The only thing he could feel was the senseless weight his soul cast upon him. He was aware of his body's existence, but he couldn't move his limbs.

  He was cold. Freezing cold.

  He tried to open his eyes, but he was terrified. He wasn't sure where he would find himself once he parted those dark curtains. Nothing felt familiar. Not a sound, not the faintest sign of any presence. He felt like a lifeless body being hurled from one end to the other in the middle of absolute nothingness.

  With tremendous effort, he overcame the endless, oppressive weight on his eyelids—a pressure that felt as vast as eternity—and slowly pried them open. But something was wrong. There was nothing in his field of vision but a vast, empty void. It was as though the world around him wasn't dark, but simply made of nothing at all.

  He tried to check on his limbs using only his gaze. Nothing changed.

  He closed his eyes again. *I can't make sense of anything,* he thought.

  He decided to leave himself alone with his thoughts. It was the only thing he had left. To think...

  I'm sorry, Rebecca.

  Kael froze, halting the storm in his mind. In the middle of this void, he had finally perceived something. Was his brain playing a trick on him? Was this some reflex his mind had generated while fighting to survive?

  But this is how it has to be.

  No—he had definitely heard it. Kael opened his eyes, fear gripping him.

  Before him, though he couldn't see it clearly, stood a long corridor opening into a large room. Night had already fallen; the dim lights of the house illuminated the corridor's oppressive walls. Kael wanted to move forward—wanted to walk along that corridor floor, to touch those walls. But he couldn't.

  When I've already lost everything... and now this too?

  The voice was muffled, but Kael realized it was coming from the sitting room at the far end of the corridor. He was burning himself from the inside out, desperate to move his body, to understand what was happening, to reach that room.

  A silence fell.

  Then a woman's voice, fractured by sobs, shattered it...

  I don't understand.

  I don't understand!

  I don't understand...

  The woman was screaming as if she couldn't breathe. She was pouring her shattered heart into words; it was as if she were pleading with her creator at the final edge of her life, begging for just one more second to exist.

  Then came a sound violent enough to rupture eardrums.

  The sounds of things shattering rose from the gloomy room inside. It was as if a burglar had broken into the house and was hurling everything to the floor.

  Kael saw a ceramic vase flung toward him. It struck one of the corridor's dim walls with brutal force and shattered to pieces on the floor.

  I hate you.

  I hate you.

  I HATE YOU!

  Kael recoiled violently. He squeezed his eyes shut in horror. He desperately wanted to get away, to escape this chaos he had been thrown into. But the woman's screams kept echoing deeper and deeper into the recesses of his mind.

  He forced his eyes open again. His mind wasn't playing tricks on him; it seemed to be trying, forcefully, to tell him something.

  Then a small dark shape appeared before him.

  Just beyond the broken shards of the vase, Kael could barely make out a small child standing there. Its back was turned to him. It stood in the doorway, watching the horrifying scene unfolding inside.

  The voice of the woman screaming and sobbing inside suddenly went silent.

  The child stood motionless in the doorway, looking around as if it couldn't understand what had happened.

  Then came the thing that truly horrified Kael.

  The child turned its body toward him in an achingly slow movement. It could definitely see him. When it had turned to face him completely, it simply stood there; its blank stare seemed to bore directly into the depths of Kael's soul.

  They stared at each other for a long moment. Kael didn't know what to do. He couldn't move, couldn't tear his eyes away from the child's innocent, empty gaze.

  The child slowly began to walk toward Kael. It moved forward, stepping barefoot over the shattered ceramic shards, as if feeling no pain at all—focused only on its destination.

  Kael wanted to close his eyes, to erase everything from his mind entirely. He wanted to get out of wherever he was as quickly as possible; he wanted to see his friends, the lush grass stretching under a bright sun, and Marshal Voss raining down commands on him.

  The child was so close it was almost within reach. At that moment, the corridor's dim lights exploded with a violent crack.

  The house, the corridor, the woman's agonizing cries... All of it collapsed inward and shattered in seconds. That absolute, deafening darkness imprisoned Kael inside itself once again.

  He felt lighter. As if he had been freed from all his troubles.

  He felt his body like a leaf tossed about in a gentle storm. Like a ship with no port to sail to, a stray cat with nowhere left to shelter...

  But this deceptive peace didn't last long. His mind had torn him from one hell and flung him mercilessly into the center of another.

  When he regained his vision, he found himself in the middle of a deserted street. The buildings didn't look old, but they couldn't be called new either. Night had fully fallen, and any sign of life had been all but erased from the street. People seemed to have retreated indoors after a long day's work, leaving the road to its heavy, unsettling silence. Faint light leaked from windows and fell on the asphalt. The sky was slightly overcast, but between those grey clusters, a moon as brilliant as the sun at midnight was drifting through.

