He did not leave at once.
When the seed cracked inside him and the blade of shadow formed in his hand, the world outside had not yet recovered from the lightning.
People whispered. Someone bent over him. Pain and cold and the small, brittle sounds of the waking came like a gentle drizzle.
Aramith, however, did not want the waking world.
Not yet.
He wanted the ruin. He wanted the silence that had always hummed beneath the clatter of living things.
He wanted the place that had first whispered to him in childhood and then been stolen away by lies and people who pretended to care.
He wanted answers, and so he stayed.
The realm did not force him.
Days bled into each other, but what was a day when the sun neither rose nor fell in this realm?
In a world where time was a concept that failed to exist, it felt hollow.
