The void did not breathe.
It listened.
Kael felt it — the pressure, the weight, the way the silence bent around him as though the world itself leaned closer to hear his pulse.
The System shuddered.
> [Warning: Observation persists.]
[Source: Unknown. Layered beyond registered dimensions.]
[Protocol: None.]
The words faded, but Kael was not alone.
Something stirred within the fractures of the unseen light. A ripple — faint, but carrying echoes of wings that had never flown. For a heartbeat, Kael thought he saw them: vast shadows unfolding across the broken sky, not his own, but belonging to something that had once devoured galaxies.
He froze.
It was not memory.
It was not vision.
It was… inheritance.
The fracture pulsed, and with it came a whisper:
"Not all silence is absence. Some silences are prisons."
Kael's chest tightened. He reached for his core, yet the beat within him no longer obeyed his will. It echoed with another rhythm, one that did not belong to him — a rhythm that wanted to consume, to break, to feed.
The void darkened.
The fracture listened.
And Kael understood.
He was no longer the one walking into the abyss.
The abyss was walking into him.
---