The descent went on, deeper and darker. The current that had taken hold of Makun grew stronger and dragged his astral form through layers of reality that shouldn't have existed, each one heavier than the last, like sinking through tar.
But something was fighting back. He could feel the chains now, not only their presence but their weight, ethereal iron wrapped around his astral body and digging in. Every link was intricate and ancient and carved with symbols that hurt to perceive. They were trying to haul him back up, toward his dying body and the silver cord that tied him to life, while the other force pulled him down toward whatever waited in the deepest dark.
He hung stretched between the two. His consciousness flickered in and out, blurring and sharpening like a signal cutting through static. Far above, through the cord, he felt his body convulse, muscles seizing and heart stuttering as the pills did their work, but that pain was nothing beside this. This was the pain of a soul being pulled apart.
The chains bit deeper. Each link burned with a cold fire that seared straight through him, and he understood what they were trying to do: fold him back into the neat little box they had kept him in for twenty-three years. The current pulled harder. His form wavered and began to come apart at the edges. He wanted to scream but had no throat, and he wanted to die but was already dying.
So he fought, but not against either force. He fought with the current. He threw everything he had left into the descent, because whatever was down there, whatever wanted him, it was the only thing in his life that had ever pulled him toward it instead of pushing him away.
The chains resisted, but as he gave himself fully to the fall, one of the links shattered.
The sound was impossible, like the foundation of reality cracking, and something flooded into him. It wasn't strength, and it wasn't energy. It was wholeness, as if a piece of himself that had always been missing had clicked back into place, a fragment of his soul that had been locked away and hidden even from him. All at once he could see more clearly and feel more deeply, and the layers of the Veil became distinct and visible, something he could move through.
This is what they took from me, he thought. This is what I was supposed to be.
There was no time to hold onto it. The remaining chains tightened to make up for the loss, and the current used the crack in his prison to drag him faster. Makun dove. The Veil parted around him, and layers of existence flowed past like dark water, realms where physics didn't apply, where thought became substance and nightmares took shape and fed on reality. He kept sinking until, at last, the pull stopped.
He hung suspended in absolute darkness. It wasn't the absence of light so much as the presence of nothing, a void so complete that his astral form felt like a candle flame in an endless cavern. The weight here was beyond anything he had felt, a pressure that could crush mountains and birth stars and snuff them out with a thought, and his soul flickered in and out of existence beneath it.
The chains trembled. Hairline fractures spread along every remaining link, and he felt with total certainty that all of them were about to break at once.
They didn't. Something held them together, reinforcing them, like invisible hands reaching in to stop the final shattering. Not yet, the presence seemed to whisper. Not here.
Makun tried to look around, but there was nothing to see, only the crushing weight of something vast and patient and impossibly old. Then it spoke.
It wasn't words, and it wasn't sound. It went past his ears entirely and rang through his consciousness like a tuning fork struck against his soul. The voice was soft, almost gentle, and female, if such things meant anything here, but the pressure behind it was otherworldly, divine and terrible and absolute. When it spoke, reality listened.
"You are here."