I awoke gasping, my body lurching upright as if I had just surfaced from drowning. The air in my lungs burned, raw and searing, as if I had been holding my breath for far too long.
But the world around me was not the world I had left.
I knelt upon an endless expanse of black glass, smooth and unbroken, stretching to a horizon that did not exist. Above me, the sky was neither night nor day—it was a shifting mass of stars caught in a slow, dying swirl, their light flickering like candles on the edge of being snuffed out.
And the heartbeat remained.
A slow, rhythmic thud, pulsing beneath the surface of the glass, as though something slumbered beneath this world—something vast, buried, waiting.
I tried to rise, but my limbs felt… strange. Heavier. As though the weight of the abyss still clung to me, reluctant to let me go.
"You have heard the call."
The voice sent a shiver down my spine.
It did not echo. It did not come from behind me or before me, nor did it belong to anything with a mouth or lips to shape words.
It was simply there.
I turned.
And it stood before me.
Not the figure from the throne. Not the writhing shadows of before.
This being was human-shaped, but unmistakably wrong—as if someone had tried to sculpt a man from flowing ink and fractured starlight, his edges flickering, his form both solid and shifting at once.
His face was nothing but darkness, but his eyes—two silver crescents, thin and sharp as blades—stared at me with something that was neither malice nor kindness.
Something older than both.
"You are not yet whole."
The words came again, the same as before, yet different now. He spoke them not as a riddle, but as a truth I was meant to understand.
I clenched my fists, steadying myself. "Then tell me what I'm missing."
The figure took a slow step forward, and with it, the sky trembled.
"Do you truly seek the answer, Shadowborn?"
The name again. That damned name.
I narrowed my eyes but said nothing.
The being extended a hand. Long fingers, ink-stained and shifting, reached toward me.
"Then awaken."
The moment his hand touched my chest, the world exploded.
A shockwave of pure force erupted outward, sending cracks splintering across the glass beneath my feet. The sky fractured, the stars above shattering like dying embers, and from within the depths of the world, a voice that was not my own screamed.
And suddenly—I was not alone in my own mind.