Time didn't exist in the Forgotten Abyss.
Seven months... or maybe seven years... or seven centuries. For any other creature, the line between one day and the next would have been completely erased. But for Stella, the passage of time was marked by something much simpler: absence.
Absence of sweets.
Absence of the sarcastic laughter she used to provoke in Virgil.
Absence of the warm touch, of stolen moments amidst the chaos.
And now, in the midst of that pulsating void, the absence began to turn into anger.
She sat on the edge of a floating rock, her legs dangling toward the nothingness that opened up below. The "sky" of the Abyss was a veil of darkness cut by slits of light that never stayed in place, as if they were alive, breathing. The wind carried fragmented voices—echoes of people who never existed, or who had been forgotten so long ago that not even hell itself remembered them anymore.
