The trial began without warning.
One moment I was perched on the temple edge, Nyx's voice fading like smoke in my mind. The next—agony. Pure, blinding agony that erased everything else.
In the endless void—thicker than night, colder than forgotten stars—Nyx stood alone upon her throne of writhing shadow. Her pale skin gleamed faintly, tattoos shifting like living ink across her arms and chest, the inverted cross pendant swaying gently between her breasts. Void-eyes stared into the emptiness before her: a vast, featureless expanse where no light dared linger. Yet she saw it all—the invisible chamber, the chains, the unraveling soul of her chosen. She watched in silence, claws tapping once against the arm of her throne.
After an eternity compressed into moments, her voice cut the silence—low, velvet-edged, laced with quiet fury.
"That is enough, don't you think?"
The reply came from everywhere and nowhere at once: a chorus of a hundred voices layered in discordant harmony—male and female, ancient and infantile, whispering and thundering in the same breath.
"No. It is necessary. It is meant to go on for a year... if he can last up to that."
Nyx's black lips curved in a slow, dangerous smile, though her eyes remained cold abysses.
"No," she said softly. "He can't."
The voices overlapped in cruel amusement, shifting from a child's giggle to an elder's rasp.
"Yes... I agree. Your chosen is pathetically weak, I must say. But the least he can do is survive it for a month. He must survive it for a month."
Where are and who are you truly Nyx asked
You will know soon enough
The world shattered and reformed around me: a vast, endless chamber of jagged obsidian walls, dripping with something thick and black that smelled like rotting flesh and burning sulfur. Chains—rusted, barbed—erupted from the floor, snapping around my wrists, ankles, throat with bone-crushing force. They yanked me spread-eagled, suspending me inches above a pit of writhing, razor-edged shadows that hissed like starving serpents.
No air. No sound but my own heartbeat thundering in my ears. Then the first wave hit.
It started in my stump—the severed wrist that had barely begun to heal. Something burrowed under the scabbed flesh, hot and squirming. I screamed as it pushed deeper, a thousand needle-legged insects hatching inside the wound, chewing through muscle, tunneling into bone. They spread like fire: up my arm, into my chest, gnawing at my lungs until every breath was a wet, bubbling rasp. My skin bulged and split, pus and blood weeping from cracks as the things erupted outward—black, chitinous horrors with mandibles dripping acid that ate deeper holes.
I thrashed, chains biting into flesh, flaying skin from my limbs in long, bloody strips. My mind fractured under it—make it stop, please, anyone, Nyx, fuck, help me—but there was no one. Only silence and the wet crunch of my own body devouring itself from within.
Death came slowly. My heart stuttered as the insects reached it, burrowing into the chambers, flooding them with venom that burned like molten iron. Vision tunneled; I felt my soul tear, a psychic rip that echoed the physical one. Then—blackness. Sweet, merciful nothing.
But death didn't save me.
I woke gasping, chains still biting, body whole again—for a heartbeat. Then the next horror.
Fire this time. Invisible flames licked my skin, blistering it layer by layer. Flesh bubbled and peeled away in sheets, exposing raw muscle that cooked and split, fat sizzling like meat on a spit. The pain was beyond screaming—my throat raw from the last death, voice reduced to guttural croaks. I smelled myself burning: hair singeing, eyes boiling in their sockets until sight burst in pops of jelly. My mind shattered further—memories forced to the surface, twisted. My parents' screams as the gateway monsters tore them apart, replayed in vivid loop while my own flesh sloughed off bones. My sister's face—last time I saw her, small hand reaching as they dragged her away—warped into accusation: You failed me. You always fail.
Soul-deep torture: every regret weaponized, every loss a blade twisting in the ether of my being. Isolation crushed me—no voice, no touch, no hope. Just me, alone with the unraveling of everything I was.
I died again—charred skeleton collapsing as organs liquefied and poured from my mouth in steaming torrents.
Woke again.
This cycle—endless. Flayed alive by whipping shadows that peeled skin in precise, agonizing strips, exposing nerves that sang electric fire with every breeze. Drowned in acid that melted flesh from bone, eyes dissolving last so I watched my own face slump into a skull. Impaled on spikes that grew from within, erupting through guts in wet punches, twisting slowly to prolong the shredding.
Each death worse. Mind breaking: hallucinations of the Ghost Team, faces melting as they blamed me for the botched job. Soul fracturing: whispers of the Forbidden One—not named, but felt—a vast, hungry void promising this was only the prelude.
I begged in the gaps between deaths—silent, broken pleas to anything. Nyx. Gods. Myself. No answer. Tears mixed with blood, snot, bile. Body, mind, soul: all tortured in symphony. No escape. No help. Just pain that built and built, wave upon wave, until I forgot what mercy felt like.
Until even hate dissolved into whimpering surrender.
And still, it continued.
The trial had only just begun.