"Three weeks ago."
The hiss that broke the silence of the vast chamber was small, almost nothing.
The top of the dark capsule shifted, the surface dissolving in sections like a tide of ants retreating from a shoreline, the nanobots peeling back in a smooth, practiced motion to reveal what lay beneath.
Pale white skin. Black hair that moved like liquid even in stillness. The nanobots finished their retreat, and before the last of them had fully slipped away, his eyes snapped open.
Dark, and pupilless.
What followed was not gradual. In an instant, a lightless darkness gushed outward from him like water through a broken dam, as even the srounding lost their color. The capsule beneath him creaked under the crushing weight of darkness, the metal groaning at its seams, and the ruinous touch of the darkness only added to its collapse.
The chamber's dim lighting turned red.
