The darkness didn't end.
Morwenna continued falling through the void, without a body to measure the passage of time, a heartbeat to count, or a breath to hold. She was nothing more than a solitary spark suspended in an endless, suffocating blackness. There was no bottom beneath her, no horizon ahead, and nothing to tell her how far she had fallen.
Then the nature of the darkness began to change.
It didn't brighten in any ordinary sense. Instead, its very texture shifted, much like stepping from one room into another without walls or doors to mark the passage.
Weight returned first.
It settled across her shoulders with sudden, crushing gravity. Then came the sharp sensation of air against her skin. She had small hands again, a fragile chest that rose and fell in a panicked, uneven rhythm, and a body that could feel the world around it.
The heavy, unmistakable warmth of another life rushed in to meet her.
. . .
Heat and the cloying scent of cloves surrounded her earliest memories.
The air was thick with humidity, carrying the sharp smell of antiseptic mixed with the spicy sweetness of kretek smoke drifting in from somewhere outside.
A young woman held her close. Her face was marked by an exhaustion that seemed far too deep for someone her age. Tears fell silently from her eyes, landing on the infant's swaddling.
Morwenna could barely see through the blurred vision of a newborn, but the oppressive warmth of that room and the salt of her mother's tears remained with her.
She had been born in East Java, in a room where the sun beat against the walls until they seemed ready to melt.
As she grew, the world often seemed too loud and painfully slow.
She was a bright child. Too bright, according to her teachers and the neighbors who watched her with narrowed eyes. She had learned to read before she ever stepped into primary school. She could finish her homework long before the teacher had finished explaining the assignment to the rest of the class.
She was full of questions, but no one seemed to know how to answer them. Or perhaps they simply didn't want to try.
Yet she was also considered a difficult child.
Her attention often drifted away from the world around her. During lessons, her eyes would lose focus as her thoughts wandered toward something only she seemed capable of perceiving. Her teachers dismissed it as daydreaming, while her mother simply called her lazy.
Eventually, she learned to hide those parts of herself.
She concealed her wandering attention, her endless questions, and the brightness that made other children uncomfortable. She learned how to make herself smaller and quieter, how to keep her thoughts to herself and avoid drawing unnecessary attention.
It was much easier to be ignored than noticed.
Most of the time, it worked.
. . .
Stories became her only refuge.
She read about hidden worlds, children carrying secret bloodlines, and strange creatures that could speak to those brave enough to listen. She stayed awake until dawn, the glow of her phone casting an electric-blue light across her face.
She devoured stories about rewritten destinies and second chances, about fix-its and time travel. She wanted something like that with a desperation she could never quite put into words.
She longed for a place where her wandering thoughts finally made sense, where the things that made her different were not weaknesses to conceal but gifts to embrace.
But in that life, she was only a girl who knew too much and belonged nowhere.
She remained an observer in her own existence.
. . .
As she grew older, the drifting only became worse.
She struggled to hold on to things the way other people seemed to. Friendships gradually faded as she forgot to reach out, while her interests appeared briefly before disappearing just as quickly.
She would begin projects with fierce enthusiasm, pouring everything into them, only to abandon them a few weeks later without understanding why the initial excitement had vanished.
She moved through life on a hollow kind of autopilot.
University came and went. She earned a degree in a subject that left her cold, then settled into a quiet, unremarkable job. She smiled when expected and nodded when required. She learned the routines, followed the rules, and did what everyone seemed to expect of her.
Inside, however, she felt as though something had been carved out of her.
She wasn't empty. Emptiness suggested that something could still be placed inside and fill the space.
She was hollow.
It was an absence where something vital should have been, a space she could neither name nor reach. No amount of pretending could fill it.
. . .
The years blurred into a long period of quiet endurance.
There were therapy rooms that smelled of lavender and dust. There were kind eyes and gentle questions that she simply couldn't answer because she lacked the words to describe the void inside her.
There were pills that promised clarity but left her trapped beneath a thick chemical fog. She stopped taking them, tried again, and eventually stopped once more.
The dark periods came without warning.
Sometimes they lasted for weeks, during which the ceiling became her entire world. Getting out of bed felt like lifting a heavy stone. Even something as simple as taking a shower could seem like an impossible task, as though she were being asked to climb a mountain with no strength left in her body.
She survived each day, but she never truly lived through them.
Thriving seemed to belong to other people.
She was simply waiting for something to change, though she no longer knew what that something might be.
. . .
She was twenty-eight, perhaps twenty-nine. By then, the numbers had begun to lose their meaning.
Her apartment was small, and its only window faced a brick wall that never received direct sunlight.
She sat on the couch with her laptop open, the light from its screen reflected in her eyes.
She was reading about a child with white hair and green eyes, a girl who carried an immense burden of magic and could speak to serpents.
She closed the laptop and tried to stand.
But before she could steady herself, the floor seemed to rise toward her.
She didn't feel the impact.
All she saw was the ceiling.
It was white, cracked, and strangely distant. Her breathing quickened, then slowed. The sounds around her faded, and the hollow space inside her seemed to collapse at last.
. . .
Darkness returned.
She fell once more, but this time the void didn't hold her.
Something was pulling at her, drawing her not downward but upward and outward, toward a warmth she could barely remember.
It was a thread she hadn't felt in years.
She tried to resist. Her life had been exhausting, but it was the only life she knew. The familiar darkness was all she had ever understood.
Yet the pull didn't weaken.
It stretched her thinner and thinner until she became nothing more than a single thread of light suspended against the black.
Then fissures began to appear in the darkness.
Golden light seeped through the cracks, spreading across the void.
And then she heard a voice.
It was fractured by distance, faint and almost impossible to distinguish, yet unmistakable.
Morwenna.
It wasn't the name she had carried in the quiet, cloves-scented apartment. It wasn't the name written on documents or spoken by people who barely knew her.
It was the name called across stone and water.
The name bound to blood, ancient lineages, and the people who had refused to let go of her.
Morwenna.
For the first time, she stopped fighting against the pull.
Instead, she reached toward the voice with everything she had left.
The golden light surged forward.
And swallowed her whole.
===
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