Somewhere behind eyes that are not his own, a man exists—no longer alive, but not quite dead.
Trapped between pulses, between breaths, in a body that responds to someone else's life.
My body collapsed into pieces I couldn't feel.
Sound dissolved first, Valley's voice echoing too far away, like she was underwater.
The world tilted, sound and light bending until I couldn't tell where my body ended and the dark began.
My heart pounded once, a single violent beat, then faltered. The taste of metal filled my mouth, sharp and wrong, as if the air itself had turned to blood.
I remember pain.
I remember trying to speak.
But nothing came out.
Valley was beside me now. Her presence felt like both a tether and a weight.
I screamed, Don't put that in me, please!
My chest burned with the weight of words that couldn't escape, trapped beneath my tongue, swallowed by the dying of everything I was. Her eyes, wet and unblinking, told me I had already lost.
The room blurred at the edges, shapes smearing into streaks of light as my vision faltered. I caught fleeting glimpses of Valley—her face pale and wild with grief, her hands trembling as she clutched me like she could hold my soul in place.
Her lips moved, but her words were drowned out by the rising hum of machinery, a cold, sterile sound that didn't belong to either of us.
Her eyes burned with wild hope and terror, a prayer and a plea tangled into one.
Heat seared through my veins, spreading from the base of my skull like liquid fire. I realized it was the Emberlink binding us, its threads digging past flesh and thought, stitching us together.
Somewhere, far away, Valley whispered something—maybe my name, maybe a prayer—but the darkness swallowed it before I could understand. My last breath didn't come as a gasp, but as a surrender.
Then breath slipped into silence.
stillness.
Or at least, I thought it was stillness.
Until I realized I was still thinking.
The stillness wasn't peace. It was a void stretched so thin it hummed, like the silence before a scream.
I thought death would be simple—a door shutting, a thread cut clean, the quiet mercy of nothingness.
Instead, I felt frayed at the edges, every part of me unraveling into nothing.
There was no body, no breath. Just the aching awareness that something of me still lingered.
For the briefest moment, I felt a tug—subtle but undeniable, like a thread catching on rough fabric. It pulled at me from somewhere beyond this emptiness, and with it came the faintest echo of Valley's breath, warm and unrelenting. Not words, not even sound. Just presence.
I reached for the edge of myself and found only emptiness.
And that's when I understood: this wasn't an ending. It was the space between endings, a place no one was meant to remain.
Thought became space.
Light became thread.
At first, there was nothing but a pull—faint and persistent, like the world itself was tugging me through the eye of a needle. Colors bled in from the edges of the dark, threads of red and gold twisting into shapes I didn't recognize. They weren't mine. They belonged to someone else.
Faces flickered past—too fast to catch, too broken to name until they unraveled into strands of memory that weren't mine, though some felt hauntingly familiar.
A little girl laughing beneath a canopy of glowing trees. A woman's shadow reaching for something just out of sight. A door slamming shut, followed by the sound of a child's scream that made my chest ache.
Sometimes, I caught flashes that don't belong to either of us. Places I've never been. Voices I don't recognize. I tell myself they're just echoes, but they feel too precise to be accidents.
Somewhere in the distance, a lullaby hummed, broken and off-key, before vanishing like smoke.
The sound clung to me, familiar in a way that made my chest tighten. It wasn't my memory, yet it threaded through me like it belonged there, begging to be remembered.
Each image tore through me like a thread pulled too tight, leaving behind only the hollow impression of someone else's pain and joy.
They slipped away before I could grasp them, scattering into nothing.
My soul didn't just move forward; it was being stitched, pulled through knot after knot, binding me to a place that wasn't my own. Each tug sank deeper, dragging me through corridors of thought and shadow, until I realized I wasn't drifting. I was being assembled.
A hunger in the dark was dragging the frayed ends of who I was through an impossible corridor made of memories I didn't recognize.
I was being stitched into something else.
I never wanted an Emberlink.
I never agreed to be Soul Woven.
It felt like a trap disguised as love, a shackle forged in desperation.
But I never had the chance to tell her. It was too late. She couldn't hear me.
My body was gone, and my voice wasn't strong here yet.
And even if she could, I don't know if I'd beg her to stop... or curse her for trying.
I felt it all—fading out, second by second, while something deeper pulled me under.
I didn't know how much of myself I was leaving behind.
The pieces of me were coming apart, and none of them seemed to know where to go, yet they swam around like they had somewhere important to be.
I wondered if this is what ghosts feel like—trapped not in houses, but in hearts.
Wandering hallways of flesh and memory, forever looking for the door they'll never find.
Death wasn't waiting anymore. It had already taken me—just not all of me.
Valley has trapped my soul here on the promise of love lasting forever.
And I hate the part of me that wanted to believe her.
Because I loved her enough to trust her. Loved her enough to think forever sounded like salvation instead of a prison. And that's why it hurts more than anything—because part of me still wants to stay.
Even though I knew better.
I fell back into my last memory, replaying things I didn't understand before in a clearer view. Her hands were warm—so warm it almost felt like safety. But warmth can burn just as deeply as fire. And as she held me, I realized she wasn't saving me at all. She was burying me alive.
She held my face and whispered, "I hope this works, if it does… I'll hear from you again, my love." Her voice trembled with belief. Or desperation. Maybe both.
Hearing her voice splintered me more than the pain ever could. Because part of me wanted to answer. To tell her I loved her. But no sound came—not from my mouth, not even from my thoughts. Just silence.
I don't think she understood what that meant. What it means to be one in that way. But how could she? I've kept her in the dark when I should have told her everything.
Then I drifted in flashes—fragments of light that blinked in and out like dying stars.
Just flickers. Like existence was trying to remember me.
There were sounds I didn't recognize. Echoes, maybe. Or memories.
Her voice. My voice. The voice of someone I couldn't name. All layered on top of each other, until I couldn't tell which one to follow.
I thought I was dreaming. I thought I'd wake up. But I never did.
Not in my body anyway.
I found a version of myself in her mind.
Not a full version. Just... echoes. Fractures.
A shadow walking through someone else's house, barefoot and unseen.
I wasn't whole. I was splintered thought, pulled thin across walls I didn't build.
I feel like I'm made of fog. In a moment, I forget what my hands looked like. Or if I even had them.
I don't know how long it's been since I left my body, how long I've been in this part of her mind.
Time here isn't made of seconds. It's made of silence.
Long stretches where I hear nothing, not even my own thoughts—and then suddenly, everything floods back in at once.
I try to hold onto something solid, but even my name slips if I think about it too long.
But then there's her. A hum. A heartbeat. A gravity.
When I start to drift too far, I feel her presence again. I'm not sure if it's a memory of her or if it's really her. But it's the only thing that keeping me from disappearing entirely.
At first, I didn't want to leave.
Then I couldn't leave.
I was trapped, looking for a way out of this dark room. Then something shifted—a whisper of movement, so soft it felt like breath against the back of my neck. The darkness rippled, thinning just enough to reveal the outline of something small and trembling.
The air thickened, heavy and cold with a fear that didn't feel like mine, wrapping around me like a suffocating thread.
A pair of eyes glimmered faintly in the dark, wide with terror.
I saw a small girl hiding beneath a dark blanket.