more the truth surfaced.
No. That was not exactly right either. These orbs were not intruders. They were residents. They belonged here just as much as he did.
These were the orbs born from every life he had taken — the remnants of each Abjection he had slain and absorbed. He had felt them enter him before. But he had never seen them like this, laid bare within the architecture of his own soul. They did not glow with malice or rage; instead, they carried something else, as though they were simply fulfilling a law written long before Kael had ever drawn breath.
All of a sudden, without warning, a fissure split across the surface of the three of them. Until all three orbs finally shattered at once.
The spheres imploded and exploded simultaneously, collapsing inward before bursting apart into fragments of devouring darkness. The sound did not exist, yet Kael felt the impact reverberate through him like a cathedral bell struck inside his skull.
Then the pain came.
It struck his entire being. His spine felt as though it had been ripped out and replaced with a rod of white-hot iron, heat and pressure surging outward into every nerve. His veins burned as if they carried liquid fire instead of blood, each phantom heartbeat detonating beneath his skin. His skull throbbed, not from pressure but from expansion, as though something inside was trying to claw its way free. He could not breathe, though there was nothing to breathe; could not scream, though every fiber of his being convulsed with the need to.
The agony had no edges. It was not sharp or dull, not piercing or crushing. It was annihilation — a violent unmaking of whatever held him together. His thoughts splintered. His sense of self warped and flickered, threatening to dissolve entirely under the strain. If this was the price demanded of him for something, then it was a cruel and merciless toll.
He can only hope that the pain stop soon, or maybe just kill him already if it continues.
***
Kael jolted awake and screamed as if something were still tearing him apart from the inside.
His body arched violently off the surface beneath him, muscles locking, fingers clawing at empty air as though he were still trapped in that void of annihilation. For a split second, he was still expected to see darkness, fragments of shattered orbs, the endless abyss swallowing him whole.
Instead—
White.
The scenery had shifted again.
The ceiling above him was smooth and seamless, light panels embedded within it casting a sterile glow across the room. The bed beneath him was firm, clinical, sheets tucked neatly.
Straps — thin but unyielding — secured his wrists and torso, not painfully tight but firm enough to prevent sudden movement. To his right, a machine emitted steady, rhythmic beeps, a soft pulse of sound accompanied by faint flickers of green light across a small monitor screen.
Reality settled in slowly.
"Are… are you okay?"
The voice came from his side — familiar and also edged with worry.
Kael's breathing was ragged as he turned his head. A golden-haired boy stood beside the bed, his usually composed expression fractured by surprise and relief.
Kael swallowed, throat dry and burning. "Where…" His voice was cracked and brittle. He tried again.
"Where am I?"
"The station's infirmary," the boy answered immediately, stepping closer as if afraid Kael might disappear if he hesitated.
"You're safe."
The… infirmary.
With trembling hands, he lifted his head just enough to glance down at himself. Ignoring the restraints, he tugged at the hem of his shirt and swiped it upward.
His breath caught.
There was no gaping wound.
Only faint bruising — darkened patches across his chest and abdomen, blackening at the edges.
His hands started to shake.
In a voice tight with terror and confusion, he asked:
"What… happened?"
The golden-haired boy blinked, clearly startled by the question.
"You don't remember?"
Kael's silence was answer enough.
The boy inhaled slowly before speaking.
"After we killed the Abjection, its corpse… it fell forward. It... struck you directly."
His jaw tightened slightly at the memory.
"Reinforcements arrived not long after. We thought…" He hesitated.
"We thought you were done for."
Kael's fingers curled weakly into the sheets.
"But you weren't," the boy continued quickly. "You were still breathing. Barely. Your pulse was there, just… faint. It wasn't normal. It was like your body shut down without actually dying. It's just like the suspended state."
Suspended state…
The captain had mentioned it once before. A condition where the body entered a liminal threshold — neither fully alive nor truly dead — when undergoing metanoia. A transformation forced by proximity to death itself.
His heart began to pound harder against his ribs.
The boy kept talking, perhaps mistaking his silence for confusion.
"So they brought you here. You've been unconscious for three days." He glanced briefly toward the monitor before looking back at Kael.
"And then… something strange started happening."
Kael's eyes sharpened.
"The wound on your chest," the boy said quietly, still sounding faintly incredulous.
"It was deep. It should've required surgical reconstruction. But after a few hours… the medics said that it began to close on its own." He swallowed.
"Slowly. Like the flesh was pulling itself back together."
The steady beeping of the machine seemed louder now in the sterile quiet of the room.
His mind struggled to align the two realities — the sterile white infirmary and the endless void of darkness. The suspended state. The boy's earlier explanation. A body hovering between death and transformation. But this had not felt like transformation. It had felt like...
'A sacrifice.'
Had that vision been more than a hallucination born from something? Had those orbs — those fragments of every Abjection he had absorbed — been the reason his heart still beat? The reason his chest now bore nothing more than fading bruises instead of a mortal wound?
The thought sent a quiet chill through him.
"I… I should introduce myself properly." The golden-haired boy straightened slightly, as though remembering something important.
"I'm Elias."
Kael dragged his gaze back to him, still trying to steady the storm in his head. Elias offered a small, earnest smile — one that didn't quite mask the lingering worry in his eyes.
"Back there, you stepped in. If you hadn't, we wouldn't have made it." He dipped his head slightly, a gesture of sincere gratitude.
"Thank you."
Kael blinked, caught off guard by the sudden shift in tone. "I just… did what anyone would've done."
"That's not true," Elias replied immediately. He hesitated briefly before adding:
"Even though she's not here right now… my fiancée wanted me to tell you she's thankful for back then too."
Kael opened his mouth, then closed it again.
"Ah." The response that came out was awkward, almost stiff. "You don't… have to thank me."
Kael's brows then knit faintly.
"…Wait."
He turned his head slightly toward Elias, confusion momentarily overriding all the other questions swirling in his chest.
"Fiancée?"