What do you think of yourself
What do you think when it was lost? What was found was already lost and will be lost, again. And what was lost may never be found ever. We all know that.
But loss is something you'll never get used to, even if it eats your memories, corrupting your feelings, and devouring your perspective to what it is like to gain something again—when they'll just be lost in the matter of time. What worth does anything hold when they'll just be lost deep in your memories? Or what about when your memories were nowhere to be found at all?
It started when the memories were not there anymore.
It was a darkness.
Quiet.
Peaceful.
Blind.
But it became more.
There was a light.
And there were colors.
Yellow.
Red.
Blue.
Yellow again.
Then, it became white. All-consuming, blank, yet full.
Until his eyes opened, and they met the sky.
A pale gray expanse stretched above him, clouds moving slowly, as if unconcerned with the passage of time. They veiled the sun, allowing only a weak, muted light to filter through—cool and colorless, the kind of light that suggested neither dawn nor dusk, but something suspended in between. Around the edges of his vision, leaves shifted with the wind, their branches creaking softly in a rhythm that felt both unfamiliar and eternal. The sound was old. Patient. It did not care if he woke or did not wake.
"Where am I?"
The words left his lips unbidden, quiet and tired, as if weighed down by the question itself. They floated into the air and were absorbed by the silence, leaving no echo, no answer.
He sat up slowly, pushing against the damp earth beneath him. The soil was cool and slightly soft, yielding to the press of his palms. Blades of grass brushed against his skin, grounding him in a place he did not recognize. He rubbed his eyes with one hand, feeling the disheveled strands of his black hair sway with the gentle breeze. The movement was automatic, thoughtless, but it brought a strange comfort—proof that his body still obeyed him, even if his mind did not.
Looking down, he noticed the shirt he was wearing.
It was striking—a long-sleeved patchwork of macaron pastel colors, soft blues, yellows, pinks, and greens, stitched together in square patches in a way that felt deliberate yet fragmented. The fabric felt sturdy, well-made, even comforting against his skin, though he couldn't remember why he wore it or where it came from. Each square was precise, the stitching tight and careful, as if someone had taken great care in its creation.
"It's nice," he murmured softly, running a hand over the material. The texture was familiar in a way he couldn't place—smooth, warm, alive. "But… why?"
The question wasn't just about the shirt. It was about everything.
He looked down further. The pants—simple and white—were clean yet worn at the edges, as if they had seen a long journey. His sneakers, also a patchwork of pastel squares, mirrored the vibrant yet strange design of his shirt. Every part of his attire seemed chosen with care, yet he couldn't recall who had chosen it or why.
But it was nice. Even with the confusion of the unknown situation he was in, he knew he liked it.
His eyes drifted to his hands.
The faint glow of his light brown skin caught the muted sunlight. Smooth and unmarked, they looked as though they had done little hard labor. Yet they trembled slightly, as if carrying the weight of an invisible burden. He turned them over, studying the lines of his palms, the curve of his fingers, the soft pads of his thumbs. They were his hands. They had to be. But they felt like borrowed things, tools he did not yet know how to use.
He touched his face next, fingers brushing over its familiar unfamiliarity. A small mole near his left eye. Soft lips. Young skin unmarred by scars or weather. He traced the contours slowly, as if mapping a stranger's features, as the realization dawned on him—slow, heavy, unavoidable—that he could not remember anything.
Not his name. Not where he came from. Not who had dressed him in these colors.
Nothing.
He stood, slowly, as if testing the strength of his legs. They held. The wind tugged at his hair, cool against his skin, carrying the scent of earth and leaves. Around him, the world was quiet, but not silent. The rustling of trees, the distant call of unseen birds—they were reminders of life. A life he wasn't sure he belonged to anymore.
The pastel shirt, the pristine white pants, the sneakers—they felt like remnants of someone else. A person who had chosen them with care. A person fond of the myriad of soft colors. A person who knew who they were.
How could that person be him? How could such colors fit him?
The colors to be worried about were not just his shirt, his white pants, the faint light of the sky—but the darkness lingering at the back of his mind, the emptiness of his knowledge that had brought him here. He was full of colors, and yet his soul might only be a clash of the light and the darkness. The person he was was out of reach. A person he was yet to find again.
But that person was gone, scattered like the memories he couldn't find. Only to see broken fragments of mirror shards in the darkness of his mind. A mirror that does not reflect himself.
He finally looked in front of him, and around.
His eyes were met by the trees, and then by the grass, where he found the thing that would add to his confusion.
"What? Where the hell am I?"
The voice was stern, cutting through the natural sounds of the forest like a blade through silk. It belonged to a woman—pale-skinned, adult, wearing a blue nurse uniform that stood out against the muted greens and browns of the trees. She was standing now, rising from the grass with the sharp, controlled movements of someone accustomed to crisis. Her eyes swept the area, assessing, searching for context that did not come.
