The sharp pain contracting her temples suddenly vanished, replaced by an absolute, unnatural silence that echoed all the way into her eardrums.
Zhilian snapped her eyes open. No more blue rubble of the collapsed tower, no more acrid smell of ozone left behind by the wyvern's breath. There was no trace of the cultists, nor of Hayjin's blood.
Around her stretched a primordial nothingness, a completely white, aseptic space, devoid of shadows, corners, or reference points. It was a whiteness so blinding and saturated it almost hurt her retinas, an infinite horizon that knew neither gravity nor direction.
"Hayjin?... Evelyn?... Is anyone there?"
Her voice rang out without an echo, instantly swallowed by that milky shroud. She took a step forward; her boots made no sound, treading on an invisible surface that seemed not to exist at all. Panic, a cold and slimy mass, began to creep up the base of her neck. She could no longer feel her mana. Her bond with the light, her very magical identity, had been completely severed.
Suddenly, the floor beneath her trembled. A black line, thin as a hair but dark as night, ripped through the purity of that white. No light came from the fissure, but a thick, dark liquid that began to bubble and expand with terrifying speed.
Before Zhilian could retreat, the stain spread beneath her feet, swallowing the white. The surrounding whiteness began to peel away like old paint on a rotting wall, revealing the familiar walls of her childhood underneath.
In the blink of an eye, the white blindness transformed into the suffocating twilight of the Great Throne Room of the Kingdom of Opes. But it was not the splendid palace she remembered.
The air was saturated with a heavy, purple mist, so dense it made every breath a torment. The immense stained-glass windows that once chronicled the deeds of the founders had been completely shattered; shards of colored glass lay on the ground, mixed into a shapeless carpet of torn human flesh and piled bodies.
The white marble floor was entirely covered by a layer of blood several centimeters deep, a slimy, lukewarm lake reflecting the dying light of the wall torches.
Zhilian stumbled forward, her legs trembling violently as her boots sank into that scarlet molasses with wet, heavy sounds. The stench was unbearable: an odor of exposed entrails, fecal matter, and accelerated decomposition assaulted her nostrils, wrenching a gag from her that she only managed to suppress by grinding her teeth until it hurt.
To her left, hanging from the monumental crystal chandeliers, were the bodies of the knights of her personal guard. They had been flayed alive: skin hung from their limbs in flaccid tatters, revealing muscles striated with red and black, while their nail-stripped fingers continued to drip bone marrow onto the floor below.
To her right, piled against the load-bearing columns, lay the king's advisors. Their bellies had been ripped open with surgical precision; the loops of their intestines spilled outward like grayish snakes, tangling among the legs of chairs and the remains of ceremonial carpets. Many of them had wide, glassy eyes fixed on the ceiling in an eternal expression of pure terror.
"No... no, this isn't real... it's an illusion... it has to be an illusion..." Zhilian kept repeating to herself, her voice breaking into a desperate weep as she clutched her head in her hands.
Every step she took toward the center of the hall produced a splash of blood that stained her clothes. But the true aberration awaited her at the far end, upon the golden steps leading to the royal seat.
On the highest throne, where her father once sat, a body had been placed.
Zhilian felt her heart stop, a sharp blow to her chest that completely took her breath away.
That slumped figure, draped over the red velvet now soaked in putrid fluids, was Hayjin.
The boy had been reduced to a monument of the purest, most visceral splatter horror. His chest had been literally ripped open in two: his sternum was shattered, pried outward like the doors of a gateway to hell, and his broken ribs emerged from the raw flesh like sharp white spikes, soiled with marrow and torn tendons.
At the center of that devastated ribcage, his black, collapsed lungs no longer moved, while his heart, reduced to a lump of grayish muscle, hung flaccidly out of his chest, held only by a few frayed arteries.
All of his guts and internal organs had been pulled out, unrolled with sadistic ferocity along the steps of the throne; his small intestine, veined with black and covered in imaginary flies, dripped down like a slimy waterfall, mixing with the unstoppable blood that continued to gush from his gashed belly in a thick, inexhaustible stream.
But the most intolerable horror lay in his face. Half of his face was completely gone, torn away by a bite or a brutal slash: the flesh of his right cheek no longer existed, leaving his white jawbone completely exposed, his blood-stained teeth and the temporomandibular joint hanging inert.
