Darkness took Lucien without mercy.
Not the gentle dark of closed eyes. Not even the deep dark of sleep.
This was a dark that remembered him.
Lucien drifted through it like a thought pushed under black water, and the first thing he saw was himself.
He stood on a plain of ash where the horizon was stitched with burning worlds. Planets hung in the void like lanterns with their flames turned inward and their skies were inverted into bruised auroras. Every star above him looked dimmer as if the universe had learned to avert its gaze.
And Lucien… was walking.
Conquering.
He wore his own face in the same way a blade wore a reflection. Familiar, but wrong. His eyes were hollow, glazed with a joy that did not belong to a human. His aura was a crown of pressure that crushed kneeling continents flat before he even stepped on them.
Billions of worlds were behind him.
Not in distance.
In ownership.