Around her, others were rising too.
People. Strangers. Unfamiliar faces wearing distinct clothing—colors and uniforms, casual wear and formal attire, some even draped in nothing more than thin cloth that clung to their bodies like afterthoughts. They stood scattered across the forest floor, several meters away from him, each turning in slow circles, their expressions unified by a single, shared state: confusion.
Despite the difference in their ages, their dress, their postures—they all looked lost.
They looked like him.
"Are we possibly... dead?"
The words left his mouth unbidden, quiet and hesitant, as if testing the weight of the idea. He looked down at his right hand, flexing the fingers, then touched it with his left palm. The skin was warm. The contact was real. The sensation was undeniable.
"Is this heaven?" he added, turning his body to the side, his gaze sweeping across the growing number of people around him.
They were everywhere now, emerging from the grass like flowers after rain. Some wore uniforms again—recognizable professions he couldn't name but somehow understood. Others wore casual clothing, bright colors and faded fabrics. And some wore almost nothing, shivering in the cool air, arms wrapped around themselves.
"What in the fuck happened? Can someone tell me?"
The voice was deep, disgruntled, belonging to a man wearing athletic red and white shorts. His face was twisted in frustration, his hands balled into fists at his sides.
"Shit. I was just promoted and now this?"
A young man in a black office attire exclaimed, his voice high and tight with panic. He tugged at his tie as if it were choking him, then let it fall loose, forgotten.
"Or hell?"
He said it to himself, softly, and chuckled—a short, hollow sound that felt wrong even as it left his throat. The idea was absurd. And yet, hearing the people curse, hearing their anger and confusion spill into the air like smoke, it didn't seem so impossible.
"YES! Those fucking ass-kissing cops thinking they'll catch me, huh?"
A middle-aged man in a rugged jacket shouted, his voice triumphant, manic, as if this strange new reality was a gift rather than a trap.
"Hey, you fucker! Come with me, let's have some fun!"
"H-help... where's my friends?"
"Stay away from me, you motherfucker! I'll beat your ass!"
Voices overlapped, escalating, tangling together into a cacophony of fear, anger, and confusion. Some people were shouting. Others were arguing. A few were already walking away, as if movement alone could provide answers.
It was all... surreal.
But the realization dawned on him, slow and heavy: This is humanity. This is them.
And then he remembered.
The colors he had seen before waking—before the darkness—they were all yellow.
Then they turned orange.
Then there was fire.
Then they turned red.
There was blood.
The memory flickered like a dying candle, distant and distorted, but it was there. It was different from the captivating view of the forest in front of him. Different from the muted light, the quiet trees, the calm wind.
There must be something different here. A change.
He thought it quietly, turning the idea over in his mind like a smooth stone.
Beside him, a louder voice cut through his thoughts.
"Where's dad? I need my medicine now!"
He turned.
A young woman stood near him—or rather, she had been standing. Now she was falling, her knees buckling, her hands reaching out toward nothing. She wore a hospital gown, thin and pale, the fabric barely covering her trembling frame. Her face was twisted in panic, her breathing shallow and fast.
She fell to her knees near his foot.
He stepped forward instinctively, his hand reaching out.
"Can I help you—"
"You! You're—no!"
The woman cut him off, her voice sharp and afraid. She scrambled to her feet, backing away from him as if he were a threat, then turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction, disappearing into the growing crowd.
"Oh."
The word left his mouth softly, quietly, as he watched her go. His hand was still half-raised, frozen in the air where it had meant to help.
Now I feel like I should regret that. But this is confusing. What's really happening right now?
He lowered his hand and looked around again.
The voices of the people around him were getting louder. Some were walking now, their steps aimless and uncertain. Some were talking—arguing, questioning, shouting. Some were heard screaming at each other, their words blurring into noise.
He asked himself, quietly, beneath the sound: They seem to remember everything. Why can't I?
He looked down at his hands, raising them to his chest. He turned them over, studying the palms, the lines, the faint tremor that ran through his fingers. Then he looked up at the sky.
The pale gray expanse stared back, indifferent.
"Is this a joke? A prank?" he whispered to himself.
"Or a game? An isekai?"
The word felt strange on his tongue, familiar yet foreign, like something he had read or heard in another life. He looked around again, watching the people walk, talk, scream.
"Or a novel? A simulation? The Matrix?"
He asked himself, but his eyes widened as the words left his mouth.
I know that movie. I know that movie? And yet I don't know how I know that movie. And I don't even know how I am here.
The thought spiraled, tightening in his chest.
But I know who I am, do I? Or I don't? Maybe this is a dream. A weird dream where I can't remember anything.
His left hand touched his right hand again, fingers wrapping around the wrist. He pinched the skin there—hard enough to sting, hard enough to be real.
