Chapter 3 — Helpless
Carter was sinking.
Not through water — through thought.
The darkness wasn't cold or wet. It was dense, like tar, like smoke thickened into matter. It folded around him, smothering sound, smothering breath. Even his heartbeat felt distant, fading like a drum beneath miles of earth.
He tried to move. The darkness clung. He tried to think. The thought dissolved.
Then the void shivered.
A single ripple cut through the black, spreading outward like a tremor through liquid glass. The world reassembled in fragments — light, wind, sound — until Carter stood once more on the cliff.
The same cliff.
The same valley.
The same dying light.
But this time, he wasn't there.
He was transparent — a ghost painted in smoke and faint blue light. His hands fluttered like torn veils in a wind that didn't touch him. He had weight, but no shape; presence, but no body.
Below, the valley churned.
Steel met shadow.
The clang of iron was distant, stretched thin like memory.
The small settlement beyond the battlefield glowed faintly orange beneath a dim, reluctant sun.
Am I dreaming again?
The thought echoed oddly, bouncing back at him from a thousand directions.
Before he could answer himself, the world convulsed. The horizon folded inwards. The sky peeled away.
Something hooked deep beneath his ribs and pulled.
The cliff shattered into white.
---
When sight returned, he was smaller.
The air was dense, heavy with smoke and salt and something sharp that burned his throat. He coughed — or tried to. The sound that escaped was high, ragged, childish.
He looked down. His hands — tiny, trembling, slick with sweat. His fingers curled weakly, gripping air.
These aren't my hands.
His chest heaved. Panic surged, but his limbs didn't obey him. He moved — but not by choice.
He wasn't watching. He was inside.
The world towered around him — the walls, the roofs, the doors — everything swollen to monstrous size.
And the walls… the walls were burning.
Flames clung to them like vines, crawling upward, devouring beams that had once seemed unshakable.
Screams tore through the air, one after another, until they blurred into a single inhuman sound.
A hand — warm, shaking — clamped over our mouth.
"Quiet," whispered a woman's voice.
Our mother.
Through the cracks of a half-shattered door, Carter saw them — soldiers in armor blacker than soot, moving in silence except for the dull thud of their boots. Their visors reflected the fire, the glow shaping itself into a hollow circle — a black sun wreathed in gold.
Behind them, banners hung tattered in the smoke — the same sigil stamped across them, the gold glinting like an open wound.
Father was gone.
He had gone to speak to them.
He had not come back.
The room stank of oil and dust. Half-filled bags lay scattered on the floor — escape abandoned mid-breath.
Outside, laughter — coarse, uneven, too human to be monstrous, too monstrous to be human.
Her mother pressed a trembling kiss to her brow.
Then she left.
Carter felt his throat burn. Don't.
The word clawed up his windpipe, but his mouth stayed shut. The child's lips didn't move.
The door closed.
It didn't open again.
---
Night arrived without stars.
The fire outside died to embers, leaving a silence that scraped the edges of sanity.
The child — he — we — curled in a corner, shaking until even shaking became rhythm.
When dawn finally broke, the air turned pale and wrong. Light crept in through the cracks, heavy with the smell of charred flesh.
We stood.
Our fingers brushed the door, and it gave way with a soft groan.
Ash fell inward like dust from a grave.
Outside — ruin.
Bodies lay across the street, their shapes melted into one another, their shadows burned into the stone. A dog whimpered somewhere — then stopped.
Carter's stomach convulsed. The girl's body doubled over, retching bile into the ashes.
This wasn't war.
It was cleansing.
---
Bootsteps.
Slow. Heavy. Certain.
They approached like the ticking of a clock before execution.
She turned.
Too late.
A figure emerged from the haze — a man in black armor, his blade dripping, the crest of the black sun burned onto his pauldron. The gold circle caught the weak sunlight, haloing him in something blasphemously divine.
Cold fingers closed around her throat. Her feet kicked uselessly. The world spun.
"This one's young," said a voice from behind the visor. Calm. Detached. "Fresh."
The sound didn't echo — it lingered, like oil spreading over water.
Then the world cracked apart again.
---
Darkness.
Chains.
The stink of rot, iron, fear.
She was in a cage — one among many.
Children huddled together, their breaths shallow and rhythmic like animals learning not to make noise.
Carter felt everything — the ache in the wrists, the torn skin around the shackles, the taste of blood and metal on the tongue.
He tried to wake. Tried to tear himself out.
But the dream held him down like gravity.
Days blurred into nights — or maybe nights blurred into themselves. When the blows came, there were no words. Only the dull cadence of impact: wood, fist, flesh.
Then came silence.
A silence so vast it pressed against the eardrums until thought itself became whisper.
Carter realized something.
Pain could fade.
But the absence it left behind didn't.
---
Time became shapeless.
The child's tears dried to salt on her cheeks. Her voice died first. Then her dreams. Then her name.
Until one day, the silence broke.
A sound — shhkkk — steel on stone.
A man sat before her cage, sharpening his blade with slow, patient strokes. His armor, once white, was cracked and blackened at the edges as if burned from the inside.
He lifted his head.
Carter saw his eyes.
Pale. Empty. The light of a star long dead.
Their gazes locked.
Something inside Carter — inside both of them — twisted.
The girl faded like smoke. Her breath left her body, and his chest grew heavy. Metal sank onto his shoulders — plates, chains, the weight of authority. The smell of oil replaced the smell of ash.
He looked down.
Scarred hands. Hardened palms. A sword slick with old memory.
He was no longer the child.
He was the man.
He looked at her — small, frail, trembling.
Not with pity.
Not even indifference.
With disgust.
"Filthy Astarian," he said.
The words came out of his mouth — but they tore through Carter's throat.
He tried to stop them. Couldn't.
He felt the hatred. The certainty. The rightness that wasn't his.
The world bled at the edges.
The girl's eyes — wide, wounded — glimmered once, then dimmed like a dying ember.
Carter reached for her, but his arm was iron. His breath was smoke.
The weight of the armor crushed him from within.
The sword trembled.
The air thickened — ink, again, swallowing everything.
Carter tried to breathe, but there was no air, only the echo of his own voice, distant and broken—
"Filthy… Astarian…"
And then the world collapsed, folding in on itself like a lung collapsing inward.
He was drowning once more — in ink, in silence, in himself.
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