The snap back to the room wasn't a fade; it was a collision.
Kaelen's eyes flew open, and the first thing he felt was the suffocating weight of his own skin. It felt thick, greasy, and far too small. The air in the room was no longer the sharp ozone of the void; it was stale, smelling of old paper and the guttering lamp. His lungs burned. They had forgotten the rhythm of the atmosphere, and for a terrifying second, they simply sat idle in his chest. He had to force them. In. Out. It was a manual, clunky process, like turning a rusted crank.
He looked down at his hands. They weren't shimmering anymore. They were just pale, fleshy things with dirt under the nails. He gripped the arms of the wooden chair, expecting his fingers to pass through the grain, but the wood bit back. It was hard. It was real. And it felt utterly meaningless.
There is a quiet, desperate lie in the way a person trusts the ground beneath them. Most live their entire lives convinced that "solid" is a permanent state, never realizing that their reality is held together by the thin, fraying thread of their own conviction. To Kaelen, the wood of the chair was no longer a comfort; it was a cage. He was experiencing the horror of the return—the realization that the "material" world is just a heavy, clumsy suit we wear to keep the cold out. The moment one begins to wonder how their fingers move, or why the pulse stays in their wrist, the suit begins to itch.
The fear was gone, but so was the spark. The facts remained, but the "ache" was missing. It was like looking at a hearth full of grey ash; he knew it had once been hot, but it offered him no warmth now. He hadn't just survived the shredding; he had been hollowed out.
"The guest has departed, but he took the furniture with him," a voice murmured from the corner.
The King was leaning against the far wall, his black metal crown catching the flickering yellow light of the lamp. He didn't look like a teacher; he looked like a predator watching a wound close.
"I can't... I don't feel right," Kaelen rasped. His voice was flat, lacking the vibration of a living thing.
The King pushed off the wall, his movements fluid and impossible. "Right is a word for architects and moralists, Kaelen. You are merely... spacious. Tell me, does the bird mourn the weight of its shell once it has cracked it? Or does it simply marvel at how light the air has become?"
"It's cold," Kaelen said, though he didn't shiver. "Everything feels cold."
"Perhaps the world was always this temperature," the King replied, his featureless mask tilting slightly. "Perhaps you were just too feverish to notice. You have traded your fire for a mirror. Most spend their lives burning; you have chosen to reflect."
The King stepped toward the door, his shadow stretching across the floor like a spilled inkwell. "Go out. See the theater of the breathing. Observe the 'something' you nearly became. You might find that the numb are the only ones who can truly see the play."
Kaelen stood up. His legs felt like stilts. He needed to leave this room. He needed to see something that wasn't a book or a mask. He stumbled toward the door and yanked it open.
He walked down the hall, his boots clicking with a rhythm that felt foreign. He passed a servant—a young girl scrubbing the floors. Usually, he'd offer a nod. Now, he just watched the rhythmic, mindless sway of her shoulders. She wasn't a girl; she was a clockwork arrangement of meat and bone, ticking away her seconds in a world made of cardboard and habit.
It is a curious thing, how easily the "sacred" value of a life vanishes when the observer stops believing in the fiction of the soul. We walk through the world assuming everyone else is "real" simply because we are too terrified to admit that we might be the only ones currently awake.
He reached the iron doors of the courtyard and shoved them open. He needed the sky. He needed to see if the stars were still just points of light or if they were holes in the fabric of the world.
The courtyard was bathed in a moon that looked less like a celestial body and more like a bleached bone pinned to a velvet shroud. The air was crisp, but Kaelen didn't feel the bite of it. He stood on the gravel path, listening to the crunch beneath his boots—a sharp, rhythmic noise that felt like it was coming from a miles-long distance.
He looked at the high, sweeping arches of the palace, the marble white and gleaming, designed to project strength and eternal legacy. It was a monument to human will, yet it felt as flimsy as a paper lantern. We spend our entire lives nursing the delusion that our actions are the ink of history, that our choices are the tectonic plates upon which the world rests. We obsess over the weight of our legacy and the "truest value" of our decisions, yet we never for a single, terrifying moment stop to consider the alternative: that it was we who were meaningless from the very beginning.
The guard stood at the far end of the garden, a tall silhouette holding a rifle. The long, black barrel of the gun caught the moonlight, a cold line of steel that seemed more "real" than the man holding it. Kaelen watched the man's chest rise and fall. He saw the way the guard shifted his weight from one foot to the other, a small, human movement to ward off the boredom of the night.
To the old Kaelen, that man was a loyal soldier, perhaps a father, a person with a name and a story. To the Kaelen that had returned from the ledge, the guard was a twitching curiosity—a meat-clock wound up by the habit of existing, ticking away his finite seconds for a kingdom that was nothing more than a shared hallucination. Even the weapon he carried—that heavy, indifferent engine of lead and spark—felt like a desperate attempt to exert power over a world that didn't truly exist.
"Do they look like ghosts to you yet?"
The voice was a dry rasp in Kaelen's mind, an echo of the King's tone but without the King's presence. Kaelen turned, but the shadows under the willow tree were empty. There was no bruised silk, no jagged crown. The King wasn't there to guide him; the King was likely back in the room, or perhaps he had never left the pages of the book at all.
Kaelen was alone with the silence. It was a terrifying, hollow independence.
He looked back at the guard. He felt a strange, cold impulse—not a desire to hurt, but a curiosity to see if the "theater" would react if he walked off-script. He began to walk toward the man, his boots crunching loudly on the gravel.
The guard snapped to attention, the rifle coming up in a smooth, practiced motion. The click of the safety being disengaged was a sharp, ugly sound in the quiet air.
"Halt! Who goes there?" the guard called out. His voice was full of a self-important weight.
Kaelen didn't stop. He didn't even slow down. He watched the guard's finger tighten on the trigger. He saw the flicker of doubt in the man's eyes—the frantic machinery of a "meaningful" life trying to process a prince who was walking like a ghost.
Kaelen realized then that the bullet wouldn't matter. If the gun fired, it would just be lead passing through a suit of skin. The meat would stop, the clock would break, but the "nothing" that Kaelen had become would simply remain, standing on a ledge that the guard couldn't see.
He reached the guard and kept walking, brushing past the barrel of the rifle as if it were a blade of grass. The guard froze, his mouth hanging open, the weapon trembling in his hands. He didn't fire. He couldn't. You can't shoot something that has already accepted its own insignificance.
Kaelen reached the edge of the courtyard where the garden ended and the forest began. He looked up at the stars. They were jagged, piercing holes in the dark—tiny leaks in a reality that was struggling to contain the vast, silent pressure of the nothingness outside.
He took a step into the trees, finally understanding that the only thing more hollow than the void was the life he had fought so hard to keep.