His right eye was a vacant cavity, a black hole from which a thick, dark stream of blood continuously gushed, streaking his neck.
The other eye, the left one, remained in its socket, but it was devoid of a sclera: a dilated, vacant red pupil, completely glassy, that locked onto Zhilian the moment she approached.
Suddenly, the corpse's ruined jaw snapped. The remaining neck muscles tightened with a wet click, and from deep within that exposed trachea, filled with clotted blood, came a voice. It wasn't a human voice; it was a distorted, wet sound, a liquefied rattle that seemed to scrape against the walls of Zhilian's soul.
"Z-Zhilian... Zhilian... what took you so long?... Look at me..."
The corpse began to move. Hayjin's left hand, its fingers showing exposed bone due to the consumed flesh, clawed at the armrest of the throne, trying to drag the rest of his torso forward. As he did, another mass of entrails slipped out of his gashed abdomen, falling onto the steps with a wet thud that echoed through the deserted hall.
"Zhilian... it hurts... you let me die... you left me alone... ZHILIAN!"
The cry became a piercing, desperate shriek, while the boy's glassy eye wept tears of pure blood that mixed with the mush of his ruined face.
The psychological impact was so violent it shattered the last defensive barrier of Zhilian's mind. Her vision blacked out for an instant, her knees gave out, and she fell right into the pool of blood surrounding the throne steps.
The combination of the stench of rotting flesh, the unspeakable sight of Hayjin's devastated body, and the echo of that liquefied shriek provoked an immediate, uncontrollable physical reaction. Zhilian opened her mouth wide and began to vomit violently.
Bitter bile, mixed with gastric juices and the blood she had inhaled in this nightmare, poured onto the ruined marble floor. Her stomach continued to heave, bending her in two, her hands sinking into the flesh-mush of the surrounding corpses, while tears streamed down her face, leaving clean tracks through the grime on her skin.
"Stop... please, stop... wake me up... make it all end..." she sobbed, saliva and vomit hanging from her trembling lips.
"Nobody is going to wake you up, little princess."
A cold voice, devoid of any human inflection, echoed behind her.
Zhilian, her body still shaking from the last heaves of vomit, turned around with difficulty, propping herself up on her blood-slicked hands. Behind her, a few meters away, loomed a figure in the twilight. The features of its face could not be distinguished, entirely covered by a dark hood that seemed to absorb the dim red light of the hall, but its eyes glowed a vibrant purple, the exact same color as the wyvern's.
The figure slowly raised a black-gloved hand toward her. Between its fingers, it wasn't the golden mana of Opes that formed, nor the green energy of Doeken, but a strange magic a thick, grayish mist that began to make the surrounding air vibrate at a distorted frequency, one that made her ears bleed.
Before Zhilian could utter a word or make a single defensive movement, the marble floor beneath her knees crumbled completely, turning into black dust.
There was no throne room anymore. There were no bodies.
Zhilian felt gravity vanish beneath her and, with a muffled scream that died in her bile-filled throat, she fell backward, plunging into an absolute, dark void a deep abyss that seemed to have no end, while the figure in the twilight continued to stare down at her with terrifying, silent indifference.
The freefall through the darkened void had seemed to last for centuries, a suspended infinity in which the sense of time dissolved along with Zhilian's mental stability. Then, without any warning, the impact came.
SPRACH.
The body of the princess of Opes crashed heavily onto something that was neither stone nor solid marble. It was a damp, yielding, cold shroud. The blow knocked the air from her lungs, forcing her to open her mouth wide to inhale desperately. A pungent taste of rotted earth, decomposed leaves, and iron immediately filled her throat.
Zhilian coughed violently, propping her palms on the ground. When she opened her eyes, her mind reeled at the absolute geometric and sensory impossibility of the place she was in.
She was in the heart of a monumental forest, but it was a place that defied every law of nature. Above her, through the dense web of branches twisted like the skeletal fingers of giants, shone a blinding, summer sun of a suffocating heat. The sunlight beat down hard, ruthless, illuminating the details of the leaves and the earth with a terrifying clarity. Yet, at the very same time, everything was plunged into a pitch-black darkness. The shadows cast by the trees were not mere absences of light: they were three-dimensional masses of absolute black floating in the air, a dense gloom that coexisted with the sun's rays without being dissolved by them. The visual contrast was torture for the nerves; Zhilian's retinas struggled to focus, oscillating between the blindness of the solar glare and the ink-black darkness wrapping around the trunks.
