Birds squawked, reptiles hissed and beasts growled. All heads in the forest snapped towards a point, towards Arsanguir. Few had escaped the piercing and tangling tendrils that had encompassed a 302km radius throughout the forest. All the creatures looked and stared in horror as they watched the bodies of the creatures caught by the tentacles.
The creatures caught didn't even get the time die, their bodies shrinking into the tendrils, absorbed to fuel their ever going conquest into the wilderness. Nothing was spared; trees, soil, stone, water, air even the light itself, let alone the forests inhabitants, all absorbed. Consumed.
The air lefts vacuums around the tendrils afraid to fill the gap just to be absorbed into the pulsating masses. Water refused to obey gravity refusing to be absorbed into the purple entity, unstable ground dared not crumple lest it befall the same fate. Trees groaned as they were absorbed from the tips of their leaves to the bottom of their roots.
Light shunned the purple masses shifting the colour switching to an abyssal black and then darkness itself recoiled against the tendrils. Finally, in a scene that would've shattered language itself, Arsanguir's body ceased to be a vessel and became a verdict. His skin, once taut over muscle and bone, now shimmered with an oily translucence that revealed movement beneath — slow, coiling, patient. His silhouette fractured in subtle shifts, his outline betraying something greater inside, like a mirage that pulsed in defiance of shape. He did not move. He simply became.
And the world noticed.
Not with force. Not with warning. But with withdrawal.
The first sign was scent.
The forest, once saturated with the heavy perfume of soil and chlorophyll, exhaled — not a breeze, but a fading. The aromas thinned, hollowed. Breath became tasteless. The musk of life was drained from the air like sap from a dead tree.
Then came light.
It dimmed, not in hue but in presence. Shadows no longer bent around objects — they simply detached. The tendrils remained visible, but not lit — they were outlined in void, not contrast. The canopy swayed, but the sun above gave no warmth. It stared like an eye too old to blink.
Next, sound fractured.
The chirps, hisses, growls — gone. Not silenced, but muted by choice, like nature itself had turned its ears away. Even the creak of branches ceased, the groan of dying trees falling into themselves like broken lungs. A silence stretched wide and long, not empty but judging.
Then the earth.
Beneath his feet, the ground did not tremble. It stiffened. Hardened. As if refusing to allow itself to be beneath him. Small roots unknotted from the surface. Mycelial strands severed themselves in ritualistic abandonment. Life pulled back.
Finally, came the signal.
A knowing. A pressure not on the skin, but under thought. It surged through Arsanguir's spine like a slow tide of ash — not pain, not fear — but certainty. The forest had not merely stepped away. It had cast judgment.
Arsanguir stood in the epicenter of absence.
The air did not touch him. The light did not reach him. Even gravity seemed reluctant to acknowledge him, as if space itself debated whether he still belonged to its geometry. He should have felt cold. He should have felt weight. But there was no should anymore.
There was only is.
And is had changed.
Inside his mind, something ancient stirred — not a voice, not a thought, but a memory that didn't belong to him. A memory of something vast, prior to language, prior to flesh. It had no name, no symbol, no prayer. It had only a feeling: You are no longer one of them.
His breath — if he still drew breath — came in quivers not of fear but of dislocation. It was like trying to remember how to be alive in a world that had forgotten how to permit it. The trees knew. The ground knew. The light, the sound, the scent — all of them had stepped back, recoiled not out of hatred, but reverence.
Or perhaps horror.
His hands, if they could still be called that, twitched. Skin peeled in veils of shimmering haze, revealing not blood, but meaning beneath. His form was now a scripture etched into space, and the tendrils — those writhing extensions of the unknown — did not obey him.
They were him.
Each pulsing coil that drank the world was a syllable in his unspoken name. Each absorption was a breath in the exhale of cosmic rejection. He wanted to speak. To scream. But his mouth — did he have one still? — could not form words that reality could tolerate.
He tried to step forward. The world refused.
The ground beneath retreated subtly, like water dodging heat. Each motion he made was both accepted and refused, like the universe negotiated with itself whether to let him exist for another second.