"And yet I can feel this. And I can see them clearly."
He whispered it to himself as he looked around, his voice barely audible over the noise.
The people were still there. The trees were still there. The sky was still gray.
It was all still real.
"And the sky is not that weird for a weird dream," he murmured, tilting his head back, letting his gaze drift upward through the gaps between branches that had, moments ago, formed a canopy of impossible green.
But the gray had shifted.
Not suddenly—though it felt sudden in the way all slow horrors do when the mind finally catches up to what the eyes have been seeing. The clouds were thinning, dissolving like sugar in water, their edges blurring until there was nothing left but a vast, darkening sweep of emptiness. No stars pricked through. No familiar constellations. Just the color draining away, replaced by something deeper, something that pressed down on the air itself.
Night was falling. It's falling too fast. But it was the wrong kind of night.
"Or I spoke too soon?"
The words came out light, shaped like a joke, but his face had already begun to betray him. His jaw tightened. His eyes narrowed, tracking the accelerating dimness as it bled across the sky like spilled ink. The forest floor beneath him lost its faint definition, edges softening, details retreating. Shadows pooled where moments ago there had been none.
And then he saw it.
The moon.
Red.
Not the warm, earthy red of clay or rust. Not the deep, wine-dark red of old blood. This was something else—something faint, anemic, a red that pulsed weakly like the last ember of a dying fire struggling against the dark. It hung low in the sky, too large, too close, its surface smooth and unbroken, glowing with a sickly luminescence that did nothing to illuminate the world below.
"Red?" he whispered, and the word tasted wrong in his mouth.
The air thickened.
It was not a gradual change but a sudden compression, as though the atmosphere itself had gained weight. The murmurs and footsteps of those gathered below—strangers he could not see but could sense through the rustling fabric, the shuffled gravel, the hitched breaths—all of it ceased. Heads tilted upward in unison, drawn by some invisible compulsion to witness what hung above them.
The red moon pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
A rhythm like a heartbeat, slow and deliberate, each throb sending a faint ripple of crimson light across the black sky.
And then the shadow appeared.
It began as smoke.
Formless. Directionless. A wisp rising from some unseen abyss, curling and twisting against the red glow like oil spreading across water. The shape had no edges at first, no clear beginning or end—just movement, slow and wrong, defying the natural pull of gravity as it climbed higher, spreading wider.
Then it began to coalesce.
The smoke thickened, gathering itself, pulling inward until it formed something approximating a figure. Too tall. Too narrow. Proportions that bent logic, limbs that seemed to extend just slightly beyond where they should end, a silhouette that refused to settle into anything the eye could fully comprehend.
Not a man.
But shaped like one.
The figure stood suspended against the crimson moon, motionless, its outline sharp and terrible against the soft glow. It did not move. It did not speak. It simply was, and its presence was a weight—a pressure against the chest, a heaviness in the lungs, a cold hand pressed against the base of the skull.
And then its eyes opened.
Two points of molten red ignited within the shadow, bright and terrible, cutting through the darkness like brands. They were not eyes in any human sense—they held no pupil, no iris, no white. Just pure, burning red, concentrated and unblinking, fixed on the crowd below with an intensity that felt personal.
It was not looking at them.
It was looking into them.
A collective shiver rippled through the gathered mass, bodies flinching without conscious thought, breaths catching in unison. The silence deepened, became absolute. No one dared move. No one dared speak. Even the wind had stilled, as though the world itself was holding its breath.
Some felt it—a faint pressure against their sternum, as though invisible fingers were pressing, searching, testing the spaces between ribs to find the heart beneath. Others felt it in their throats, a tightness that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with knowing—the sudden, nauseating certainty that this thing, this shadow, this presence, saw everything. Their fears. Their secrets. The things they had done and the things they had failed to do.
The red eyes did not blink.
Did not shift.
Did not release them.
The air grew colder. Not the clean cold of winter or the sharp bite of mountain wind, but something else—something stale and still, like the air inside a sealed tomb.
Was it a man?
A beast?
A herald of something worse?
No one could answer. But the certainty settled in their chests like stones: this was not something they had encountered before.
And then it spoke.
"After a millennia, the Goddess of Light finally made her move."
The voice was kind.
Calm.
Measured, as though speaking to an old friend over tea, the tone warm and gentle and utterly, impossibly wrong for the thing that stood silhouetted against the red moon.
And it was inside their heads.
Not spoken aloud. Not carried on the wind. It arrived fully formed in the space behind their eyes, clear and close, as though the speaker stood directly beside each of them, leaning in to whisper against their ear.
"Welcome to Terraldia, Outworlders."
The forest erupted in bewilderment—not sound, but the sudden, internal chaos of minds scrambling to understand. How? Why? The figure had not moved its mouth. Had not gestured. It stood motionless, impossibly distant, and yet its voice was there, intimate and invasive, bypassing every defense the mind might erect.