The ground was made of a thick, black earth, strewn with knotted roots that seemed to pulse weakly beneath the surface, like turgid veins ready to burst. The air was perfectly still, saturated with a damp heat that made sweat pour down the girl's back, mixing with the filth of the previous nightmare.
"Hayjin...? Hayjin...? Where... where have I ended up now?" Zhilian murmured, her voice reduced to a frightened whisper. She passed a hand over her face, but her fingers met only the dried remnants of the vomit from the first hallucination. Her mind was a house of cards collapsing under the blows of a methodical madness.
As she tried to stand, clutching the slimy bark of a tree that seemed to ooze a dark, thick liquid, a sound broke the silence of the paradoxical forest.
CRACK.
A sharp, distinct noise. The unmistakable sound of a long bone being snapped and hollowed of its marrow.
Zhilian froze, her breath caught in her throat.
SCHLUCK. SPURT. SNAP.
A sequence of even more obscene noises followed: the wet sound of fingers sinking into soft tissue, the whistle of air escaping from a severed trachea, and the rhythmic, guttural sound of someone chewing raw meat and muscle fibers with animalistic zeal. It was the sound of a cannibalistic banquet conducted with unbridled ferocity.
Zhilian's heart began to race wildly again, a drum of pure terror echoing in her ears. She wanted to close her eyes, cover her ears, curl up on the rotted dirt floor, and wait for death. But an invisible force, a macabre curiosity innate to the flow of the hallucination, forced her to move.
She advanced slowly, one step after another, passing through a mass of solid shadow that hung from a branch like a black veil.
Under the direct light of the ruthless sun, in a small clearing surrounded by thorny bushes, the scene revealed itself in all its brutal, indescribable monstrosity.
Sitting on her knees in the middle of a pool of blood that was being rapidly absorbed by the black earth, was a little girl. She wore a light blue nightgown, embroidered with small white flowers.
It was Wren, her beloved younger sister.
But the child's sweetness had been completely erased by a splatter aberration. Wren's head was tilted forward, her hair clumped into hard, heavy strands, completely soaked with clotted blood and fragments of grayish brain matter. When the little girl slightly raised her face, Zhilian felt her soul fracture: Wren's eyes had become two globes of a vibrant, crimson red, devoid of pupils, from which two unstoppable rivers of dark blood continuously flowed, streaking her childish cheeks, dripping onto her neck and chest, turning the blue nightgown into a butcher's apron.
Wren was hunched over a body lying on the ground. A body that Zhilian recognized instantly.
The corpse lying beneath the little girl's hands was a perfect clone of Zhilian herself. The copy of the princess had been pinned to the ground, motionless, while little Wren carried out a facial tearing of unprecedented violence.
With her small fingers, her nails broken and black with dirt, Wren had clawed at the edges of the fake Zhilian's lips, pulling outward with inhuman strength.
The flesh of the clone's cheeks stretched to the breaking point, then ripped with a wet sound, revealing the yellowish layer of subcutaneous fat and the masseter muscles being torn away in shreds.
Wren buried her mouth directly into that open wound. With her small baby teeth, she bit into the fake Zhilian's cheek, tearing away a large piece of raw flesh.
She chewed it, her red eyes staring blankly into space, while strands of skin and tendons hung from her lips, and a cascade of warm blood squirted across her chin.
Not satisfied, the child jammed her right index and middle fingers directly into the clone's left eye socket. POUR.
The sound of the eyeball being pressed and scooped from its natural socket was excruciating.
Wren pulled her hand back: between her fingers, she clutched the fake Zhilian's entire left eye, with the optic nerve still attached, hanging like a grayish, bleeding worm.
Without a shred of hesitation, Wren brought the eye to her mouth and bit down on it. The vitreous humor and internal fluids of the eyeball exploded between her teeth, spraying outward in a mix of white and red that completely smeared her face, while she continued to chew the leathery sclera with dull, gruesome noises.
Zhilian stood paralyzed, her hands pressed against her mouth to keep from screaming, tears blinding her vision.基因 Terror urged her to flee, to run amidst those black trees, but her visceral love for her sister or the image of her caused a short circuit in her brain.
"W-Wren...?" her voice came out like a choked grunt, devoid of strength. "Wren... please... stop... what are you doing?... Look at me... it's me..."
