[Third POV-Kyrene]
The darkness swallowed everything.
It was not shadow, smoke nor a fog.
It was simply dark, thick and heavy, pressing in from all sides, as if the space itself had decided to erase light. Sound felt distant, dull, like it had to fight just to exist.
From the outside, it would look like Kyren had vanished.
From where Kyren stood, nothing had changed.
He did not panic.
He did not move.
He stood calmly in the dark, hands relaxed at his sides, breathing steady.
This was not new to him.
Long before he was Kyren Finley, before paperwork and schools and borrowed names, he had existed in places far emptier than this. Places where light had never existed to begin with. What the world believed him to be now, a gifted fox spirit, a rare divine beast nearing its peak, was only a surface truth.
A useful lie.
One that kept attention away.
