ALDRIC
The darkness came first.
But it was not the kind you get when you shut your eyes and wait for sleep to take you. Neither was it the soft kind that still held the shape of things, where you could still almost picture the room around you if you tried hard enough. This was something else entirely. It pressed in from everywhere at once, thick and complete, like it had swallowed the idea of light long before I got there.
I didn't know if I was floating or falling. The thought kept circling, useless and stubborn, because there was nothing to measure it against. No ground. No sky. No sense of direction. Just that endless void stretching out in every direction, or maybe in none at all.
I tried to move.
It was instinct more than anything, the body remembering what it used to be able to do, even if I couldn't feel it anymore. I reached for my hands, my legs, my chest, anything that would prove I still had a shape, that I hadn't dissolved into whatever this place was.