Despite the scene tearing away her sanity, Zhilian took a step forward, extending a trembling hand toward the child.
At that sound, Wren's movements stopped abruptly. The child dropped the clone's limp arm, which crashed to the ground with a dull thud amidst the mush of flesh. Slowly, with a jerky, almost mechanical movement of her head, Wren turned her neck toward the real Zhilian.
Her face was a mask of death: her mouth was wide open, her teeth completely black with blood and fragments of the copy's flesh, and her red eyes continued to weep rivers of scarlet fluid.
Wren parted her swollen lips. From her throat came not the crystalline voice of a ten-year-old girl, but a flat, expressionless, hollow, and terrifying monotone.
"Zhilian."
The child left her prey. She began to turn around completely, getting onto all fours on the blood-soaked earth. Her small hands sank into the scarlet molasses as she began to crawl along the ground toward the real Zhilian, moving with the unnatural speed of a predatory insect.
"Zhilian. Zhilian. Zhilian."
The word began to pour from her mouth without pause. There was no pause to breathe, no emotion. It was an obsessive litany, a distorted magnetic tape repeating the exact same name over and over, growing louder, sharper, closer.
"Zhilian. Zhilian. Zhilian. Zhilian. Zhilian!"
Zhilian's protective instinct vanished in a millisecond, replaced by the pure, uncontrollable fear of survival. She turned to run, but the ground beneath her boots was too slippery. Under the blinding light of the sun, little Wren made a desperate leap forward, closing the distance between them.
CLUTCH.
Wren's hands, slick with blood and human fat, locked with a steel grip around Zhilian's left ankle. The child's nails dug through the fabric of the boot, sinking into the girl's skin and tearing a cry of pain from her.
"No! Let me go! Let me go, you monster!" Zhilian shrieked, completely losing control.
She crashed onto her back, the black dirt smearing her hair and dress, while Wren continued to pull her closer, crawling on her belly and climbing up her leg. The child's red eyes were inches from her own, and the stream of blood gushing from her sockets dripped directly onto her pants.
"Zhilian. Zhilian. Zhilian. Zhilian!" the child kept repeating the name, her jaw snapping at the air as if she wanted to bite into the flesh of her leg.
Seized by a brutal panic attack, Zhilian lifted her free right leg. With all the strength left in her adrenaline-tightened muscles, she delivered a violent kick straight into her younger sister's face.
BAM.
The heel of her boot impacted Wren's nose. The distinct crunch of nasal cartilage shattering could be heard, and a new spray of fresh blood erupted from the child's face. But Wren didn't loosen her grip. Her fingers tightened even more around Zhilian's ankle, the tendons in her small, childish arms strained to the absolute limit.
"Get away! You're not my sister! Get away from me!" opens Zhilian screamed, her voice hoarse from tears and sobs.
She delivered a second kick, then a third, a fourth, in a frantic and desperate sequence. Each blow produced a wet, terrifying sound: the boot destroyed Wren's lips, broke her front teeth, which flew out and landed in the dirt, but the child kept advancing, her face reduced to a deformed mask of battered flesh and blood, while her red eyes remained wide open, locked onto her, and her throat continued to emit that distorted sound: "Zhilian... Zhilian... Zhilian..."
The psychological pressure was too much. Zhilian felt that if she didn't break free right then, her mind would shut down forever, leaving her prey to that monster.
She channeled the last, desperate shred of will into her magical core. There was no scepter, no logical formula, just the pure terror of dying. A spark of Light-type mana, unstable, wild, and concentrated, gathered in the palm of her right hand.
"I'M SORRY! WREN, I'M SO SORRY!" she shrieked, a cry that tore her vocal cords.
Zhilian thrust her hand forward, planting her palm directly onto the left side of Wren's face, and released the energy.
BOOM.
The explosion of light was not a purifying glare. It was a close-range kinetic and thermal blast, a brutal detonation that acted on the child's flesh with the effect of an artillery shell.
The strike of light literally blew away half of Wren's face. Her left cheek, eye socket, cheekbone, and the corresponding mandibular arch were instantly pulverized.
Fragments of white bone mixed with pieces of grayish brain and boiling blood splattered everywhere, hitting Zhilian's chest, face, and eyes in a warm, corrosive rain. What remained of the child's head was an anatomical aberration: the right half of her face was still intact, with her red eye continuing to stare at her, while the left half was a smoking hole of burnt flesh, exposed nerve fibers, and the cranial cavity visible from the outside.
