Prologue
Her face blurred out of my vision, slipping away like something I was never meant to hold on to. The blow to my head had been heavy too heavy metal crashing against bone with a force that didn’t just hurt, it shattered. Something had pierced somewhere deep, and now everything inside me felt disconnected, numb… almost distant, like my body had already begun to give up on me.
I tried to open my eyes, but they felt impossibly heavy, soaked with blood that clung to my lashes and sealed them shut again and again. Each attempt took more strength than I had left. But I needed to see her. That was all that mattered now. Not the pain, not the darkness closing in just her. Just one more look.
But she was fading.
A warm liquid trickled down my neck, slow and sticky, and when I raised my trembling hand to wipe it away, my fingers came back darker than I expected. That was when it hit me not just the pain, but the weight of it. How deep the wound was. How brutal the impact had truly been. The realization didn’t scare me… it only made me more desperate.
The surroundings began to lose shape, dissolving into blurred patches of color. Blue bled into red, green twisted into something unfamiliar, and the world around me stopped making sense. But even as everything else disappeared, my eyes searched for her, clinging to the only thing that still felt real. And yet… she kept drifting farther away, like the universe itself was pulling her out of my reach.
There were no more noises now. Not the chaos, not the panic, not even the rain that had been tearing against my skin moments ago with its sharp, unforgiving drops. Everything had gone silent, as if the world had decided to pause, to hold its breath and watch me fall apart.
Or maybe… I had simply stopped feeling it.
Weightlessness took over slowly, wrapping around me like something soft and dangerous. I felt light too light like I could just let go and float away. Maybe I could reach her like this… like a cloud drifting without resistance. I could wrap myself around her, hold her close, feel the warmth of her presence without the pain in between.
Maybe then… I could finally feel something again.
But I didn’t.
And just like that, everything went black.
And yet somewhere between the darkness and whatever came after it didn’t feel like the end. It felt like something unfinished, something pulling at me, refusing to let me disappear completely.
Because this wasn’t where it began.
