Surrounded by nothing but pitch-black liquid, a young man sank slowly into the abyss beneath the pool.
The darkness around Lysander was absolute, heavy and endless, like a vast sea of ink that had swallowed light itself. There was no surface above him, no bottom below, but only the suffocating embrace of the black liquid and the quiet certainty that he would soon disappear within them.
Strangely, the pain was gone.
The agonizing wound on the right side of his chest, from Abel who obliterated half his torso, no longer tormented him.
It was a strange feeling. Not relief, not numbness, but simply absence, as if this part of him had been ripped from him so cleanly that it had never even existed from the beginning.
For a moment, Lysander tried to swim upward, to escape the ritual's pool.
He moved his arms, kicked his legs, forced what little strength remained in him to struggle against the pull of the abyss. His body answered weirdly, every movement weak and distant, as though his flesh no longer belonged to himself.
Lysander rose a little, then stopped. The black liquid dragged him back down with patient inevitability, for his strength was not enough.
The worse was that slowly, almost imperceptibly, something else was happening.
At first, Lysander thought it was only exhaustion, but then, he realized the truth.
He was losing parts of himself. Not flesh, not blood. Something deeper, something far more terrifying.
As he continued to sink, pieces of himself seemed to drift away into the endless darkness, torn from him without pain, without struggle, without resistance.
The thought of escape grew faint, the reason he had fought so desperately to survive his First Nightmare began to blur.
Why had he wanted to rise?
Why had he wanted to return to the waking world?
Why had any of it mattered?
Here, in this bottomless dark, pain was no longer a concern. Fear was distant. Even death seemed powerless in the land of forever.
A blissful drowsiness settled over him, soft and embracing, whispering that he could simply close his eyes and sleep.
Sleep for eternity.
Sleep until all burdens were gone.
Sleep until nothing remained.
And as that seductive deam wrapped around him, more fragments of what made him who he was slipped away.
First, the person he incarnated in the First Nightmare.
Then, the one he was in the waking world.
His name.
His goal.
The path he had clawed forward in the slums, step by step.
Jet.
He was slowly losing Jet too.
A girl he had taken as his adoptive sister after the death of his soulmate he had loved. A stubborn, sharp-tongued devil who had become one of the few reasons for him to come home. For a dreadful moment, even she began to dissolve into the dark.
But the cruelest loss of all came after.
Rose.
Her name, once so bright, dimmed like a dying sun that would not bask the world in its radiance ever again. Her voice, once so familiar, faded as the world lost its reason to sing. Her laughter, once so vivid, became a distant echo of a forgotten time where happiness was taken for granted. The warmth of her touch upon his cheek when she wiped his wounds, the fleeting moments they had stolen beneath a sea of stars atop the rooftop, the grief of losing her in this accursed world. Everything began to be taken by the abyss, memory by memory, until not even her face remained whole in his mind.
He should have panicked, should have raged, should have fought to reclaim what was his, but even that strength was being stolen from him.
And yet, not everything vanished.
No matter how much the darkness took, one thing remained clearer than ever in his mind.
Her eyes.
Two pink eyes, luminous and gentle, shining under the moonlight like the petals of a rose blessed by grace.
They lingered in the depths of his soul like a dying ember that refused to be extinguished.
Far away, weakened and distorted, a voice resounded.
The Nightmare Spell.
He should have heard it, but what the voice reached was only broken fragments of himself.
[Your soul is being corrupted.]
[Your soul is—]
Adrift in that endless black sea, time lost meaning.
At some point, after what felt like both a thousand years and a single fleeting dream, a thought surfaced from the sinking vessel of his consciousness.
A question, no louder than a whisper, as if afraid to disrupt the calm of eternity.
"What am I…?"
The abyss offered no answer, for it had forgotten what it had taken from him.
His ruined body continued to drift downward, changing as it sank. What had once been human was becoming something else, twisted, irregular, monstrous. A form stripped of humanity, corrupted into something unrecognizable.
And yet, even as his flesh betrayed him, his soul clung stubbornly to the last thoughts it held.
What am I? Who am I?
And her eyes.
Only those questions remained.
Only those eyes remained.
Then, deep below, where even light should have drowned and forgot to shine, Lysander saw something.
At first, it was no more than a pale blur suspended in the dark. But as he approached closer, it became clearer, emerging from the abyss like a truth given form.
A girl.
She looked to be around his age. Her skin was smooth and pale, like carved marble, untouched by the filth of the black blood around her. She floated in stillness, serene and unreal, with her eyes closed as though resting in some blissful dream.
He could not move, could not breathe and could not even think.
He simply stared as the distance between them vanished.
Then, slowly, the girl opened her eyes.
Pink. A soft, radiant pink.
In that instant, the abyss changed, and within the deepest part of Lysander's shattered soul, something stirred.