The amber climbed his ribs in slow, deliberate inches.
Warmth at his waist.
Heat across his chest.
A weight that felt old.
The hum of the pod thinned.
Lights dimmed into a single, steady pulse.
His limbs floated, unclaimed by him.
Then—
a flicker,
like static behind his eyelids.
Sand.
A wheel slipping.
A sudden drop, the taste of iron and dust.
Children running past.
A sneaker stepping over him without slowing.
Laughter—thin, sharp, effortless.
Another blink.
A supermarket aisle.
Someone's hand on his shoulder:
"You're such an inspiration."
A smile that wasn't a smile.
The air between them smelling of detergent and pity.
Blink.
A classroom doorway.
Desks scraping.
A girl's voice—soft, embarrassed,
"Not like that. Not… in that way."
Chairs shifting.
Her turning away.
The amber reached his collarbones.
A second voice surfaced, close enough to warm the skin behind his ear.
"—Tired?"
Tavo stiffened.
The oxygen mask hissed—small, clinical breaths.
He didn't answer.
"—You've done enough."
A playground fall.
A wheelchair tipped.
A shrug from a teacher.
A boy's voice: "Just leave him."
The amber slid higher.
"—The ground remembers you," the voice murmured. "It held you more often than your legs did."
His throat tightened.
Air rasped through the mask—a thin, cold wind filling the empty frame beneath his ribs, each breath a gust through a doorway that no longer led anywhere.
The memories kept coming.
The nurse saying
"He's used to it."
The coach not meeting his eyes.
Doors with ramps too steep,
restrooms too narrow,
friends walking ahead without noticing.
A lifetime of almosts.
The amber brushed the line of his jaw.
"—Why get back up again?" the voice asked, softer now. "Your whole life has been a climb back to standing. Let it end. Let the world hold you for once."
His fingers twitched—
or tried to.
The amber swallowed the movement.
His eyes burned.
Salt blurred the lights beyond the pod.
He swallowed—once, twice—the sound catching in his throat like a stone he couldn't spit out.
He didn't sob.
He didn't beg.
He just breathed—
shallow, shaking—
a boy bracing against a wave he could no longer see coming.
"—Stay down," the voice whispered. "You've earned the rest."
The amber rose to his cheekbones, warm like a hand closing his eyes.
Tavo shook once—a tiny motion, hardly motion at all.
Like a match struck against soaking wood.
The voice waited.
Patient.
Certain.
Nothing in him answered.
Only the trembling breath of someone holding himself together by threads.
And somewhere behind it all—a crack.
Quiet.
The kind that starts deep, where no one else can hear it breaking.
The amber slid over his jaw.
A low vibration opened behind his ribs—
small at first, like a spark catching dry grass.
Then a shape formed in the dark.
Not a face.
A breath.
His breath.
It spoke without moving.
"—Enough."
Tavo's shoulders twitched.
The amber held him.
Another memory surfaced—
Fernanda asleep at her desk, cheek pressed to open textbooks,
ink smudged across her arm where she'd fallen studying beside his chair.
Another—
her hands pushing him uphill in the rain, hair plastered to her forehead,
laughing through chattering teeth,
and him pretending not to see how tired she was.
The dark around him brightened—
no firmament,
no skyline,
just cold light leaking from the fractures in his own chest.
The breath spoke again.
"—She deserved a life."
His throat constricted against the oxygen mask.
The hiss of the airflow sounded like static—a signal searching for a station that no longer existed.
Fernanda helping him fix the wheelchair.
Fernanda skipping college tours.
Fernanda's smile—small, stretched thin, stitched with exhaustion.
The amber rose to his lower lip.
A ripple spread through the dark.
His voice—
but steadier, older, carved from the nights he lay awake staring at the ceiling.
"—You stole it."
Tavo's fingers spasmed.
The amber swallowed the motion.
He opened his mouth, but only air came out—thin, trembling, the kind of breath taken right before a fall.
Lights flickered overhead.
The chamber thickened into something vast—
a horizon without land,
a sea without surface.
From that vastness, a silhouette stepped forward.
His height.
His outline.
But when it inhaled, the entire space around them contracted—
a lung the size of a sky.
It didn't smile.
Didn't snarl.
Just breathed.
And each breath carried pieces of words:
"—You made her choose."
A cold pressure settled against his sternum.
Not a hand.
Not touch.
Another piece of the past.
Fernanda braiding his hair before college.
Fernanda telling him stories during hospital nights.
Fernanda saying "I'm fine," one too many times.
He swallowed a sound that tried to escape—
a small, broken thing.
The silhouette tilted its head.