And then the words themselves settled.
Terraldia.
Outworlders.
Two names. One for this place. One for them. Labels that arrived with the weight of truth, as though they had always been waiting to be spoken, and now, finally, were.
And the mention of the Goddess of Light—a name that carried significance they could not yet grasp, a presence they did not know, invoked by a shadow that radiated nothing but wrongness.
Curiosity flickered. Confusion surged. Mouths opened to question, to demand explanation—
The voice spoke again.
"And welcome to my demon dominion."
The words landed like ice water down the spine.
"The Tribunal of the Damned."
The ground convulsed.
Not a tremor. Not a quake. A convulsion—the earth jerking upward with violent, unnatural force, throwing bodies off balance, sending arms flailing for purchase that was no longer there. The trees—those massive, ancient giants that had surrounded them, their trunks thick and solid and impossibly tall—began to sink.
Vertically.
Not toppling. Not breaking. Sinking, as though the soil beneath had opened its mouth and begun to swallow them whole. The bark groaned, a deep, resonant sound that vibrated through the air, and one by one, the trees descended into the earth. Their trunks vanished first, then the lower branches, then the canopy itself, leaves folding downward like hands closing over a secret.
They were being eaten.
Screams erupted—raw, animal sounds of terror and disbelief. People fled, stumbling over roots that were no longer there, tripping on soil that bucked and heaved beneath their feet. The forest was collapsing. Nature was betraying them.
"This can't be real!"
The cry tore from his throat, raw and cracking, as the ground beneath him lurched again, harder this time, and his knees buckled. He hit the earth with a jarring impact, palms slamming into soil that felt alive—warm, pulsing, ravenous. It was not solid ground. It was something else. Something that wanted.
And then the grass moved.
It started at the edges—a faint rustling, the kind that might be wind or small animals. But there was no wind. And the rustling grew louder, faster, until it was a hissing, writhing cacophony. The grass beneath their feet twisted and coiled, blades lengthening, thickening, shooting upward like serpents waking from sleep.
It wrapped around ankles.
Calves.
Thighs.
Tightening with every frantic movement, every desperate attempt to pull free. The more they struggled, the more it grew—new shoots bursting from the soil, fresh tendrils lashing out, wrapping, binding, consuming.
Screams mingled with the sound of tearing—hands ripping at green, pulling fistfuls away only to feel more sprout beneath their fingers, relentless and hungry.
"What?!"
He shook his legs violently, refusing to touch the writhing strands. If he touched them with his hands, they would climb. They would spread. They would take everything. "You've gotta be kidding me. These grass can't be my friends."
Don't touch. Don't give them more surface. Don't—
"It seems you humans of Earth are not that different from other Terraldians."
The voice returned, still calm, still kind, still wrong.
"Your first step into this beautiful world is already destruction of nature."
The words cut through the chaos, sharp and accusatory.
"With that, your resistance is worthless. The Goddess cannot help you in my ultimatum game."
Dominion.
Game.
Demon.
The thoughts collided in his mind, fragments assembling into a horrifying whole. This was not random. This was deliberate. The shadow—the figure—the demon—was orchestrating this. The Goddess of Light had summoned them. This demon opposed her. And now they were caught between forces they did not understand, playing a game whose rules they did not know.
And the demon would kill them all.
Or worse.
He could not think of what worse might mean.
The others ran.
Or tried to.
But the grass was faster. Stronger. Relentless. It held them down, one by one, wrapping legs until movement became impossible, until all they could do was scream and tear and wait for the inevitable.
"I doubt you'll be able to use the prophesied weapons of your souls, Outworlders."
The voice was almost sympathetic.
"I haven't even witnessed anyone from you using even the simplest magic right this instant. As if you never had any magic to begin with."
True. Painfully true. No light had burst from their hands. No shields had manifested. No weapons had appeared from thin air, forged from the essence of their souls as the prophecy—whatever prophecy—had promised.
They were defenseless.
"And for the strongest demonic magic ever known—dominion—it ends with either the caster, I, die by the hands of you, or the sole purpose of the game is achieved, which is for all of you to meet your end."
A pause.
"There's nothing in-between."
Silence.
Not physical silence—the screams continued, the grass hissed, the earth groaned—but the silence of minds shutting down, of hope collapsing, of the terrible, cold certainty settling in:
We are going to die.
Several seconds stretched into eternity. Spines chilled. Breaths came shallow and fast. The horror of dying—not eventually, not someday, but now, here, moments after being dragged across worlds—pressed down on them like a weight too great to bear.
"This is... a slaughter? A massacre. A spawn kill?"
His voice was low, barely audible even to himself. His gaze had sharpened, jaw tight, eyes fixed on the silhouette above.