  Kael's gaze locked onto a single point. The details were hard to make out in the darkness. It was a detached, two-story house with a small garden, a compact garage attached to the main building, and a few windows on the front facade staring into the dark.

  As Kael's eyes swept over the surroundings, a boundless, inexplicable weight settled in his chest. His mind was hazy. He didn't even know whether he had seen this house, this street, before. The only thing he knew was that indescribable sorrow gnawing at his soul the longer he looked at it.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Why. Why am I here. What does any of this mean?

  His mind was consuming itself, searching for an explanation.

  Suddenly, a faint rustling from the garden gate broke the street's suffocating silence. A small silhouette appeared in the dim light. A little girl...

  Kael didn't know her. He couldn't make out her face; who she was was a vast blank in his mind. But the moment he saw her, his throat tightened. A primal instinct stirred within him. He felt as though if anything were to happen to that girl, his own existence would end too. He wanted to protect her, to open his arms and tear that tiny girl away from the darkness of this night. He strained every fiber of his being trying to shatter the paralyzing shackles restraining his body, to run toward the girl and cry out. "Run! Please run!"

  Why was he fighting so desperately for this stranger? He had no idea. He was simply helpless.

  Then the darkness on the garage roof moved.

  First came those blood-curdling clicks of bone. Then a deep, muffled growl that seemed to tear through the dark, oppressive air of the night...

  There it was. That cursed thing stood directly before him. Like something out of a nightmare, it had descended from the garage roof into the garden, just a few meters from the little girl. It turned its head directly toward her. It couldn't see her, yet it quivered its vile gill-like slits as if it were fully aware of the girl's presence.

  The little girl couldn't even scream. She was frozen in place, her gaze unable to look anywhere else.

  Everything happened within seconds. When the creature savagely swung one of its crystal-hard, razor-sharp limbs at the small body, Kael couldn't close his eyes. He was forced to watch the savagery, the helplessness, and the final moments of that little girl he didn't even know—paralyzed, unable to move.

  He wanted to scream, to cry out. He wanted to break free from the prison he was being held in by force; to leap at that vile creature with his bare hands, to kill it right then and there.

  In that moment, the voice of the woman he had heard screaming moments ago echoed through his mind again.

  I HATE YOU!

  Kael didn't know who the woman had been screaming at, why this little girl had died, or what any of this had to do with him. But in that absolute nothingness, he felt it in his very marrow—that the hatred in that scream had driven straight into his own soul, that he was the true culprit.

  As the woman's voice shattered through his mind like broken glass, that dark garden, the destroyed little girl, and the hideous hunter's growls were suddenly obliterated by a blinding, pure white light.

  He found himself in a place with no end and no beginning.

  No matter how far he looked toward the horizon, there was nothing to see but a boundless brightness with no edges. It felt as if someone had pulled him from the very depths of hell and placed him inside this infinite purity. His ears filled with a hazy, barely perceptible noise—faint, but always there, coming from somewhere deep.

  He swept his gaze around him. He could now see and feel his limbs, numb from their long immobility. He began walking slowly through this absolute void.

  No matter which direction he went, he sensed that this infinity would never end. He felt as if he had been walking for hours. He wanted to see something, to touch something—at this point, he simply wanted to truly *feel* something.

  He heard a delicate sound pierce the deafening silence of infinity.

  "Nathan... is that really you?"

  The voice came from directly behind Kael. He shuddered. With hesitant, weary steps, he turned around. He was afraid to look.

  About fifteen meters away stood a figure. In the middle of this white infinity, it was like a faded, dark smudge. A woman—roughly 1.70 in height, slender and delicate, not yet robbed of her grace but worn and weary. Kael felt his heart beating the way it had against the little girl's in his dream, as he began walking toward her.

  "How did you get here?"

  The woman's question froze Kael in his tracks. His mind was full of questions, but the question of why he was here pushed him toward a bottomless void. Why was he here? Who was he?

  "Could it be... that you've died too?"

  Kael was horrified. He had no idea what the woman was talking about. Had he really died? Was this truly heaven? Or was he in that narrow purgatory between heaven and hell?

  The figure began to drift slowly toward him. Her feet didn't seem to touch the ground; she appeared to glide across the pure white surface.

  Only a few meters separated them now. Kael could make out the woman's face more clearly, though the details were still blurred. She seemed to be in her thirties; her face bore the deep marks of bittersweet joy and regret. She looked so exhausted it seemed as though she hadn't slept in days, perhaps years.

  "Nathan."

  The figure reached out her hand to Kael.

  Kael felt a light, cool breeze brush against his face. Those fingers moved gently across him, but their touch wasn't warm like a human's—it was more like a memory seeping through the skin.

  "I've missed you so much."

