Simon's Perspective
Darkness greeted me not as emptiness, but as a living thing—breathing, shifting, curling through the jagged stone corridors like smoke soaked in hunger. The Abyss was not silent. It whispered. It trembled. It waited.
Footsteps echoed ahead of me—steady, regal, unhurried.
Orba did not look back, yet every step he took dragged reality along with him. The stone bent beneath his weight as though recognizing a sovereign not by crown, but by cruelty.
I followed.
Not because he commanded me, not because fear pushed me—but because movement felt easier than stillness. Stopping meant thinking. Thinking meant remembering. Remembering meant sinking.
Forward was simpler.
"Your name," Orba said at last, voice drifting like a knife edge through smoke.
"Simon," I replied.
A lie. A truth. Something between. It didn't matter. I was both men and neither.
"Simonstita," he continued.
His tone was not questioning—it was confirming. "Aumar. Blood of the Lower Human Domain. Soldier caste."
The old memories within this body flickered—military drills, wooden training swords, shouted insults, bruises earned not through bravery but through failure. Simon had not been special here either.
"Correct," I answered.
A hum, almost thoughtful.
No praise. No mockery.
Simply analysis.
The corridor widened. Faint violet crystals pulsed within the cavern walls, bleeding sullen light. The smell of sulfur and cold iron clung to the air like a second skin.
"Your death?" Orba asked without turning. "Do you remember?"
Simon's memories—flashes of a battlefield, a blade piercing flesh, cold mud, cries fading—merged with my own memories of a sterile hospital, my sister's last smile, the weight of pills in a trembling hand, the quiet that followed.
"Pain," I said quietly. "And then… nothing."
"Nothing," Orba echoed. "How familiar that word is becoming with you."
He slowed, not stopping, but drifting into a measured pace, more like stalking than walking.
"You fear nothing?"
Fear.
I had known it once.
Fear of disappointing. Fear of being forgotten. Fear of failing again and again until breath became a burden.
But that world died with me.
Fear belonged to someone else now.
"I have feared enough," I said. "There is no reason left."
"Mm," Orba mused. "A man without reason. A shape without soul. A vessel emptied clean."
He chuckled softly, like a predator amused by prey pretending to be stone.
"Do you know what the Abyss does with empty things, Simon?"
"I assume it fills them," I replied.
His laughter deepened—entire caverns trembled.
"No," he said, and for the first time he slowed enough that I drew almost level beside him.
"We sharpen them."
---
The tunnel opened into a vast overlook, revealing the domain below. A kingdom forged not by hands but by hunger—towers of bone, stone shaped by screaming runes, rivers of molten black running like poisonous veins. In the far distance, spires rose like teeth from the back of a sleeping titan.
A dragon of shadow swept across the horizon, wings dissolving into corruption as quickly as they formed. Screams echoed faintly—some joyous, most not.
And there, at the heart of it all, a citadel that pulsed like a heart carved from the night itself.
Orba's empire.
"You are very calm," he said, silver eyes scanning the realm with disinterest, as though boredom was the truest form of dominion. "Most who see this tremble. They tremble even when their minds break and run out of their bodies in shreds."
I looked at the kingdom of monsters, of death and strength and eternal hunger.
"I do not see hell," I said.
"Only a world honest about itself."
Orba turned. And for a moment—just a heartbeat—his gaze sharpened. Not anger. Not shock.
Interest.
"A curious tongue," he murmured. "A human tongue should quiver here."
"I am not certain what I am," I replied.
"Good," he said. "Certainty is the first cage."
He resumed walking. I followed.
"Tell me, Simon," he said after a moment, "when your world collapsed—what did you hope for?"
Hope.
Such a delicate word.
Such a cruel one.
I searched for it inside myself. Found dust.
"I hoped," I said slowly, "to stop hurting."
"Ah," Orba breathed. "A coward's wish in a coward's world. Yet here you are—walking into a place where pain is worshiped and despair is currency."
"I did not choose this place."
"Choice is a myth mortals invented to feel important. The strong never choose. They take."
He stopped at a platform carved into a jagged cliff. A chariot made of bone and black crystal waited—pulled not by horses, but by horned beasts that looked sculpted from nightmares and serpents.
Orba stepped onto it. I joined him.
The beasts roared—sound like mountains collapsing—and we shot forward, soaring over the Abyssal kingdom. Wind howled like souls, brushing cold against skin.
"You are quiet," Orba observed.
"I have nothing to say."
"Every creature has something to say."
He tilted his head, curious again.
"Yours simply does not believe it yet."
We passed over training pits—demons tearing each other apart, regenerating, tearing again. Over a marketplace of chained things. Over a cathedral where priests with twisted wings bled ichor into black chalices.
Orba watched none of it.
His gaze remained on me.
"What do you believe in, Simon?"
I looked forward. Into the dark.
"Nothing."
"And yet you walk," he countered. "And yet you breathe. And yet you answer."
He leaned closer—horns casting long shadows across me.
"Nothingness is not emptiness, boy. It is hunger waiting to know its shape."
I did not answer.
Silence, for once, felt fitting.
The citadel approached—colossal gates carved with screaming faces and ancient abyssal runes. They glowed faintly as we neared, reacting to Orba's presence like prey cowering before its master.
"Before we enter," he said softly, "understand this."
His tone shifted—still calm, still composed, but heavy, like stone remembering it was once mountain.
"You are mine. I will carve you. Break you. Refine you. I will see whether your emptiness is weakness…"
His eyes glimmered like dying stars.
"…or the beginning of a monster worth bowing to."
A pulse of power rippled outward, and the gates roared open.
Stone screamed. The Abyss howled in greeting.
I stepped forward.
No fear.
No anticipation.
Just motion.
Just direction.
Behind me, Orba's voice drifted like a prayer carved in bone:
"Welcome, Simonstita Aumar… to the kingdom where hope rots and power breathes."
Ahead, the darkness waited.
And I walked into it.