"Some of these people have lives worth more than anything you can think of. And yet you'll kill them like nothing. Like I am."
The word came out bitter, hard.
"Demon."
"Having accepted your fate now," the voice continued, ignoring his defiance, "to play my game, I only need you to do one thing."
One thing?
"One thing for a life so precious?"
The question slipped out before he could stop it, half-hope, half-disbelief.
"I, Neroth Aconite, Demon Lord of the Withered Souls, serving the God of Darkness, ask you all to answer this question with the rules of my dominion."
The name settled into the air like ash.
Neroth Aconite.
Demon Lord.
God of Darkness.
And then the question came.
"What do you think of the dark?"
The words hung in the silence, calm and cold and impossibly resonant. Not shouted. Not demanded. Simply asked, as though the answer were the most natural thing in the world.
The question reverberated through their thoughts, tearing through mental defenses, forcing a response, demanding acknowledgment.
And then—
The silhouette vanished.
The red moon remained, pulsing faintly, but the shadow was gone. No sound. No flash of light. Just absence where presence had been.
The demon was no longer in the sky.
The demon was somewhere else.
Making his move.
The forest erupted.
Screaming. Panic. Voices overlapping, words tumbling over each other in a chaotic, frenzied swarm. Minds like bees in a burning hive, buzzing with terror and desperation and the crushing, inescapable weight of impending doom.
Failure meant death.
Success meant—what? Survival? Freedom? Or just a slower death?
Is there a correct answer?
The thought surfaced through the chaos, cold and analytical.
It can be anything. Can we actually answer it?
He did not know.
No one knew.
But the question remained, what do you think of the dark?
"I… I won't answer this!"
The nurse's voice cracked, high and frantic as she tore the last tendril of grass from her ankle. Her scrubs—pale blue, spattered now with dirt and something darker—whipped around her legs as she turned. "It's terrifying! I don't want to die!"
She ran.
Her bare feet slapped against the earth in uneven rhythm, breath coming in ragged gasps that burned her throat. Ten steps. Fifteen. The darkness around her thickened, pressing in like fog made solid, but she didn't look back. She couldn't. If she didn't look, maybe—
The crimson blur materialized between one heartbeat and the next.
Neroth's shadow didn't so much move as manifest—a collapse of distance, a folding of space. His blade sang through the air with a sound like wind through a crypt, and the nurse's momentum carried her forward even as the light left her eyes.
She crumpled. Slowly. As though the strings holding her upright had been cut one by one.
Blood bloomed dark and wet across the grass where she fell, spreading in slow tendrils that the predatory blades seemed to drink. The demon stood over her collapsed form, utterly still, his voice threading through the minds of those watching like cold water down a spine.
"Fear only hastens your demise."
The man in patchwork stood frozen, fingers still tangled in the grass wrapping his own ankles. His breath came shallow and quick.
People can answer that, he thought, the words hollow even inside his own skull. Around him, panic had transformed into something worse—frenzied, animal desperation. Bodies thrashed against the grass. Feet scrambled for purchase. Heads whipped back and forth, searching for escape routes that didn't exist, eyes white and rolling at the edges.
His gaze tracked the movement, cataloging the chaos with a detachment that felt wrong in his chest.
And it's not enough.
"It's scary… I hate it!"
The man in athletic shorts staggered backward, his voice climbing toward a scream. Sweat gleamed on his bare legs, muscles trembling with the effort of remaining upright. "Only God answers for me! Please don't—"
The shadow moved.
It didn't cross the distance between them. It simply stopped being there and started being here, a displacement so swift the eye registered only afterimages—crimson and black, bleeding together like ink in water.
Neroth's eyes narrowed, twin coals of malevolent focus.
"Those who fear it have no place in this world." Each word fell with the weight of verdict. "And your God is ashamed of you."
The blade came down.
Metal met flesh with a wet, splitting sound—the noise of something fundamental being severed. The man's scream cut off mid-breath, throat working soundlessly as his knees buckled. He hit the earth hard, face-first, the impact sending up a small cloud of disturbed soil.
Around him, others broke and ran.
The shadows hunted them with surgical precision. No pursuit. No chase. Just the sudden, inevitable collapse—bodies folding like paper, falling like discarded puppets into the hungry grass. One by one, the screaming stopped. One by one, the silence spread.
"I… I don't know what to think!"
The corporate man stood trembling, his hands pressed flat against his chest as though he could physically hold the terror inside. His dress shirt was torn at the collar, tie hanging askew. "It can be a lot of things—I don't know!"
Neroth's gaze settled on him.
There was weight in that attention. Pressure. The sensation of being evaluated by something vast and pitiless, something that saw through skin and bone to the quivering uncertainty beneath.
"Confusion over such simple matters..." The demon's voice was soft now, almost contemplative. "...is the truest reflection of your life's worth."