The steel grip on her ankle finally loosened. The mutilated body of Wren floated backward for an instant, then collapsed into the black earth with a dull thud, motionless.
Zhilian lay flat on her back, her face covered in the blood and remains of her younger sister. Silence returned to reign over the forest of paradoxes, broken only by the sound of her broken, hysterical breathing.
"I'm sorry... I'm sorry... I-I'm so sorry... Wren, please... forgive me..." she kept repeating, her hands trembling so much she couldn't wipe the blood from her eyes that prevented her from seeing.
But the dungeon wasn't done torturing her yet.
The ground beneath her back, wet with the blood of the two Zhilians and Wren, suddenly gave way. The black earth tore open into an infinite chasm, swallowing the sunlight and leaving only solid darkness. Zhilian felt her body lose the support of physics once more, and as she plummeted for the second time into the absolute void, her desperate apologies for killing the ghost of her sister were lost in the dull roar of an abyss that seemed to want to devour what was left of her soul.
The fall ceased abruptly, but there was no physical impact. There was no sound of broken bones, nor the taste of blood-soaked earth. Zhilian's body simply stopped falling, as if gravity itself had lost interest in holding her.
When she opened her eyes, the horror of the paradoxical forest and the mangled body of her sister Wren had vanished. In their place stretched that completely white, flat, and infinite void once again, the same one that had preceded the beginning of her nightmares. But this time it was different. There was no warmth, no cold; the air was completely still, devoid of smell, sterile like an autopsy room before the first incision.
Zhilian remained lying on the ground, or on what her mind perceived as a floor. She looked at her hands: they were clean. Wren's blood, the fragments of smoking brain that had splattered onto her chest, the bile of her own vomit... everything had disappeared, erased by the aseptic purity of that white nothingness. Yet, the smell of iron and burnt flesh continued to burn inside her nostrils, a sensory ghost that refused to leave her.
The silence was so dense it was painful. She couldn't hear the beating of her heart, the whistling of the wind, or the sound of her own breath. It was like being buried alive inside a block of glowing plaster.
With a massive effort, Zhilian lifted her torso. Every muscle in her body ached, not from real wounds, but from the traumatic shock her nervous system had endured during the two previous hallucinations. She sat up, her blonde hair disheveled and falling over her eyes, her gaze glassy and lost in the void.
"Is it over...?" she whispered, but her lips moved without producing any sound. The white void seemed to devour sound waves before they could even form.
It was at that moment, as she tried to put together the pieces of her fragmented mind, that she saw it.
A few meters away from her, emerged from the white nothingness as if it had always been there, stood an individual. It was the mysterious figure she had caught a glimpse of in the throne room, the shadow with purple eyes that had cast her into the void. But here, under the diffuse and shadowless light of the absolute white, its presence was even more disturbing.
The figure had its back turned to her. It wore an ancient-cut tunic, woven from a dark fabric that seemed to reflect none of the surrounding light, absorbing it like a geometric black hole. It didn't move. Not a breath raised its shoulders, not a millimeter of cloth swayed. It was a statue of pure penombra planted in the heart of the whiteness.
A shiver of primordial terror raced up Zhilian's spine, but along with the terror, a desperate need for answers was born. This being was the key. It was the origin of her ordeal, the architect of the monsters that had torn her soul apart.
"Who are you..." Zhilian tried to say, forcing her throat until she tasted blood. This time her voice came out, a trembling, cracked rattle that died almost immediately in the sterile air. "Who the fuck are you? Answer me!"
The figure did not turn. Not a nod of the head, not a change in posture. It remained motionless, staring toward a non-existent horizon.
Zhilian stood up, staggering like a drunkard. Panic was giving way to a blind, hysterical rage, the rage of someone pushed past the limit of human endurance. She took a step forward, her boots invisible on the white floor.
"Look at me, damn you! Look at me!" she screamed, tears starting to streak her clean face again. "Why are you doing this to me? What do you want from me? Opes... my sister... Hayjin... it was all fake, wasn't it? Tell me it was a trick! Say a goddamn word, turn around!"
Nothing. The figure's silence was a brick wall against which her screams shattered uselessly. There was no apathy in its attitude, no mockery; there was only a total, absolute absence of interaction. It was as if Zhilian didn't exist, as if her pleas were the buzzing of an annoying fly in an empty room.
