As Damien stepped forward once more, the pressure around him shifted with eerie finality. The howling storm of emotion, memory, and grief that had tormented him across the Sky Bridge suddenly vanished, as if exhaled from his soul and carried off into the abyss below. In that silence, something deeper and more insidious rose within him, not chaos, but stillness.
His heart, once burdened by guilt, no longer throbbed with sorrow. His chest, once burning with rage, now sat hollow and calm. All the fury toward Europe for its betrayal, all the hatred for the beasts who devoured cities and families, all the cold disdain for the Bloodbanes who had cast him out and abandoned him to obscurity… Gone.
The pain had been peeled away with surgical precision.
And without it, what remained?
For a moment, Damien faltered. His feet remained planted, his gaze fixed not on the next step, but on the unseen space within himself.