"No." The word escaped as a whisper. The man's eyes widened, pupils dilating as understanding dawned too late. "No way. I'll—"
The shadow blurred.
Blood sprayed outward in a fine mist, catching what little light remained and scattering it into a thousand crimson droplets. The man's body folded, swallowed by darkness before it even finished falling.
"Darkness?"
The woman in the hospital gown spoke without inflection, her voice carrying the flat, detached quality of someone already dead inside. The thin fabric hung loose on her frame, pale blue cotton printed with small flowers. "I don't know what to think… it's just… nothing? It's meaningless. It's just the absence of light."
Neroth regarded her for a long, silent moment.
"And so is your existence."
The blade moved like a striking viper—one fluid motion, surgical in its precision. It found her heart with the certainty of long practice, and she crumpled inward as though the darkness itself had reached through her ribs and crushed her from the inside.
"It's vile and destructive!"
The elderly woman's voice shook, but there was steel beneath the tremor. Her ceremonial robes—vibrant patterns in ochre and deep burgundy—swayed as she raised the jade talisman higher, fingers white-knuckled around the carved stone. "The world doesn't need darkness!"
Neroth's shadow swelled.
It grew larger, denser, until it seemed to have weight—until the air itself bent under the pressure of his presence. The talisman in her hand cracked. Then shattered. Fragments of jade fell through her fingers like rain.
"The world has no need for your foolish disgust either."
His blade struck.
The woman sagged like a marionette with cut strings, her robes pooling around her in a spreading stain of color against the dark earth.
In the chaos, the man in patchwork watched.
His eyes tracked movement, following figures as they stumbled and fell, but his attention snagged on one in particular—a man in military uniform, face lit with an expression that bordered on ecstasy. The soldier raised both hands toward the red-stained sky, voice ringing out clear and fervent.
"Then darkness is beauty!" He shouted it like proclamation, like prayer. "It is pure. It is power. It is our savior. It is eternal!"
A savior?
The thought barely had time to form before the demon's shadow materialized directly in front of the soldier.
The man in patchwork felt his jaw go slack.
For a single, stretched moment, Neroth simply stood there. Silent. His head tilted fractionally to one side, considering the soldier with the same detached interest one might show an insect pinned beneath glass.
Then he spoke, each word dropping into the stillness like stones into deep water.
"Flattery will not save you." A pause, breath-thin and sharp. "It is hollow when it lacks truth."
The blade moved.
One strike. Clean. Final.
The soldier's chest opened in a single red line, and he collapsed forward—not backward, but down and forward, body bowing as though in grotesque reverence to the shadow that had killed him. Blood pooled around his boots, soaking into the leather.
The man in patchwork pressed his hand over his mouth, fingers trembling against his lips.
Not even those who praise it...
Around him, more bodies fell. The sound was becoming familiar now—that heavy, final thump of weight meeting earth. The wet percussion of ending.
"Darkness means nothing to me!"
The man in the golden tuxedo stood with his shoulders squared, chin lifted in defiance that bordered on arrogance. The expensive fabric caught faint glimmers of crimson light, making him look like a figure carved from flame. "I don't care about your question. You're just another man to kill!"
Brave words.
Empty words.
The blade moved before the sound of his voice had fully faded, and the man's defiant expression froze—locked in place as his body realized what his mind had not yet grasped.
"And your end is the darkness." Neroth's voice carried no heat, no anger. Only certainty. "Empty bravado has no place here."
The golden figure crumpled.
"The darkness… it reminds me of what I've done."
The young woman in the school uniform spoke quietly, almost to herself. Blue and white fabric, crisp pleats now dirt-stained. Tears tracked down her face, catching the red light and turning it pink. "Of the pain I've caused."
The blade struck.
But her eyes had already gone glassy—empty and still long before the steel reached her heart. She fell without sound, body folding neatly as though she'd simply decided to lie down.
"Regret will not cleanse you," Neroth murmured.
"No..."
The word escaped the man in patchwork as barely more than breath. His legs were still trapped, grass coiled tight around his calves like living rope. "That's just cruel."
But his eyes were already moving, already tracking the next answer, the next death.
"Darkness is a test!"
The man in rugged overalls clenched both fists, staring not at the demon but at the ground beneath his feet. Defiance radiated from every line of his body—stubborn, desperate resolve. "It's an enemy. It's there to make us stronger, to prove our worth to the light!"
The words hung in the air.
Neroth stopped. Studied him.
For three heartbeats, the demon remained utterly still, head tilted as though dissecting not just the words but the soul that had spoken them. The silence stretched, pulled taut as wire.
When he finally spoke, his voice carried the cold finality of winter wind through a graveyard.
"Faith is a fragile shield against inevitability."
The blade moved with something like ceremony—a deliberate flourish that made the killing almost formal.
