Darkness did not come all at once.
It seeped in through the cracks.
Sound arrived before sight—distant, stretched, warped—like echoes traveling through a cavern too large for memory to fill. Stone grinding against stone. A low roar that might have been an explosion or might have been his own pulse. He couldn't tell. His body felt impossibly heavy, as if the ground itself had wrapped around him and refused to let go.
And then—
A voice.
Not loud.
Not clear.
A whisper, fractured at the edges, slipping through the fog of his mind like smoke through broken glass.
Master… do you remember… the first time…
The words didn't arrive whole. They never did. Pieces of them surfaced, dissolved, resurfaced again, as if his thoughts were trying—and failing—to assemble something important.
The darkness rippled.
Shapes bled into one another.
A corridor that wasn't here.
Moonlight that didn't belong to this place.
The quiet weight of another presence beside him.
