Far away, beyond shattered stone and fractured reality, three Elders paused as one.
They felt it.
The cord that tied them to their brother snapped. His essence gone....not consumed by Enso, not erased by void. No, this was something else. Something worse.
Something else.
A silence hung between them, heavier than any word.
Finally, one Elder's lips parted. His voice cracked with something rare...fear. "…That was not Enso."
Another's gaze shifted downward, his knuckles tight. "No. It was something older."
The third said nothing at all. His silence screamed loudest.
None of them moved. Because moving meant facing it.
And for the first time in centuries, even Elders hesitated.
------
Rei gasped awake.
Darkness pressed on his skin like chains. No ground, no sky, just an endless hollow that tasted like old graves. His chest heaved. His limbs felt like borrowed wood. His sword was gone.
Above him, balanced on a shard of black stone that ought not to float, stood a figure: barefoot, still, small as a mountain and quiet as thunder. Crimson eyes opened and pinned him.
Raga.
Rei's throat tightened. The word fought its way out. "What are you?"
Raga tilted his head, amused and patient. "I am what comes when everything else has ended."
Rei reached for some steady breath and found none. "The end of what?"
Raga's smile was slow and sharp, practiced cruelty. "Breath. Name. Memory. Hope. You will learn what it is to be erased and still be remembered as a wound."
The stone hissed. Rei's nails dug into his palms. "You're death."
At that, Raga laughed. It sounded like a bell rung inside a tomb. "At last, the boy names what he carries."
Rei tried to stand and failed. His voice came out raw. "Why me? Why inside me?"
Raga's eyes narrowed. He stepped closer, the shard cracking under his foot though nothing should break here. "If I had chosen an ordinary person, my hunger would have consumed them. Their flesh would hollow and their soul would be gone. They would not have stayed long enough to feel me."
His voice softened just enough that Rei could hear the cruelty like a confession. "You are hollow enough to hold me, and strange enough to keep me balanced. Your Enso fights mine. It does not bind me, but it keeps me from burning you up on the spot. You are an imperfect cage, and I am very fond of cages."
Rei's jaw trembled. "I fought. I bled. I kept going."
"You crawled because I allowed it," Raga said. "I watched you stumble for a long, delicious time. I whispered. I waited until you were thin with trying. Then I entered."
Rei's breath hitched, rage sparking through the fear. "Get out. Leave me. Go away. This...this is my fight. The Elders are my enemy. Not you. Let me end them."
Raga stepped even closer. The darkness around him contracted. He smiled as if Rei had said the name of a favorite toy. "You think they are yours to end? Fool. They are old bookkeeping. They write and rewrite the ledger of life and death. They thought erasing a village would be enough. They thought killing a child could close a wound. They were wrong."
Rei spat, every word like a stone. "I am not yours."
"You already are," Raga said gently. "I am you in the only way that matters now. Your flesh. Your pulse. Your bone. You will carry my hunger until I am full or until you are nothing."
Rei lurched to his feet, every fiber trembling with refusal. "No. I will not accept you. Say the word and I..."
Raga cut him off by leaning so close Rei could feel a cold breath across his ear. "I am what you cannot deny. If I left, you would unravel. My presence keeps you whole enough to move. The only thing I ask is recognition. Say the word that you accept me and you will not die by my hand."
Rei's voice broke into a scream. "I will never say your name as welcome! Never! Go! Go away!"
Raga laughed, not cruel this time but delighted, as if Rei had finally understood how precious his stubbornness was. "Ah. The stubborn heart. You have always been loud. You think you can choose who dwells inside you. You cannot. I choose what I feed."
He stepped back and folded his hands, as if settling in for a long exam. "I could end you now. One slow squeeze and every thought in you would go black. I choose not to, because I want to see the work. I want to see how a body balanced on divine and damned moves when pushed."
Rei staggered. "You can kill me whenever you like."
Raga's smile was patient, the way a blade watches a wrist. "Yes. I decide who dies and when. As long as I do not choose your silence, you walk. Say the word and I will be a companion. Deny me and I will make you a lesson. Either way, you will learn the feel of my teeth."
Rei's throat closed. He had nothing left to answer. He had bled out words until they meant nothing.
Raga's eyes glinted, the voice that had first greeted him at Grimwake sinking back into the marrow. "I carved life long before men learned to count seasons. I have watched kingdoms forget themselves and gods blink out. With you, I will learn something new: what happens when death sits inside an argument with divinity."
Rei felt the weight of all his failures and everyone he'd lost press down. He opened his mouth and a sound came....half plea, half challenge. "Get out, or I will make you."
Raga cocked his head and smiled, savoring the note in Rei's voice. "You already did. You shaped me. I am not outside you to be chased off. I am a thought in your skull that refuses to be quiet. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can use me."
Rei's fists closed until his knuckles shone white. "I will never accept you!" he whispered. The word had no power left. It sounded small and brave.
Raga hummed like someone pleased by a mildly interesting meal. "Then everyone else will have to die trying to take you from me. The Elders will come, the world will come, and I will still be here. I enjoy a good hunt. I am patient."
He let the silence stretch. Then, softer, almost fond: "You feel your guilt, your grief. I feel it too. It is delicious. You will carry it like an armor that cuts. I like you because you hurt honestly."
Rei's lids trembled. "I am not yours."
"You are," Raga said. "I am you. The sooner you learn your reflection, the less painful this will be. Say the word."
Rei's throat ached. Memory flashed behind his eyes....rain on a path, a white cloak, a last soft command: Live. Something in him answered that command with the smallest of sparks. He thought of faces he could not quite name, of a village that would not exist except in a wound.
Raga leaned close enough that Rei could smell iron and old wood. "If you will not speak, I will carve the word into your bones. I do not need permission to be patient."
Silence settled again, heavy as a tombstone.
Rei could not say it. He could not hand himself over like meat. He had fought to be himself, small and filthy and human. The thought of inviting death in tasted like surrender.
Raga's smile softened into a hunger with the patience of winter. "Then prepare," he said. "For every thing that reaches for you will learn my name. I will not be polite. I will not be quiet. I will be everything you have tried to deny. The choice was never offered. It only seems like one."
He stepped back and let the dark close around Rei, leaving the boy broken and breathing. The black shard under Raga's foot trembled and then splintered into a dozen points that vanished into nothing.
Outside, the remaining Elders did not move. None of them reached. They did not strike.
Far from them, in the ruined halls of what had been safety, a distant tremor answered like the first step of a storm.
Rei curled on the cold floor and, for the first time since Hurukoya burned, the knowledge that something else now lived inside him felt like a second heartbeat.
Raga's voice slid into the quiet, close enough now that Rei could feel it in his teeth. "You will say it. The world will teach you. Or I will. Time is interesting, little vessel. We will see which lesson pleases me more."
And somewhere, far beyond the hush, a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been the cracking of the world echoed for an instant before the darkness swallowed it whole.