I was no longer struggling. I was nothing more than dead weight, a monolith of black glass sinking into the unfathomable depths of the river.
The current of the Styx no longer struck me; it enveloped me like a liquid shroud, rocking me in its eternal coldness.
As I descended, the world above the queue, the gray, the Ferryman disappeared completely, erased by the growing pressure of the abyss.
Here, light had never existed. This was the realm of the world's roots, where the darkest secrets of the gods came to rest.
My new obsidian skin vibrated at the touch of the heavy waters. It resonated like a crystal bell struck by millions of whispers.
I drifted amid the wreckage of forgotten civilizations and the skeletons of titans, debris that time itself had given up on destroying.
Everything was distorted, magnified by the thickness of the black mercury. The silences were denser, the shadows more palpable.
I had become part of that silence. A sleeping predator, carried by currents that led nowhere.
Time no longer had any hold over my stone body. I could have drifted like this for eons, suspended between destruction and oblivion.
But deep inside my black glass cage, the lycoris heart continued to beat, a small red light pulsing in the void.
It was a constant reminder. A distress signal in the ocean of night.
I hadn't come here to sink. I had come here to break everything.
My drift was coming to an end. The bottom of the abyss was no longer a destination, but a foothold.
The floor of the abyss rose to meet me, a shoreline composed of jagged bone and calcified history.
My obsidian feet struck the bottom with a dull, metallic ring that shuddered through the heavy silence of the deep. It was the first sound of solid impact in an eternity of drifting.
The current still clawed at me, desperate to drag its masterpiece back into the mindless flow, but the weight of my new form was absolute'
I was no longer a feather in the wind; I was an anchor in the storm, a monument of black glass that refused to be moved.
I began to walk. Every step was a feat of raw, infernal power.
My movements were slow and deliberate, fighting against the crushing pressure of a liquid that weighed as much as a mountain.
The Styx felt like a living creature now, a jealous god trying to pull me back into its cold embrace, screaming through the vibrations in my chest.
Above me, miles of liquid shadows pressed down, a vertical ocean of despair between me and the sky I had abandoned.
But then, I saw it—a faint, ghostly shimmer piercing the suffocating dark.
It was a ripple of sickly gray light, flickering like a dying star at the very limit of my vision.
It was the surface. The boundary between the erasure of the deep and the reality I intended to reclaim.
I dug my crystalline fingers into the slope of the underwater bank, carving deep grooves into the black sand.
I pulled myself upward, muscle of obsidian and bone of glass straining against the river's cruel gravity.
As I climbed, the water began to thin. The suffocating pressure eased its grip on my chest, allowing the red glow of the lycoris to pulse more brightly through my translucent skin.
The silence finally shattered.
I heard the sound of the world again—not the hollow whispers of the dead, but the cold, sharp whistling of a wind that carried the scent of ash and destiny.
My hand breached the surface first. A claw of black glass, slick with mercury, glistening under the pale, stagnant mist like a jagged diamond.
Then, with a final, violent surge of will, I hauled my entire weight out of the river and onto the cold, solid earth.
I stood on the forbidden shore, dripping with black acid that hissed as it hit the ground.
I was a creature of obsidian, born from the heart of the apocalypse and tempered by the weight of the Styx.
I breathed, and the air felt like a mouthful of fire. I was no longer an inhabitant of the afterlife; I was its intruder.
The shore was not made of sand or earth, but of the calcified debris of forgotten existences.
As I stepped away from the Styx, I entered a vast, white desert that stretched toward a horizon swallowed by a sickly, motionless haze.
Beneath my obsidian feet, the ground did not yield; it crunched with the dry, brittle sound of breaking glass. It was a wasteland of bones miles upon miles of skeletal remains, bleached to a blinding white by a sun that had died eons ago.
Millions of skeletons lay shattered here, ground into a fine, pale powder by the weight of time. This was the cemetery of the rejected, the discarded remains of those the Styx had stripped of spirit but could not fully digest.
The wind here did not howl; it whispered. It spiraled through empty ribcages and whistled through hollow eye sockets, playing a dissonant, haunting melody that sounded like a thousand voices trying to remember a single word.
I was a dark stain upon this world of ivory. My black glass body acted as a mirror, reflecting the pale, ghostly glow of the bone-dust in a way that made me look like a walking shadow carved from the night itself.
As I moved deeper into the wasteland, a strange, rhythmic thrumming began to vibrate in the center of my chest.
It was a magnetic resonance, a violent tugging between the red lycoris burning in my soul and an unknown force hidden in the heart of the desert. The further I walked, the more the air seemed to thicken with a static charge, causing small arcs of red lightning to dance across the edges of my obsidian skin.
I was no longer wandering; I was being summoned by a gravity I could not resist.
In the dead center of this ossuary, the very atmosphere began to warp. The horizon distorted like a heat haze over a desert of fire, bending the light until the sky seemed to bruise into a deep, bruised purple.
Something waited there a point of absolute weight, a pillar of destiny that felt like the heartbeat of the apocalypse itself.
It was a call that bypassed my mind and spoke directly to the fire in my veins. It was a promise of purpose, or perhaps, the blueprint for my revenge.
I quickened my pace, my crystalline claws leaving deep, jagged scars in the white dust.
With every step, the red light within me pulsed in synchrony with the center, turning me into a beacon of blood-red fire in a kingdom of bone.
I did not know what sat at the heart of the silence, but I knew that I was the only thing in this realm alive enough to claim it.
The contrast between the white bone desert and the absolute abyss marks the point of no return for your protagonist.
The bone desert stopped abruptly, as if the world had been severed with a clean, definitive blow of an axe.
I stood there, motionless, at the edge of a vertical break that defied all geological logic.
Tartarus.
It wasn't just a hole in the ground; it was an open mouth, a void so deep that it seemed to suck in not only light, but reality itself.
From this abyss rose a cyclopean heat, a burning breath that contrasted violently with the coldness of the Styx.
It was the smell of sulfur, molten metal, and ancient anger smoldering beneath the roots of existence.
If the Styx was the place of oblivion, Tartarus was that of eternal pain, where the foundations of the world were forged in the suffering of the Titans.
The pull I felt in my chest became a silent scream, a gravitational force pulling me toward the edge.
My obsidian body vibrated, the red of my lycoris heart casting long, bloody reflections on the steep walls of the abyss.
Below, in the unfathomable depths, magmatic glimmers danced like the eyes of sleeping beasts.
I knew that going down there meant leaving the realm of shadows for good and entering the realm of punishment.
But that was where the source of the signal was, the heartbeat that had called me across the desert.
I looked at my black glass hands, then at the immensity of the void before me.
There was no more fear, only a cold certainty: to be truly reborn, I had to pass through hell itself.
Without a backward glance at the world of gray, I let myself fall.