Not accusing.
Observing.
"—She carried you."
A pause.
"—Now let someone carry you back."
The amber reached his upper lip.
His next breath shuddered.
Something shifted behind the silhouette—
a deeper shadow,
still as stone.
Lady Death.
No scythe, no cloak—
just a presence with the color of endings.
She stood with the calm of a closed door.
No judgment.
No warning.
Just… waiting.
The silhouette—his reflection stripped of softness—stepped closer.
When it spoke, its breath fogged the inside of his mask.
"—You can stop now."
Images flickered across the air like reflections on water:
Barkhad lifting him into the Trans Am, and his laugh, loud enough to shake fear loose.
Fiona calling his name in the game,
as if he'd made the world better just by logging in.
All of it hovered in front of him.
All of it slipped away as the silhouette raised a hand.
A hand that looked exactly like his.
It brushed two fingers beneath his eye, touching the tear he didn't know had fallen.
"—Let go," it whispered.
"—Rest.
Just—rest."
His heart didn't break loudly.
It broke with the sound of silence—
like the one that follows a storm,
when even thunder has nothing left to say.
His breath faltered.
He didn't answer.
The amber climbed to cover his mouth.
Lady Death stood behind the Monster, watching him sink.
And somewhere in the dark between the three of them—
something inside him stopped.
The amber sealed over his mouth and the oxygen mask.
Light dimmed.
Sound thinned.
Only the hiss of oxygen remained—
a cold thread against his chest,
a feather trembling over a hollow space
where his heart should have been holding strong.
He drew one breath.
It shook.
The chamber fell away.
Dark.
Not empty—
dense, like the moment before lightning strikes the earth.
Something shifted at the edge of vision.
A figure—his shape—
standing rigid, chin lifted, eyes dry as stone.
Another shape knelt in mirror-silence,
hands open on its thighs,
head bowed toward nothing.
A third shape stood between them—
not rigid, not kneeling—
just… standing.
Shoulders uneven.
Chest rising unevenly.
A faint glow beating under its skin
like a pulse remembering itself.
The air cooled.
Lady Death stepped out of the dark behind them—
bare feet over nothingness, eyes endless as eclipses.
She didn't move toward him.
She didn't warn him away.
She simply watched,
her gaze reflecting Tavo's trembling inside her darkness as though she held his fear cupped between her palms.
Behind him,
a breath he knew too well leaned close—
his breath,
but older,
stronger,
unsoftened.
"Come now…"
A whisper against the mask.
"Just let it fall."
A hand—his hand—slid along his shoulder.
No warmth.
No cold.
Just certain.
The kneeling shape lowered further.
The rigid shape flickered as though hollow.
The glowing one inhaled sharply—
a tiny sound,
barely there,
but enough to make the void tense.
A soft pulse answered.
Far away.
A star blinking.
No—
not a star.
A pulsar, beating in time with the tremor under his ribs.
One pulse.
Then another.
Each one brighter, sharper,
etching cracks of white fire across the dark.
The Exiled God appeared without a sound.
No arrival—
just existence.
Standing between the three reflections like a pillar carved from the first moment after creation.
Not pointing.
Not judging.
His face, fathomless and calm, holding the whole cosmos the way a hand holds a single flame to shield it from the wind.
Tavo's breath hitched.
The feather over his heart fluttered faster.
His chest tightened as if the universe had set its weight upon him.
The Monster's mouth brushed the line of his ear.
"You feel that?"
A murmur.
A push.
"You're breaking. Let it break. Let it go quiet."
The kneeling reflection exhaled, as though agreeing.
The rigid one faltered,
its edges trembling.
The glowing one trembled too—
but its trembling felt different.
No collapse.
Friction.
Pressure.
Heat building where heat should not be.
The pulsar answered with a brighter flash.
The void leaned closer.
Lady Death's shadow deepened, her eyes absorbing the newborn light and giving none back.
One more breath.
Just one.
Something inside him—
small enough to be dismissed,
urgent enough to burn—
pushed upward against the crushing dark.
A spark.
A speck of dust.
A point of refusal.
It flickered—
weak,
faltering.
The void froze around him,
waiting.
Even the pulsar held its beat.
The Monster inhaled behind him—
ready to swallow the spark whole.
Lady Death inclined her head a fraction—
honoring the silence before a verdict.
The Exiled God lowered his gaze to Tavo—
merely witnessing the weight of the moment, a king watching a boy decide whether to become or vanish.
The void waited.
The choice tightened around him like a fist.
And something—
thin as paper—
slid loose inside his memory.
Rain.
That's all at first.