The man in overalls collapsed like all the others, but his words remained. They echoed louder than the screams, louder than the wet sounds of bodies meeting earth.
Not a savior, nor an enemy...
The man in patchwork looked down at his own chest, at the riot of color stitched across his clothing—bright yellows and deep blues, cheerful reds and soft greens. Everything vibrant. Everything alive.
Everything contrary to the question he couldn't answer.
Connecting all of this... what really is the dark?
"Darkness? It's where dreams come from, right?"
The very young girl's voice carried a lilting quality, innocent and wondering. Her pajamas—printed with cartoon stars—seemed absurdly out of place as she tilted her head back to gaze at the sky. "It's where stars are born!"
Neroth's shadow shifted.
For the span of three heartbeats, it simply paused—a hesitation so brief it might have been imagined.
Then his voice cut through the stillness, cold and absolute.
"Naïveté is not innocence. It is ignorance dressed in softer cloth." A pause. "Take this as mercy."
The small body fell among the others.
"It's an observable phenomenon."
The man spoke with the clinical detachment of someone reciting facts, as though distance and rationality might serve as armor. He stood in nothing but glasses and a towel wrapped around his waist, incongruous and vulnerable. "A natural part of the universe, isn't it? Our studies can tell us all of it."
Neroth's form remained utterly impassive.
The blade struck without preamble, without announcement. The man crumpled, glasses falling from his face and landing unbroken in the grass beside him.
"You reduce it to something you cannot even comprehend."
The words threaded through every watching mind—not heard, but felt, like pressure behind the eyes.
"Darkness, light—it's all the same."
The young man in the gray hoodie stepped forward with the mechanical movements of someone already resigned. His voice carried no fear, no hope, no anything. Just emptiness. "None of it matters in the end."
His body froze mid-step.
Then fell.
The same wound as all the others—precise, final, absolute.
"Your apathy," Neroth said softly, "is an insult to existence."
The man in patchwork could feel his own heartbeat now—a wild, arrhythmic thing hammering against his ribs. Around him, the bodies lay scattered like discarded dolls, and still the question hung in the air, unanswered.
What do you think of the dark?
The dying continued around him—wet sounds, cut-short screams, the terrible percussion of bodies meeting earth. He was running out of time. There was no space left to comprehend death, no breath to question the worth of life, no moment to reflect on the instant erasure of people who had possessed identities, memories, entire worlds of experience—everything he lacked.
He looked down at himself. His clothing was a riot of color—patchwork fabric in shades of rose and cyan and gold, mismatched sleeves, pants of bone-white now streaked with dirt. His legs were still trapped, grass-bound, immobile. The brightness of his appearance felt absurd against the consuming dark, against the grim punishment of slaughter unfolding in every direction.
But his face, even now, was not clouded with confusion or fear.
It was calm.
The possibility of death settled over him like a familiar weight. The embrace of darkness felt less like threat and more like... recognition. He closed his eyes—not in surrender, but in something quieter. Acceptance, perhaps. Or curiosity.
His breath trembled among the chaos. Words piled in his mind, tumbling over one another, ideas connecting and branching like the structure of some vast, invisible web. What was darkness? What could he think of it? What did he feel for it? What could he make it out to be?
A reflection.
A savior.
An enemy.
What did darkness mean to him in this second—or perhaps beyond seconds, beyond time entirely, beyond past and future, beyond bravery and belief? What was darkness as he felt it, kindly, pressing against his skin or perhaps his soul?
For all its irony, it felt freeing.
Words clashed yet somehow belonged together, pieces of a larger truth seen from different angles. He had no memories of himself—only the words he had heard moments before, echoes from the dying. Sentences formed in his mind, stitching themselves together from fragments.
He spoke softly, almost to himself:
"It's madness. A beautiful madness of nothingness. It's nothingness yet it's everything. It's cycle, of beginning and end, but it's freeing."
His voice steadied.
"Darkness... it's not a savior nor an enemy. It's a mirror, showing us what we're too afraid to face. Without it, and without its light, we are all blind minds and would never be the minds that we are now."
The air stilled. Unnaturally so. As though the world itself had drawn breath and held it, waiting.
A soft, small smile crept onto his lips—not defiance, not triumph. Quiet acceptance. This is my end. The thought arrived without bitterness, almost serene, as if in these final moments he had unraveled a truth that gave meaning to his hollow existence, to the emptiness where his memories should have been, to the darkness of a past he could not recall.
Seconds passed.
Or perhaps an eternity contracted into the span of a heartbeat. He felt the coldness of the air brush his skin, yet it didn't bite as he'd expected. It was softer now. Gentler. Like the whisper of something familiar and long forgotten.
The silence deepened, expanding like a chasm, swallowing every trace of sound—the screams, the wet collapse of bodies, even the omnipresent hum of dread.
He noticed it then.