Then something inside broke.
Not in him — but in it. In the forest.
A deer at the farthest edge of the 302km radius collapsed without contact, eyes bursting like glass marbles in a kiln. It had looked at him. That was all. And the forest howled — not in sound, but in rupture. Birds took flight not to escape but to vanish. Reptiles turned to soil. Beasts shed their forms and curled into fossilized poses before time could register the loss.
He dropped to his knees, or whatever remained of them. Not out of weakness, but because the weight of being seen by the world in this state was too great.
Arsanguir was alone.
Not as a matter of geography.
But as a matter of definition.
He was no longer part of the world.
He was now its boundary.
And boundaries are not comforted. They are obeyed. Or crossed. Or feared.
He whispered into the void — not to be heard, but to remember what sound once was.
"…I didn't want this."
And the void whispered back.
"We did…"
And there with nothing else to do, with nothing else he could do. He lay down, but not on the ground. His centre of mass remained the same as he curled up into a ball.
…and the world did not notice.
It had already turned away.
There was no ground. No cradle. No up, no down. Arsanguir curled inward — not from grief, not from defeat, but from absence. He collapsed into himself like a dying star, not to die, but to fold. The motion was futile, abstract, instinctual — a gesture carried from some forgotten life when curling up still meant safety. But there was no warmth now. No nest of earth or tangle of roots to hold him. Only the idea of resting.
And even that began to fray.
His body — if it could still be called that — did not bend. It yielded. Not to force, but to itself. Knees drawn in, arms wrapped tight, spine curved like a question that had never been answered. He floated in the idea of motion, unmoved. Not levitating — suspended in exemption.
Time didn't pass.
It observed.
Each second stretched, watched, hesitated — waiting to see if he would decay, or define.
But he did neither.
Instead, he dreamed. Or maybe he remembered. Or maybe the act of curling pulled echoes from some before-time.
He saw a field. Gold. Warm. Hands — his? — touching the tops of grass. A sky bloomed with colour. His own laugh, barely a ripple in air. The whisper of water over stone. A name he recognised caught on the wind like a silk thread.
And then it vanished.
The memory was not stolen. It was overlayed — like a horrific projection on a pristine wall.
In its place: the tendrils. Watching. Not looming. Not devouring. Waiting.
He understood.
This was not death.
This was the moment after.
After change.
After choice.
After the world decided it could not hold him, and he decided he would not resist.
He was not cast out.
He was kept out.
A relic of something that had not happened yet. A border written in flesh and void, curled into a fetal truth at the edge of all knowing.
The stars above — if they still existed — had turned their backs. The soil below — if it still remembered being soil — had retracted its veins.
Arsanguir, the name, the form, the question, remained.
He was not waiting.
He was not sleeping.
He was becoming stillness itself.
And stillness, once complete, does not end.
It simply remains.
But even stillness, absolute and unbroken, creates echoes.
Not from motion. Not from sound. From meaning.
And something — somewhere — heard.
Not above, not below, not beyond. Within.
A ripple threaded itself through the fabric of his stasis. It did not tug. It did not pull. It simply suggested.
An invitation.
Or a memory of one.
The tendrils around him stilled. Not paused — attentive.
Arsanguir did not open his eyes. He did not need to. Sight was an afterthought now. He knew the suggestion, knew it without knowing. Not a thought. Not a word. Not even an urge. But it was there — pressed behind perception like a sealed door in a buried ruin.
And something behind that door knocked.
Once.
Soft.
Intentional.
The void around him did not respond. It had no stake in the interruption. But the part of Arsanguir that was still question, still not yet, recoiled. Not from fear — but from recognition.
This was not the world.
This was not the forest.
This was not even the universe that had rejected him.
This was something that had not been allowed to exist until he had been removed.
A parasite of possibility, now germinating in the wound where he had been torn free of meaning.
He felt it spiral — delicate, serpentine — winding itself through cracks that had never existed before. Not breaking. Not forcing. Simply fitting.
The pressure behind the sealed door grew.
Not with force, but with presence.
Like something that had never spoken learning how to form a word.