Rain tapping on the stubborn metal of his wheelchair right in front of the school doors,
seeping into his collar, dripping down his hair,
the world refusing him entry yet again.
He sat there anyway—
legs numb,
book hidden under his own head,
breathing on the pages to keep them from blurring.
No grand epiphany.
No choir.
Just a boy, shivering, reading words an old Roman wrote for strangers he'd never meet.
But one sentence—
quiet, unadorned—
stuck to him the way wet clothes do.
Not even a sentence—
a weight more than a phrase, pressing into his ribs then, pressing again now, in this chamber where endings wait with patient hands.
It wasn't hope.
It wasn't advice.
It felt like someone across centuries had placed a palm on his back and simply—
refused to let him fold.
The rain on the memory.
The hum of the reactor.
The breath inside the mask.
All of it the same pulse, the same insistence.
No one said it out loud.
No voice named it.
But the meaning settled in him like a spark sheltering itself from wind.
And suddenly the void wasn't empty.
It was waiting too.
At first—
nothing changes.
The void holds him,
Lady Death reducing him to a trembling silhouette,
the Shadow curved close like a second spine,
the Exiled God watching with the quiet of a star that remembers its own birth.
Tavo lowers his gaze.
And the Shadow mirrors him—
no mocking,
no towering,
just there.
For the first time, it isn't a monster.
It's the shape of every night he didn't cry because someone might hear, every moment he swallowed pain because he didn't want his sister to look back, every breath he forced through a body that wouldn't rise with him.
He meets its eyes.
His own eyes.
A fracture runs through him—
like a fault line rediscovering fire.
The void shivers.
Something small,
almost embarrassed,
almost shy,
glows beneath his sternum—
a warmth like someone cupping a candle against the wind.
The Shadow leans ever closer,
and instead of temptation
he hears—
The pulsar throb of a stellar core, hammering eternity's forge within fragile flesh.
His pulse stumbles.
Then steadies.
Then—
rises.
The Exiled God watches the way an old king watches a child lift a sword too heavy for him—
simply bearing witness to the moment weight meets will.
A low rumble moves through the void.
The pulsar skips a beat.
Then another.
Then the beat returns—
different now, syncing with the flutter inside Tavo's chest until it's impossible to tell which is the star and which is the boy.
His breath tightens—
the mask fogs—
the amber trembles—
and the warmth becomes a pressure, pressure becomes the spark,
the spark becomes—
Sound.
Not heard.
Felt.
His ribs burn.
His scars—every silent one—coils into a single, luminous flame.
And the moment he accepts the Shadow fully, as his companion, something ancient inside him ignites.
A note.
Clear.
Defiant.
Born from the fracture of a boy who refuses oblivion.
The void recoils.
Or bows.
Or both.
The Exiled God inclines his head—just a little.
A gesture soft as dusk, the smallest salute to the smallest flame.
The pulsar blinks—
once—
twice—
then syncs entirely to the rhythm in Tavo's chest.
Lady Death's eyes widen.
The Shadow straightens, then melts into him without a ripple—
no absorption,
no conquering—
recognition.
And the glow inside him bursts outward—
quiet as dawn,
bright as revelation—
a smokeless fire spilling into the void like a star remembering its first color.
For a moment, Tavo is something else entirely.
A prince of the infinite space where broken things dare to remake their name.
The void recoils into stillness.
Three silhouettes wait for him—
Death, the Shadow, the Exiled God—
carved from different shades of darkness and light, their outlines humming with the slow, patient weight of things that existed long before courage did.
Tavo's throat closes.
His breath scratches behind the mask.
Every instinct tells him to curl inward, to sink into the amber, to beg for the dreamless quiet he almost chose.
His legs are gone.
His strength is gone.
His certainty is dust.
He tries to speak.
Nothing comes out—
only a tremble, thin as a loose thread.
Lady Death leans closer, close enough she smells the cold on his own breath, and in his eyes she sees that Tavo, he is one wrong heartbeat away from unraveling into nothing.
His fingers curl against the pod's interior.
And still he forces sound past the tremor.
The words fall apart as soon as they try to leave him, barely a breath, barely language—
but the void listens.
The Exiled God tilts his head, like a monarch leaning in to catch the quietest plea.
Death's outline sharpens.
Tavo swallows.
His voice breaks.
But it rises.
"I came here… for my life."
No heroic shout.
No mythical song.
Just spoken like someone kneeling under a weight he cannot survive.
"And here…"
he gasps,
the mask trembling, the tears floating like tiny planets around him—
"…here I make my stand."
The pulsar screamed.
The amber—