Falling.
Falling from calm, clouded skies...
I felt my body unbinding itself from its restraints. As if the weight of the world, of flesh, of soul, and of memories... everything was being undone with a cruel delicacy.
The weariness left me not as a sigh or a rest, but as though a cancer had been cut out of me. A violent relief. An unbearable emptiness.
I couldn't tell if I was sleeping... or if I had woken from something that never ended.
Everything around me turned nebulous.
Like a day when fog smothers the mountain's peak... dense, wet, alive.
I walked, or maybe I was carried, for a long time in that haze that left no shadow, no reflection, no certainty.
Until my body trembled.
Every fiber bristled with a subtle warning... a prelude to change.
The mist began to bleed.
The immaculate whiteness was dyed red.
A dark red, deep crimson... like the old blood of an ancient wound being reopened inside a titan the size of the world.
And that titan... it groaned in silence.
There was no sound. No wind. No sky. No ground.
Only a muffled pulse, a hidden throbbing behind the clouds.
And then I fell.
Not fast, not slow...
I simply fell.
I landed — if that could be called a landing — on something that should have been the ground, but was only more cloud.
More crimson.
More silence.
The only certainty was the weight.
Not on the shoulders, not on the muscles...
But on the spirit.
I tried to look around. Tried to understand where I was.
But then I realized something.
I wasn't standing.
Not lying down.
Not floating.
I simply... was.
Trapped in that somber, burdensome place.
Like a memory that refuses to die.
Like a dream one cannot wake from.
Like an absence breathing in the same rhythm as me.
The fog stirred.
Before me, as though a stage revealed itself after the fall of the curtains, the mists slowly receded — withdrawing with solemnity, opening to reveal something that immediately made my heartbeat stumble. Goosebumps climbed my spine like cold fingers. Because there, in front of me... stood someone I knew better than anyone.
Myself.
Completely naked, bound to a block of crimson mist that pulsed and bled like a living, incurable wound. The version before me was unrecognizable and yet undeniably familiar. Black chains wrapped around her wrists and ankles, sinking into the skin with a mute, ceaseless pain. Demonic wings, the same crimson shade as the mist, stretched from her back but were shackled by ethereal hooks. Her eyes — my eyes — were bound by translucent threads. A thick collar circled her neck, and from it, chains plunged into the throbbing mist, like the roots of an evil that could never be torn out.
She wept. Tears of blood trickled slowly down her face. Her hair, once white as snow, was now drenched in deep red, falling in heavy strands, soaked with sin. Even the light reflecting on her skin seemed dimmed, as though existence itself had been stained.
The air trembled when that imprisoned self twisted.
With a dry, terrible crack, the space around us vibrated. The crimson mist splintered as if it were glass under pressure. The power emanating from her was so intense it nearly hurled me back. The atmosphere threatened to shatter — but before collapse could come, a golden mist, pure and radiant as sacred light, descended from above, stitching the fractures of reality as if it were a mantle of containment.
Stability returned, but the pain remained.
The creature before me — the one I was, or could become — slowly lifted her face. Her eyes cut through mine like blades of silence. There was no hatred. No pity. Only a bitter, inevitable recognition. She bit her lower lip with a wounded, lascivious gesture, as if restraining something between desire and despair — and then murmured with a voice that was mine, yet bathed in distorted echoes, heavy as shadows:
"He is mine."
Those three words reverberated inside me like a profane vow. They rang like the snap of ancient chains, the breath of a curse never broken. It was as though each syllable carried the weight of all the wills I denied, all the instincts I repressed, all the paths I refused to follow. It wasn't just a phrase — it was a claim. A sentence. And by the way her eyes pierced through me, I knew: she wasn't speaking of me. She was speaking of someone else. Of a name bleeding in her throat.
The chained Selene kept her gaze fixed on me, or perhaps through me, as though each beat of my heart was a distant echo of something she already knew. Then, a faint, colorless smile curved her lips. A hollow laugh, sounding more like the crack of something breaking within.
"Your insecurity will be your downfall."
The words slipped out in a calm whisper, yet carried a conviction that made me shiver. The mist around us was still stitching itself back together in golden threads, mending what the prior outburst of power had shattered. She turned her face slowly, watching that radiant haze with weary, but relieved eyes.
"You found our cure..." she murmured, turning her gaze back to me, "and made the worst choice."
The chains on her arms rattled, alive, as if they too felt what was coming.
Selene drew in a deep breath, like one who tastes a final breeze before drowning.
"After three hundred years..." she cried, her eyes filled with mourning, "we found the balm we needed."
She struck me with her gaze, and for an instant, the entire scene seemed to freeze, suspended between two destinies. "And you marked it. You did not trust. You chose the hardest path to forgive."
The earlier smile vanished. In its place, something deeper and more devastating appeared — a bitter resignation.
"You chose the path of ruin."
A cruel silence hung between us. Then, with a faint tremor, she leaned forward as far as the chains allowed and whispered like a sentence:
"And that is the path that will turn you into me."
The mist in the background rippled as if it had heard those words, reverberating in darker tones.
"And then we will see," she finally said, her voice collapsing like a fall, "who you really are..."
Her smile now was that of a weary prophetess, not of hope, but of certainty.
"...A butcher. The kind of beast whose destiny is to destroy everything in its path."
And in that moment, the chains tightened, the withered wings shuddered... and her bleeding eyes found mine one last time. Without hatred. Without pity. My heart ached as if someone were squeezing it from the inside of my flesh.
And then I woke up.
**
I woke to the flickering light of a cold morning filtering through the cracks of the balcony. Pale rays danced timidly across the polished marble floor and the gauzy curtains, while winter's arrival shimmered at the edges of the room — like invisible crystals on the verge of forming. The silence there was thick, reverent, as if the world around me knew I needed calm. And yet my heart pounded like war drums in march.
I was breathless.
My eyes burned, not with tears, but as if they were lit aflame, incandescent — two stars in the sky on the brink of collapse. The scene that had torn me from sleep still reverberated in my bones, in my skin, like a shapeless memory that left scars. But before panic could consume me, I saw them.
Two golden orbs staring at me in silence. Calm. Welcoming. Eyes like the sun in its splendor, resting upon me like the safest of promises.
Glenn.
The impact was immediate, like cold water doused upon a blazing fire. My symptoms began to dissolve, the knot in my chest loosened, the tension shattered like thin glass. My body relaxed completely, surrendering to the comforting warmth of his tight embrace, to the heat of his skin pressed against mine.
He smiled. Without words. He only pulled me closer and kissed my forehead softly. His fingers began to wander through my hair, so light and present that, for an instant, I feared I might come undone right there in his hands.
And it was in that touch, so enveloping and soothing, that I whispered without realizing,
"…A balm."
Glenn frowned, puzzled, his fingers still brushing the loose strands near my ear.
"A balm? What does that have to do with anything?" he asked, in that playful, sleepy tone only he could make sound so natural.
A crooked smile spread across my lips. I didn't want to answer. Not with words. I simply buried my face against his chest, like a spoiled cat curling into warmth. The scent of his skin, the steady beat of his heart, the heat of his arms... all of it reconnected me with something I couldn't yet name, but that was engraved in me, like runes carved in stone.
"Stroke my hair some more..." I murmured, my voice trembling with raw, unguarded tenderness.
Glenn chuckled softly, that lazy sunlight gleam in his voice, and tightened his embrace around me.
"It's an honor, my queen... to be tasked with such a duty by you."
And as he fulfilled his mission with touches that dissolved every horror of the night, I allowed myself — perhaps for the first time in centuries — to simply exist in someone's arms.