Arriving a step away from the shadow, Zhilian froze. She could see the details of the dark tunic, the fine weave of the fabric that seemed to vibrate at an imperceptible frequency. Neither the skin of the neck nor the shape of the hands could be seen, all covered by that cloth that seemed made of solidified smoke.
"Please..." her voice dropped to a desperate whisper, her rage suddenly dying out in the face of the immensity of that silence. "Just tell me if I'm still alive. Tell me if I can go back. I can't take it anymore... I beg you, turn around."
With her left hand trembling uncontrollably, Zhilian reached her fingers toward the figure's shoulder. She wanted to grab it, force it to turn, rip away that veil of indifference that was consuming her sanity. Every centimeter her hand covered seemed to take an eternity.
Her fingertips brushed the dark fabric.
Sssss.
There was no physical substance. As soon as Zhilian's skin came into contact with the shadow, the figure didn't move, but began to dissolve instantly. It didn't turn into smoke, or dust: simply, the matter it was made of ceased to occupy space. The line of the shoulder vanished, then the hood, then the entire tunic, disappearing into the white nothingness like a drawing erased by an invisible sponge.
Zhilian's hand clutched empty air. The forward momentum made her lose her balance, sending her crashing to her knees on the white floor.
She was alone. Again. More alone than anyone had ever been in the history of the world.
The void left by the figure seemed to collapse over her, crushing her back. Zhilian bowed her head until her forehead touched the white surface, her hands clawing at nothingness as a wild, violent, and devastating weeping took control of her body.
"What is this place...? What is happening to me...?"
The words came out between sobs, interrupted by shallow breaths and hysterical coughs. The stability of her world had shattered into pieces.
Is it a nightmare? she asked herself, wrapping her arms around her chest to feel if her own body was real. But if it was a nightmare, why was the pain in her chest from the wyvern's breath so vivid in her memory? Why did the taste of her sister's blood still seem present on her tongue?
Is this reality? Perhaps the crystal tower, Opes, her title of princess, her entire life had never existed. Perhaps she had always been there, a damned soul condemned to float in an eternal white limbo, inventing stories of kingdoms and knights just to keep from going mad.
Is she already dead? Perhaps the wyvern had killed her with that first strike, and this was nothing more than the decomposition process of her consciousness, the final electrical impulses of a brain shutting down inside a nameless dungeon.
"I don't know... I don't understand anything anymore... make it stop, please, someone make all of this end!" she screamed toward the invisible ceiling, but the white answered only with its immutable, blinding purity.
In that abyss of solitude and madness, as her mind threatened to shut down forever, an image formed in her thoughts. It wasn't the image of her father on the throne, nor that of Wren playing in the royal gardens.
It was Hayjin's face.
She remembered his cynical yet frightened eyes, his firm voice as he analyzed the frequencies of the dungeon, the way he had pushed her away before the monster's breath hit her. Hayjin was her link to the real world. He was the only constant in that sea of macabre illusions. If he was real, then so was she.
"Hayjin..." she called, her voice becoming the plea of a little girl lost in the dark. "Hayjin, where are you? Help me... please, come get me..."
She got onto her knees, looking around frantically, hoping to see his slender figure appear in the white, resonance sword in hand. But there was no one. Only an endless expanse of sterile whiteness.
"Hayjin, please! I can't take it anymore! My head is exploding... it hurts so much... I can't breathe!" her screams turned into a muffled sob, her hands covering her face as her body was wracked by sudden chills. "I saw Wren... I killed her, Hayjin... I blew her face off... and she was so real... the blood was so warm... tell me it's not true, please, tell me I'm still alive, with you!"
Tears wet her fingers, dripping onto her wrists, but Zhilian didn't try to wipe them away. She continued to rock back and forth, a rhythmic, obsessive movement, the only defensive mechanism left to a soul that had lost every geometric and moral reference point.
"If you're there... if you can hear me... wake me up," she whispered, her voice losing volume, exhausted by the amount of pain she had been forced to endure. "Hit me, scream, do something... but don't leave me here alone. Not in this place. Not in this silence. Please, Hayjin... I'm scared. I'm so scared..."
The princess of Opes was reduced to a trembling shell in the absolute void, continuing to weep her companion's name in the silence of a nightmare that showed no intention of letting her go.