There was no sunrise in the place he awoke.
There was no sky—only a blank canvas stretched infinitely above, like forgotten parchment stained with sorrow. The stars were gone. Replaced by flickering fractures in the firmament, like cracked glass struggling to hold the night together.
He stood on what felt like land, but every step hummed with contradiction. It felt too real. Too stable. And yet, the moment he looked away, even the ground beneath his feet whispered doubts into his mind.
"This world... shouldn't exist," he muttered.
His voice didn't echo.
It wasn't just the air that felt wrong. It was everything. The silence didn't rest—it clung. The wind didn't blow—it watched. And the trees, if they were even trees, moved without moving.
He walked through a forest made of obsidian veins and hollow light, the leaves shifting through impossible colors—blues that bled into thought, reds that tasted like regret.
His name—still missing.
His purpose—lost.
Only a sensation remained. A pull toward something deeper, older, buried beneath even the lies this world told itself.
At the edge of the not-forest, he found a river.
Or perhaps it found him.
It flowed upward, spiraling toward the blank heavens like a thread being stitched into unreality. Its waters shimmered with memories—visions of people he didn't know, dying in ways that felt too familiar. A child screaming without sound. A man standing alone in a hall of mirrors, each reflection turning away from him.
He reached out—
—and the river recoiled.
It screamed. Not aloud, but inside his head. A single, blinding truth burned into his thoughts:
> You were not meant to wake.
He staggered back.
The ground cracked beneath his feet, revealing a glimpse of something beneath: not lava, not stone—teeth. Row after row of slumbering, ancient teeth, as though the world itself was a mouth waiting to speak his doom.
Further along, the land turned to bone.
Mountains rose like vertebrae from a titan that had died screaming. He climbed them in silence. At the summit stood a monument—an altar carved from pieces of the sky itself, glowing faintly with runes he almost recognized.
The altar whispered.
Not in words, but in reminders. Visions, fragments:
A tower spiraling through dimensions.
A hand reaching toward a dying sun.
A voice that had once called him brother.
He slammed his hand on the altar.
The whispers stopped.
But one rune ignited—bright, red, alive.
And it spoke:
> "Return to the Tower, Exile. The world is breaking because you still exist."
His heart didn't race.
It stilled.
The forest behind him was gone. Erased.
The river was ash.
Only the altar remained. And above it now floated a black sun, pulsing like a wounded heart.
He looked into it.
And saw her.
A girl. Pale. Dressed in black silk that moved like shadow. Her eyes were endless. Her smile was soft and terrible.
She raised her hand—and the sun obeyed.
He knew her.
Or he would.
And she whispered, across time, across decay:
> "Find me. Or I will find you."
The chapter ends with silence. But not the same silence as before.
This one was watching him leave.