[EMY]
The stadium was drowning in grief.
Candles flickered in trembling hands all around me, their flames shivering against the cold night air.
I held mine tight, wax dripping over my fingers, burning, but I didn't flinch. I almost wanted the pain. It was real. Unlike the hollow ache in my chest.
A million voices hummed the same broken melody. His melody. A song that would never again be sung by the man who gave it life.
Eric.
The name pulsed in my ears like a heartbeat, or maybe like thunder refusing to fade.
The world's brightest star, the voice that carried millions—including me—through their darkest nights, was gone. Too young. Too soon.
I should have been used to being alone in a crowd, but tonight it cut deeper.
People pressed in shoulder to shoulder, faces streaked with tears, yet I'd never felt more invisible. Just another shadow among millions.
That's who I've always been. Plump. Short. Forgettable. The girl people saw and dismissed in a glance. The one they whispered about, laughed at, shoved aside.
But not him. Not Eric.
His voice had pierced through the silence I was drowning in.
"Don't hide your light. Even if it flickers, it still burns."
Those words—his words—saved me once. When no one noticed me slipping, he reached me. A stranger. And because of him, I climbed back from the edge.
Now he was gone.
My chest heaved, breath ragged, like my ribs couldn't contain the grief spilling out of me. I bowed my head, pressing my forehead against clasped hands, trapping the fragile candle between them like it was sacred.
Tears blurred everything, my voice breaking as I whispered into the void.
"I never asked for anything. Not once. Because wishes don't come true. . ." My throat closed, but I forced the words out. "But please . . . just this once."
The candlelight swam in my vision. My knees buckled, the roar of the crowd drowning my sobs.
"If I could just go back. If I could just save him. Please—let me save Eric . . . the way he saved me."
And then—the world moved.
A gust of wind tore through the stadium so suddenly it stole the breath from my lungs. Candles blew out in waves, darkness crashing across the crowd like dominoes falling.
Gasps, cries, confusion. Only the massive screens still glowed, Eric's smiling face frozen in pixels from his last performance.
Then—light.
It ripped through the night sky like a blade, too close, too violent to be a star. The ground rumbled. My stomach lurched as if gravity itself had tilted.
I couldn't breathe. My chest was locked, my hands empty. My candle slipped, glass shattering against the ground.
The world spun. My scream clawed up my throat—
—and then the darkness swallowed me whole.