"Hold still, Cane. This is for the greater good," Selena whispered.
Her voice was like silk, but her grip on my wrist was iron. She didn't look at me. She couldn't. Not while she was guiding my arm toward the jagged obsidian edge of the altar.
I tried to jerk away, but the shackles snapped tight, biting into my skin. The cold metal hummed with a sickening, rhythmic vibration. I looked up at her—the woman I’d promised my life to, the Holy Maiden of Luminis—and all I saw was a mask of divine indifference.
"The greater good?" I spat, my voice cracking. "You told me this was a purification ritual. You said we’d be together after this!"
Selena finally met my eyes. There was no love there. Just a distant, clinical kind of pity. "Purification requires a price, Cane. The Void doesn't take prayers. It takes souls. Yours is the only one pure enough to sate it."
"You lying bitch!" I screamed, thrashing against the restraints.
Around us, the priests began the chant. It wasn't a song; it was a low, guttural drone that made the marrow in my bones ache. The air grew thick, smelling of ozone and old blood. The altar beneath me started to glow with a bruised purple light, sucking the warmth right out of my chest.
"Look at me, Selena!" I roared, my lungs burning. "Look at me while you kill me!"
She stepped back, her white robes fluttering in a wind that shouldn't have existed inside the temple. She raised her hand, not to comfort me, but to signal the end.
"Forgive me," she murmured, though she sounded like she was reciting a script. "In another life, I might have loved you."
Then she slammed the ritual dagger down.
It didn't slice. It tore. The blade ripped through my chest, and for a second, there was no pain—just a sudden, violent void where my heart used to beat. I gasped, a spray of crimson hitting the white marble floor.
I watched the blood pool. I watched Selena’s expression shift from feigned sorrow to a sharp, hungry kind of relief. She wasn't mourning. She was ascending.
"The seal is broken," the High Priest bellowed, his voice echoing through the vaulted ceiling. "The sacrifice is accepted!"
I wanted to scream, but my throat was full of salt and iron. The world didn't fade to black. It tore open.
One moment I was on the altar, and the next, I was falling. Not through air, but through something thick and oily. The light of the temple vanished, replaced by a crushing, absolute darkness that felt like it was trying to eat my skin.
I hit something hard. Not ground—something that felt like frozen smoke. I lay there, staring up at a sky that didn't have stars, only swirling vortexes of grey and violet.
*Am I dead?* I wondered. *Is this hell?*
I tried to move, but my body felt wrong. My chest didn't hurt anymore. In fact, there was a hole where my heart should be, and instead of blood, a thin, wispy black smoke was curling out of the wound.
Then I heard it.
It wasn't a voice. It was a thousand voices, all screaming at once, just beneath the surface of the ground. They sounded like every nightmare I'd ever had—the fear of drowning, the sound of bones snapping, the feeling of being watched in the dark.
*Help me,* I tried to shout, but the sound was swallowed by the void.
Suddenly, a shape materialized from the haze. It was a creature—if you could call it that. A spindly, twitching thing with too many joints and eyes that looked like cracked mirrors. It didn't walk; it glided, its long fingers scratching against the smoke-floor.
It leaned in close, its breath smelling like wet earth and rot.
"A little spark," the creature hissed. Its voice sounded like grinding glass. "A little piece of light fallen into the belly of the beast. How delicious."
I scrambled backward, my heels sliding on the slick surface. "What are you? Where am I?"
"You are in the Wake, little spark. The place where the forgotten things come to feast." The creature lunged, its jaw unhinging to reveal rows of needle-like teeth. "And you look like a snack."
I didn't have a weapon. I didn't have strength. But as the creature’s maw opened to clamp down on my shoulder, something inside that hole in my chest snapped.
It wasn't fear. It was a hunger. A starving, violent need that drowned out everything else.
Without thinking, I reached out and grabbed the creature’s face.
I expected cold slime. Instead, I felt a surge of electricity. The moment my fingers touched its skin, the black smoke in my chest roared to life. It didn't just push the creature away—it pulled.
I felt a vacuum open up in my lungs. I wasn't breathing air; I was breathing *him*.
"What... what is this?" the creature shrieked, its voice distorting.
I didn't answer. I couldn't. I just pulled harder. I watched in horrific fascination as the creature began to dissolve, its physical form turning into a stream of grey mist that was sucked directly into the wound in my chest.
It felt like drinking liquid fire. My veins turned black. My vision sharpened, the grey haze of the void suddenly revealing hidden paths, jagged spires, and thousands more of those twitching things lurking in the shadows.
As the last of the creature vanished into me, a sensation of power flooded my limbs. I stood up, my movements fluid and predatory. I looked at my hands—they were paler now, laced with thin, obsidian veins.
I felt... full. For the first time in my life, the emptiness was gone.
But the silence didn't last.
From the darkness, a new voice emerged. It didn't hiss. It didn't scream. It was deep, resonant, and sounded like it came from the bottom of an ocean. It didn't come from a creature, but from the void itself.
*"So, the lamb has teeth,"* the voice vibrated through my skull.
I spun around, scanning the horizon. "Who's there? Show yourself!"
*"I am the echo of everything you lost,"* the voice replied. *"And you are nothing but a flicker in a storm. But that hunger... that is something new. That is a seed."
I clenched my fists, the black smoke curling around my knuckles. "I don't care about seeds. I want to go back. I want to kill the woman who put me here."
There was a sound like a laugh—a cold, hollow sound that made the ground shake.
*"Return? You are a corpse, boy. A beautiful, broken thing. The gates of Luminis are closed to the dead. Unless..."*
"Unless what?" I demanded, stepping forward.
*"Unless you stop being a lamb. Unless you become the shepherd of this nightmare."*
I looked down at the hole in my chest. The black smoke was pulsing now, like a second heart. I could feel the other creatures in the distance—their fear, their hunger, their wretchedness. And I realized I wanted more. I wanted to eat every single one of them until there was nothing left but me.
*"The rules of the Void are simple,"* the voice whispered, suddenly sounding like it was right behind my ear. *"There is no mercy. No love. Only the feast."*
I felt a cold shiver run down my spine, but I didn't flinch. I thought of Selena’s face—that look of clinical pity. I thought of the way she’d held my wrist before the knife fell.
"Tell me how," I said, my voice sounding deeper, darker. "Tell me how to get back."
*"Then you must survive the first night,"* the voice replied. *"And you must remember the only law that matters here..."
I felt a sudden, violent pressure in the air. A dozen mirror-eyed creatures emerged from the smoke, their jaws snapping in unison. They weren't lunging yet; they were circling, sensing my weakness, waiting for me to blink.
*"Eat,"* the voice commanded, the sound echoing like a thunderclap, *"or be eaten."*