The world collapsed into a single point of searing white.
AJ had known pain before—the curious sensation of his form being torn, stretched, or damaged—but this was different. This was his core unravelling, threads of his essence coming undone like a sweater caught on a nail.
The axe fell from what had been his hand, clattering against stone with a distant, hollow sound.
He tried to reach for it, to anchor himself to something solid in a reality that suddenly seemed fluid and unreliable.
But his limbs no longer responded to his will. Instead, they shimmered, dissipating into wisps of luminescent fog.
Too much, a voice whispered from somewhere inside him. You've gone too far.
The chamber around him—filled with the wide-eyed faces of his companions—tilted sideways, then upside down.
He was falling, though there was no direction to fall in. Just endless contraction, his once-expansive body shrinking inward like a dying star.
A memory surfaced: Walter explaining black holes during one of their long nights camped beneath the stars.
"They consume everything," the old man had said, "even light can't escape for its event horizon." AJ felt that he was becoming his own black hole, collapsing around a damaged core that pulled the rest of him into its fracturing centre.
His consciousness, that usually spread evenly throughout his form, was condensing into a smaller and smaller space. His thoughts becoming fragmented.
I'm dying, he realised with a strange sense of detachment.
The sensations arrived like visitors to an empty house, knocking but finding no one to welcome them.
He was smaller now. Much smaller. The world seemed distant and vast, as though he viewed it through the wrong end of a telescope. Faces loomed above him, their expressions uncertain.
His perception flickered. Time skipped forward again.
Something touched his edge—a soft vibration against the membrane that separated what was him from everything else.
They were offering him food. Normally, he would have absorbed it instinctively, drawn it into himself, and broken it down into mana.
Now, the task seemed monumental. He gathered what remained of his will, forcing his surface to dimple around the offering. The effort was like trying to lift a mountain with a thought. He could feel the food but couldn't absorb it.
I'm sorry, he tried to say.
Voices rose and fell around him like waves against a shore. He recognised them individually—Ethan's rumbling bass, Victor's clipped consonants, the gentle rise and fall of Walter's measured speech, but he couldn't follow the conversation.
Only Lily's voice seemed to penetrate his consciousness consistently, like sunlight through fog.
"...moss from the forest. He absorbed it so quickly and easily back then."
Yes. The moss. The memory surfaced: cool, damp vegetation laden with natural mana, practically jumping into his form.
So easy to absorb, so nourishing, but there was no moss here, just the cold indifference of stone and the diminishing warmth of his own dying light.
His awareness narrowed further. The voices faded to a distant murmur. His perception of the external world dimmed as his consciousness turned inward, towards the damaged core.
It was beautiful, a crystalline structure that had once pulsed with golden light, now webbed with fractures that leaked his essence into the void.
He had never seen it directly before, had never needed to. Now, as the external reality receded, it was all he could see.
A strange peace settled over him. If this was the end, at least he had used himself well. He had protected them. Protected Lily. It was worth the cost.
The darkness was approaching when something new entered his diminishing sphere of awareness. A beam of light.
It pierced the membrane of his form without breaking it, a sensation both foreign yet strangely comfortable.
The light found his core. Encircled it. Seeped into the fractures like water into parched earth.
The pain, which had faded to a dull background noise, briefly intensified. The light was changing something, reshaping the broken pieces of his core, knitting them back together in a pattern that was familiar but also new.
Then, with a click, the pieces aligned. The fractures sealed. His core pulsed once, twice, three times—tentative beats of a heart finding its rhythm.