The wind on the balcony didn't pull at Kaelen's clothes; it pulled at his history. It was a cold, silent gale that tasted of nothingness, a draft blowing out from the gaps between the stars. He stood on the edge of the jagged stone, his boots—if they were still boots—feeling the vibration of a ledge that was only as solid as his remaining willpower. Below him, the violet clouds churned like a slow-motion storm, swallowing the very concept of a "bottom."
"Do you feel it yet?" the King asked. He remained a silhouette of jagged iron and bruised silk, staring out into the empty expanse. "The way the void tries to fill the spaces where your 'self' used to be?"
Kaelen tried to answer, but the effort of speaking was becoming a monumental task. To speak, he had to remember how to shape air with a tongue. He had to remember that he had a throat. "I... I'm in the chair," he rasped, the words sounding like two stones grinding together. "This is... the book. I'm dreaming."
The King turned his head slowly. The pale, featureless mask seemed to catch a flicker of the violet lightning from below. "Dreaming is a luxury for those who still have a bed to return to, Kaelen. You aren't dreaming. You are merely experiencing the friction of your soul rubbing against the truth. You think you are in a chair because your mind is a coward. It clings to the four walls and the yellow lamp because it is terrified of the horizontal."
The King stepped closer, his heavy robes leaving no sound on the stone. He pointed a gauntleted finger into the swirling mist.
"Look there. In the hollows of the fog. That is what happens to those who 'dream' without an anchor."
Kaelen followed the gesture. At first, he saw nothing but the shifting violet haze. Then, he saw a shape. It was irregular, a flickering outline of a man that seemed to be made of static and broken glass. It wasn't walking; it was twitching through the air, its limbs bending in ways that defied anatomy. It had no face, only a jagged hole where a scream should be.
"That," the King whispered, "is a Definition-Seeker. A soul that reached the Unstructure but couldn't stop trying to find a door. It spent its final moments trying to remember the name of its mother, the color of its childhood home, the weight of its own skin. Now, it is nothing but the memory of a search. It is a 'nothing' that still thinks it is a 'something.' And it is very, very hungry."
As if hearing the King's voice, the static-shape in the mist froze. It turned toward the balcony, its movements jerky and unnatural, like a puppet with tangled strings.
Kaelen felt a cold spike of genuine, primal fear. His heart—the heart he was still manually trying to pump in that distant chair—gave a stuttering, painful throb.
"If you want to survive the hunt, Kaelen, you must stop trying to be a person," the King commanded, his voice growing heavy with the weight of the black crown. "A person has a heart that can be stopped. A person has a throat that can be cut. But a void... a void has nothing to lose."
The static-creature lunged. It didn't fly; it simply erased the distance between the mist and the ledge, appearing a few yards away. It smelled like wet salt and old paper.
"Prove it," the King said, stepping back into the shadows of the spire. "Prove that your reality is more than a measly, fragile lie. Or let the Unstructure edit you out of existence."
Kaelen looked at his hands. They were shimmering again, the iridescent violet light glowing brighter beneath his skin. He didn't have a sword. He didn't have magic. He only had the desperate, failing belief that he was still Kaelen.
And the creature was already reaching for his face.
The static-creature didn't strike with a fist. It struck with a conceptual hunger. When it collided with Kaelen, there was no sound of impact, only the screeching internal noise of a thousand dying memories. Its limbs—sharp, flickering edges of broken "definitions"—tore into him, but they didn't draw blood. They drew identity.
Kaelen felt his childhood—the smell of the palace kitchens, the weight of his first practice sword—being ripped out of his mind. He felt the very concept of "up" and "down" being chewed away by the entity's jagged mouth.
The pain was absolute, but it was an irregular, psychological agony. It was the feeling of being erased while still being forced to watch.
The King watched from the shadows of the spire, his black metal crown a silhouette against the chaos. He didn't offer help. He didn't offer a weapon. He simply bore witness to the shredding.
Kaelen's knees buckled, but he didn't fall. Not because he was strong, but because he was starting to forget what it meant to collapse. His mind was screaming, a high-pitched frequency that drowned out the wind of the void. 'Let it burn,' a voice whispered in the back of his failing consciousness—a voice that sounded like his own, yet stripped of all hope. 'Let the pain burn me. If the pain dies once it has consumed everything, then at last, I will be the one still standing.'
It was an involuntary surrender. He stopped trying to push the creature away. He stopped trying to "be" Kaelen. He simply became a hollow space, a vessel with no walls, allowing the Definition-Seeker to feast on the measly value of his fragile reality.
The creature gorged itself. It vibrated with a manic, flickering energy as it swallowed Kaelen's fear, his name, and his history. It grew bloated with his "material" lies, its static form becoming denser, heavier, and more "real" as it stole from him.
But as it became more real, it became more limited.
By consuming Kaelen's "definitions," the creature inherited his mortality. It inherited the very fragility it sought to devour.
Kaelen watched—or rather, the "thing" that used to be Kaelen watched—as the creature began to crack. Having fulfilled its hunger, it had nowhere left to go. It had become a "something" in a place that only allowed "nothing." With a final, silent shudder of light and old-paper scent, the creature vanished. It didn't retreat; it simply ceased to be relevant to the Unstructure. It had eaten its fill of a lie and died with it.
When the violet mist cleared, the ledge was silent.
Kaelen remained. He was still standing, though his form was now as translucent as the fog, his edges blurred and shimmering with that iridescent violet hue. He was a survivor of an extraction, a man who had won by losing everything.
He looked at his hands. They were no longer shaking. They weren't even sweating. He didn't feel the cold anymore, because he no longer remembered what "warmth" was supposed to feel like.
"You let it take the bait," the King said, stepping back onto the stone. His voice was no longer a vibration in the room; it was a physical weight on Kaelen's shoulders. "You allowed yourself to be hollowed out. Most would have fought until they shattered. You simply let the hunger pass through you."
Kaelen turned to look at the featureless mask. His heart, in that distant chair, gave one slow, heavy thud. It didn't need permission anymore. It was just an echo now.
'I am still here,' He proclaimed with a tired, restless voice that seemed to fade before he could finish.
"Indeed,"