The absence.
The silence wasn't simply quiet. It was deliberate. It grew heavier, pressing against his chest, filling his lungs with weight. The anticipation of death felt stretched thin, as though seconds were pulling apart the fabric of time itself, elongating the space between now and never.
He waited. Breathing steadily. His trembling subsiding into stillness.
But it didn't come.
No blade.
No flash of pain.
No final, cold release.
Only the dark.
It enveloped him, clinging to his skin, pooling around his trapped feet, filling every space with its quiet, unfathomable depth. It was not cruel or kind, not enemy nor savior—it simply was. His heartbeat slowed. Each pulse echoed faintly in the cavern of his chest, a lonely sound reminding him he was still alive.
Curiosity crept in. Subtle. Persistent. Nudging against his calm.
He realized the ground beneath his feet no longer felt solid. The air carried no scent of blood or turned earth. The weight of everything he had witnessed—the terror, the desperation—seemed to hang somewhere far behind him, inaccessible and faint, like a half-remembered dream dissolving upon waking.
With growing awareness, he noticed something else.
The silence wasn't empty.
It hummed. Softly. A low, unseen vibration carrying something he couldn't understand. It wasn't threatening.
It was waiting.
And so was he.
His breath lingered in the oppressive quiet, eyes still closed, mind caught in the strange stillness. Then, breaking through like stone dropped into deep water:
"You, rainbow."
Cold. Deep. Resonant—like the first crack of ice splitting a frozen lake. But something was different. The voice wasn't distant anymore, wasn't the echo of something disembodied.
It was near.
Close.
Real.
"What is your name?"
The words hung in the air, tangible as the chill against his skin. His breath caught. Hairs rose along his arms. This wasn't a voice in his head—it existed in the space around him, vibrating through the stillness, pressing against his ears.
Slowly, his trembling lids parted.
His eyes opened to the world he had dreaded to see.
The first thing he saw was him.
Not the formless shadow, not the living dark—but a figure standing before him. Tall. Unmoving. Bathed in dim, unnatural light that barely illuminated the space.
His skin was pale as frost. Smooth. Cold. An otherworldly luminescence seemed to radiate from within, as though he were carved from winter moonlight given flesh. White hair cascaded to his waist, loosely tied, framing an angular face of haunting symmetry—every feature precise, deliberate, inhumanly perfect.
Eyes—white, bright, piercing—glowed with the intensity of a winter storm. Unblinking. Fixed upon him. They seemed to strip away every pretense, every thought, every shield. The gaze was searing yet calm. Inquisitive yet judgmental. As though weighing his existence against some unseen, absolute scale.
Above the brow, two black, curved horns emerged. Short but sharp. The only imperfection on a face that otherwise seemed carved by divine hands.
His lips—thin, pale—remained still. A faint trace of a frown gave the expression a hint of disdain. Or perhaps curiosity. It was impossible to tell.
A black, jagged crown rested atop his head, shimmering faintly with embedded white jewels, as though capturing remnants of starlight itself. His clothing was dark and regal—a contradiction of tattered edges and undeniable nobility, etched with intricate silver runes that whispered of ancient, incomprehensible power.
His arms hung loose at his sides. The faint glint of twin daggers was visible against the fabric of dark trousers, sleek boots completing the unearthly appearance.
But it wasn't the weapons that held his focus.
It was the presence.
Like a force of nature. Vast. Inescapable. The air seemed to bend around him, thick and heavy with energy that hummed in his ears and chilled his bones to the marrow.
The demon spoke again.
"Speak."
His tone was measured. His voice carried weight that seemed to ripple through the darkness itself.
"For I cannot see through you, your memories nor your soul."
The words coiled around him, sinking into his thoughts, pulling at the frayed threads of identity he barely possessed.
The demon took a slow step forward. One boot. Then another. The sound was soft but absolute, each footfall a declaration.
"And yet your fascinating and disconcerting answer stays true."
The figure tilted his head slightly. White eyes narrowed.
"If you mean what you said, what is your name?"
Silence returned. Thick. Suffocating. Waiting for something to break it.
But his gaze remained fixed on the figure before him. Unable to look away. Caught in the gravity of that presence like a moon locked in orbit around a dying star.
What is my name?
The question echoed through the hollow space where his memories should have been.
What is this demon doing here?
What did I have before I woke in this place?
He remembered it vaguely. Fractured. Confusing. Colors. Rainbow. Light. Yellow and white bleeding into one another, formless and warm.
What do you think of yourself?
Milk and yellow.
Gold and darkness.
Words finally surfaced, fragments assembling themselves from the void. Only vague visions of a past that felt both his and not his. A name rising like something dredged from deep water—familiar in shape, foreign in weight.
His lips parted.
His voice was quiet. Steady. Certain in a way that surprised even him.
"Millow Aurum."