Mikey steps forward with the careful, hesitant gait of someone walking into a church he isn't sure he's allowed to enter. The corridor swallows sound; his footsteps are soft splashes on limestone, echoing like a slow heartbeat. Water beads run down the bronze of the great gates behind him and fade into the dark. For a moment the black presses in from all sides and he can barely make out his own hand in front of his face, the world reduced to shadow and the damp smell of stone and salt.
Then a faint blue glow blooms, as if some shy sunrise decided to rise underwater. Tiny points of light drift in the air like bioluminescent plankton suspended in still water, floating and pulsing with a gentle rhythm. They hang mid-breath, casting soft halos over wet walls and reflecting in the shallow puddles at his boots. The sight steals the breath from his chest—not threatening, not loud, just impossibly beautiful, like a private show put on for him alone.
"Huh… wow," he whispers, because the moment demands it.
The voice answers—deep, amused, like someone smiling through a mask of age—seemingly curling through the dark itself.
"Hey, so, I'm here! But where exactly is here?" Mikey calls into the dim.
There is that chuckle again, warm and slightly dusted with time. The sound moves around him, as if the corridor itself speaks.
"I spent so long looking for you, to talk to you. Finally you're here," the voice says. "As for where this is, it's the back of your mind. The depths of it. I've been trying to get you to see me, to hear me, for years now. But I never could. Something opened the veil—someone stirred the water. That diluted Linnium nonsense they gave you helped, ironically. But now that I am here... I can tell your head's a mess. So much pain, so much hatred."
Mikey turns slowly as the voice layers over him, trying to find its source, trying to place a face on it. The words dig into him, prying at wounds he keeps bandaged.
"Yeah… I hate him, I hate them," Mikey says, voice rough.
"No." The reply is soft and immediate. "I wasn't talking about Payne Morrison or the Council. I meant you. So much self-hatred. I can hear the static in your mind..."
Mikey's jaw tightens. He looks down at his boots, then up, as if the corridor might hold a mirror to his soul.
"Who… are you? What are you?"
The voice chuckles again, then settles. When it grows serious it changes the space between him and the dark—gravity shifts.
"I cannot answer that outright," it warns. "That would ruin everything. You are not meant to know yet; it would complicate the future. But you may call me the Predecessor."
Mikey snorts, a short laugh that bounces odd and nervous in the huge silence.
"Predecessor. Wow, big title. Makes you sound like you bend time or read crystal balls and shit."
"I can see probabilities," the voice replies, the words measured like a hand placing stones across a stream. "Not magic. Not prophecy in the childish sense. Patterns, tendencies, what is most likely to unfold. Fate, if you prefer a grand word."
Mikey's amusement dies when the voice grows almost tender.
"So you're serious. How do I even know you're real, and not just another voice inside my head trying to get me to crack?"
"You don't," the Predecessor says simply. "Not yet. You will, when you begin to see the threads. When the pictures I show you start stitching themselves into what you live. Then you'll believe."
He shifts, wanting to scoff, to walk back the way he came and shove this whole surreal test into the same bin he'd kept nightmares in, but the corridor feels wider now—expectant, patient. He starts away.
"This is bullshit. I just want this test to be over. See ya."
The breath in the corridor seems to dim. The bioluminescent plankton's light gutters and fades away like embers blown. The air thickens. The gate behind him groans and closes so silently he only notices when the sound of his own blood fills his ears. Cold spreads along the back of his neck.
"What are you—" he begins, turning.
Two green lights fix on him out of the black—eyes floating in the dark, neither solid nor clearly part of any face. They burn like coals, fierce and alive, and for a beat he feels watched by something ancient and patient. The voice slides from everywhere and nowhere, low as the rumble of the sea.
"Witness your fate, Michael Grant."
Something presses against the crown of his head like the cool tip of a needle. He reaches up before he understands why his hand moves. The sensation is real and small and impossibly cold; a finger—pale as bone, its nail long and dark at the tip—digs in. His limbs go ice, his knees weaken. A paralysis blooms from the point of contact, blooming outward until even his breath feels heavy and not his own.
"Stop—" he tries, but the word catches.
His pupils go wide until they feel like holes.
The corridor contracts and then explodes inward. Visions cascade over him—sharp, bright, complete—spilling into his skull like water poured into a cup that's been waiting empty for years.