The darkness did not end. Morwenna fell through the void without a body to measure the passing of time, a heartbeat to count, or a breath to hold. She was nothing more than a solitary spark caught in an endless, suffocating black that offered no bottom and no horizon.
Then, the quality of the darkness shifted. It did not brighten in any traditional sense, but instead changed texture. It felt much like stepping from one room into another without the benefit of walls or doors. Weight returned to her first, settling onto her shoulders with a sudden, crushing gravity. This was followed by the sharp sensation of air against her skin. She had small hands again, and a fragile chest that rose and fell in a panicked, stuttering rhythm. The heavy, visceral warmth of a different world rushed in to meet her.
. . .
Heat and the heavy, cloying scent of cloves wrapped around her first memories. The air was thick, humid, and smelled of antiseptic mixed with the spicy sweetness of kretek smoke drifting from somewhere outside. A young woman held her close. Her face was lined by an exhaustion that seemed too deep for her years, and her tears fell silently onto the infant's swaddling. Morwenna could not see clearly through the eyes of an infant, but the oppressive warmth and the salt of that grief stayed with her.
She had been born in East Java, in a room where the sun beat against the walls until they felt like they might melt.
As she grew, the world often felt too loud and far too slow. She was a bright child: too bright, according to her teachers and the neighbours who watched her with narrow eyes. She had learned to read before she ever stepped foot in a primary school. She finished her homework long before the teacher had even finished explaining the assignment to the rest of the class. She was a child of questions that no one seemed to know how to answer, or perhaps they simply did not want to try.
But she was also a difficult child. She drifted away from the world around her. Her eyes would lose focus in class as her attention slid toward something only she could perceive. The teachers dismissed it as daydreaming while her mother simply called it lazy. Eventually, she learned to hide those parts of herself. She concealed the drifting, the impossible questions, and the brightness that made other children so uncomfortable. She learned the art of making herself smaller and quieter. It was much easier to be ignored than to be noticed. It worked most of the time.
. . .
Stories became her only refuge. She read about hidden worlds and children carrying secret bloodlines or speaking to creatures that others feared. She stayed awake until dawn with her phone's glow painting her face in shades of electric blue. She devoured tales of rewritten fates and second chances, of fix-its and time-travel. She wanted that with a desperation she could not name. She sought a place where the drifting finally made sense and where her strangeness was a gift rather than a burden.
But in that life, she was only a girl who knew too much and fit nowhere. She was an observer in her own existence.
. . .
As she grew older, the drifting only worsened. She could not hold onto things the way other people seemed to. Friendships faded into nothing as she forgot to reach out, and her interests flickered briefly before dying out like spent matches. She would start projects with a fierce, burning enthusiasm, only to abandon them weeks later without being able to explain why the spark had gone.
She moved through life on a hollow autopilot, navigating university, a degree in a subject that left her cold, and a quiet, unremarkable job. She smiled when it was expected and nodded when it was required. Inside, however, she felt entirely carved out. She was not empty, for emptiness could be filled. She was hollow. It was absence where something vital should have been. No amount of pretending could fill that space.
. . .
The years blurred into a quiet endurance. There were therapy rooms that smelled of lavender and dust. There were kind eyes and questions she simply could not answer because she lacked the vocabulary for her own void. There were pills that promised clarity but delivered only a thick, chemical fog. She stopped taking them, started again, and stopped once more.
The dark periods arrived without warning, bringing weeks where the ceiling became her entire world. Getting up felt like lifting a heavy stone. Even the simple task of showering felt like an impossible, mountain-climbing feat. She survived the days, but she did not truly live them. Thriving belonged to other people. She was simply waiting for a conclusion.
. . .
She was twenty-eight or perhaps twenty-nine, though the numbers no longer mattered. Her apartment was small. The window faced a brick wall that never caught the sun. She sat on the couch with her laptop open, the screen's light reflecting in her eyes. She was reading about a child with white hair and green eyes: a girl who carried heavy magic and spoke to serpents.
She closed the screen and stood up, but the floor rose to meet her before she could brace herself. She did not feel the impact. She only saw the ceiling. It was white and cracked and distant. Her breath came too fast, then too slow, and then not at all. The hollow space inside her finally collapsed.
. . .
Darkness returned. She fell again, but this time the void did not hold her. Something pulled at her, moving not down, but up and outward toward a sudden warmth. It was a thread she had not felt in years. She tried to resist because her life had been so exhausting and it was all she knew, but the pull did not stop. It stretched her thin until she was a single thread of light against the black. Fissures appeared in the dark. Golden light bled through the cracks. Then she heard a voice, fractured by distance but unmistakable.
Morwenna.
It was not the name she had worn in the quiet, cloves-scented apartment. It was the name spoken over stone and water. It was the name that held anchors and blood and love. She stopped fighting. Instead, she reached for it with everything she had left.
The light swallowed her whole.