  Kael collapsed to the ground. His knees could no longer bear the weight of this truth. His chest tightened, his breath grew sparse; it was as though every last will to live had been drained from his veins all at once. He forced his head up, and through tear-filled eyes, looked at the figure touching him with that never-ending tenderness. He began to weep, shaking with sobs.

  The dark figure kneeled beside him. Her faint, misty arms wrapped firmly around Kael and held him. She began to move gentle fingers through his dark hair. She pressed the boy's head to her chest and broke into sobs alongside him. Yet these tears seemed to be less an expression of pure grief and more an outpouring of the unbearable, scorching longing that years had accumulated.

  "We've finally found each other."

  As the woman's whisper seeped into Kael's soul, the white infinity began to dim. Kael heard nothing. He *felt*. Deep within his chest, in the very depths, the metallic foreign object suddenly screamed. Sharp. Electronic. Merciless.

  The surroundings grew darker. As the woman's silhouette dissolved like smoke, Kael wanted to scream, to clutch her arms tightly and refuse to let go.

  Beep... Beep... Beep... Beep...

  Kael jolted awake with a start, gasping a sharp breath as he struggled to pry his eyes open.

  His vision was blurred; the fluorescent lights in the ceiling stabbed at his eyes like needles. The sharp smell of iodine and disinfectant filling his lungs instantly swept away every image he had just seen. Those tender arms he had felt moments ago were gone; in their place was the cold, hard surface of the infirmary bed.

  "Stay calm, Kael. Take a deep breath."

  He slowly turned his head toward the voice coming from his right. Mira was sitting beside the infirmary bed, looking directly into Kael's dazed eyes.

  He swept his gaze around the room. It was quite bright inside—uncomfortably so, even. Around him were a few chairs, and a table in front of the bed. He could only see Mira in the room.

  Kael tried to sit up in the bed. But his body felt far too heavy. With a strained expression on his face, he forced himself to move.

  "What... what happened to me?" Kael whispered. His voice came out hoarse and faint, as if he hadn't spoken in weeks. "Where am I? That house... What I saw..."

  "We're still at the facility, Kael," said Mira; her voice carried its usual gentle tone, though this time it seemed to hold a faint tiredness.

  "What you saw was just a side effect of the intensive drug therapy. We all went through the same thing."

  Kael relaxed slightly after Mira's words. He let his body go and took a deep breath.

  "You've been delirious from that chemical cocktail for two days." Mira smiled at Kael after her words.

  "Do you always talk in your sleep like this?" The girl let out a quiet laugh.

  "Tarin always said I snored." Kael managed a faint smile despite himself.

  They looked at each other, smiling, for a little while longer.

  "Did they give you the same drugs?" The smile on Kael's face gave way to a more questioning expression.

  "Yes. I woke up yesterday. It was quite something." Mira's gaze seemed to drift away into the room.

  "And Tarin? Where is he?"

  Mira gathered her thoughts and looked back at Kael. "He woke up a few hours ago. He also took a long time to shake off the drug's effects, just like you."

  Mira composed herself, smiled at Kael, and stood up. "Rest a little more. Someone will come to check on you." She walked slowly toward the door.

  Just as she was about to reach it, Kael's voice stopped her. "Mira..."

  The girl paused at the door. Her hand had reached for the handle, but she didn't touch it. She waited for a few seconds, then slowly turned toward Kael.

  "Yes?"

  Kael couldn't answer for a moment. His mind was very hazy. It was as though he were trying to make sure that what he wanted to say truly needed to be said. His eyes drifted for a brief moment to the fluorescent lights on the ceiling, then returned to Mira.

  "While I was under..." His voice was still weak, but there was an inexplicable tension inside it.

  "I saw something."

  Mira stepped closer to the bed Kael was lying in. There was a questioning look on her face.

  "What kind of thing?"

  Kael closed his eyes for a few seconds. The corridor, the screaming, the little girl, and the dark figure all came before him.

  "A woman."

  The expression on Mira's face grew slightly more serious.

  "A woman?"

  Kael slowly nodded his head.

  "Yes. A woman."

  Mira was silent for a moment, then sighed. "Kael, we all saw things while we were under." There was a faint smile on her face after her words.

  "I know. But it was as if she knew me."

  Mira looked at him as if she felt sorry for him.

  "She called me Nathan."

  The expression on Mira's face changed at that instant. The line between her brows deepened. The corner of her lips drew back—almost imperceptibly.

  "Strange, isn't it?" said Kael; his voice had involuntarily fallen lower. "My name is Kael."

  Mira was still looking at him. Her gaze was no longer as calm as before. "The drugs haven't worn off yet."

  That sentence sounded logical enough.

  A heavy feeling formed in Kael's chest. It was as if the single word he had just spoken had changed the air in the room.

  Nathan.

  For the first time, Kael felt truly afraid.