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The black iron chains had disintegrated into ash, but the pain, it remained. A phantom burn, etched onto his soul like fiery scars, constantly reminded him of the touch of white-hot metal. The Shroud weighed on his shoulders, a pall of cold and misery. A fleeting relief, that of no longer being chained, was immediately eclipsed by a new wave of panic. This cloak, this burden, was the source of that weight, that cold. He had to take it off.
His first thought was not of escape, but of rejection. A visceral refusal of this poisoned "gift."
His spiritual hands clenched the dark fabric. It wasn't silk, not cotton. It was a nameless material, cold as a tombstone and heavy as an unconfessable secret. He pulled. Once. Twice. Panting with a breath that didn't exist, he braced himself, gathering the last scraps of his will. The fabric didn't move an inch. It had the solidity and weight of the black iron chains, a prison woven from his own damnation.
In a final effort of rage and despair, he let out a silent scream and pulled with suicidal violence. A strange sound was heard, not the sound of tearing fabric, but a deeper, more intimate sound, like a soul splitting. The cloak gave way.
The Shroud fell from his shoulders and crashed to the ground with a dull thud, abnormally heavy, like a body being thrown into a pit.
Zac stood, bare-chested, staggering. He felt light. Free. A gulp of fresh air in a drowning man's lungs. A bitter, triumphant smile formed on his face. He had refused their gift. He had won.
The relief lasted only a heartbeat.
The moment the Shroud's touch left his skin, the world around him changed. It wasn't a physical change, but a perceptual one. A mutation of reality itself. The air suddenly became colder, viscous, clinging to him like an invisible spiderweb. The darkness ceased to be a mere absence of light and became a palpable presence, an entity watching him with malevolent curiosity.
The whispers he heard at the edge of his consciousness became clear, sharp, articulate. They called him by his name. They knew his sins.
Panicked, Zac turned around. There were no walls. The room had no limits. He then understood with absolute horror: the walls were him. His own consciousness was his prison.
Faces began to emerge, not from a wall, but from the folds of shadow, from the viscous ground, from the air itself. A face formed before him, his mother's, distorted by a silent grief. To his left, the face of the truck driver, frozen in the horror of his final moments, eyes wide from the impact. Behind him, his father's, silent, broken, his gaze devoid of all hope.
Spectral hands shot out from everywhere, grabbing him. They didn't hurt him. They did much worse. They shared.
Each touch was an injection of pure suffering. The hands poured their millennia of pain into him. He felt the regret of a father who hadn't said goodbye to his son, the guilt of a surviving soldier, the sorrow of an abandoned lover. His own guilt, already an ocean, was drowned under a tsunami of universal remorse. His mind threatened to dissolve, to lose all sense of self. He was no longer Zac; he was a screaming collection of all the world's sufferings.
He screamed, a soundless scream, a heartbreaking plea for it to stop. He no longer wanted this "freedom." He wanted the weight, the cold, the oppression of the Shroud. He desired it more than anything. It was an anchor. A refuge. A necessity.
The precise moment his will broke and his entire soul begged to have its burden back, the nightmare stopped dead.
He found himself on his knees on the cold floor, exactly where he had stood, panting, his soul in tatters. He looked down. The Shroud he had thrown to the ground with such defiance had vanished.
A trembling hand rose to his shoulder. The cold, heavy fabric was there, securely in place, as if it had never left.
He understood then. A truth so cruel it bordered on genius. An epiphany of despair. The Shroud wasn't his prison; it was the door to his cell. Removing it didn't offer him freedom, it plunged him directly into the bottomless hell of his own mind, amplified by the echoes of all the others. His escape attempt had taught him only one thing: there is no escape.
The only way not to go mad was to accept carrying his shame. It was his one and only protection against a far worse evil: himself.