Emptiness...
That was all that Vira felt. All he saw in his mother's sunken, endless eyes.
No fear.
No pain.
Just... nothing.
The room smelled faintly of mold and something rotting, a mixture he couldn't place. The silence pressed against him like a living thing. Even the faint hum of the broken ceiling fan felt wrong — its slow clicks not marking time, but measuring some unseen heartbeat. Vira imagined it was his mothers, whispering a warning he couldn't decipher.
The curtains near the window swayed, though no breeze danced with them. Shadows pooled in the corners, thick and sticky... almost like spilled ink trying to reach at Vira slowly. He didn't remember opening the curtains, but it didn't matter anymore.
Vira stood at the foot of the bed, hands hanging loosely, his chest hollow. No tears came. No muscle reacted. Even the instinct to blink felt muted and unimportant. A void had consumed him — he could feel it crawling up from his stomach, coiling around his very being, squeezing.
"...Mom?"
The word stuck in his throat. Foreign. Alien. He had never spoken it like this before. She was gone, and none of it felt real.
'This can't be happening... you're not dead, it's not possible!'
Vira argued with himself at the reality of her death and yet.
Her chest lay still.
Her fingers curled unnaturally, almost as if her last moments she was grasping for just a single moment of more life. Her eyes — half open and staring past him, into what? Into nothing? Or something that had been waiting all along?
A faint, wet sound broke the silence. It was subtle, almost ignorable... but wrong.
The shadows in the far corner shifted. They didn't shrink from the light; they spread, folding over themselves, absorbing any luminescence that was in the vicinity. The shadows moved in a rhythm that shouldn't exist.
Something was alive there. Not fully visible, yet not entirely hidden. It breathed... or maybe the air itself did. Vira's stomach tightened, but it wasn't fear. It somehow was recognition.
A strange shape took form and emerged from the shadows... or maybe the shadows emerged with it.
It was elongated and twisted, like a nightmare carved from absence. Its body flickered, collapsing on itself and stretching in impossible ways — almost like reality couldn't keep it whole.
Its head tilted, curiosity bloomed in its nonexistent eyes. It looked at him.
Or rather... it looked at his mother.
Vira didn't move. He couldn't, his legs refused. His mouth stayed trapped closed. A voice inside whispered that it was already too late.
'What... what the hell is that?'
The entity stepped forward. Limbs bending against reason, its footsteps distorted like every one it took crashed into reality, its outline folding in and out of the room. No joints, no bone, only motion. Its face — if it could be called that — was a hollow void, a cavity where features should have been. Yet, Vira felt it. Felt it staring, pressing, weighing him down.
A low sound filled the room. Not a groan, not a growl, something else. Something impossible. It reverberated through the walls, the floor, the air, even the silence itself.
Vira's chest tightened. Pressure, thick and slow, pushing inward. His lungs struggled to circulate air, he had to force himself to breath. Everything around him felt smaller, and more compact.
The entity hovered over the bed, twitching unnaturally, its limbs folding and unfolding as if testing the rules of the world and the higher power that spoke for it.
"...Hungry..."
The entity spoke. Its voice sounding like a husk yet it was filled with something. Something sinister and unnatural.
The shadows wrapped around Vira's mother. He saw her fingers disappear first, her arms, and lastly her body and entire being vanished, swallowed, absorbed by the thing without life.
Vira's lips parted, trembling:
"N-nullborn..."
Its hollow gaze turned towards him. Even in that absence of form, it looked at him. The room dimmed, shadows coiling around him as it advanced.
He ran.
Not out of fear — something deeper, older than fear, drove him. Stories his mother whispered as a child surged through his mind. Tales of entities that devoured, that lingered in the dark waiting, in The Void.
And now he believed them.
A screech tore through the room behind him. No human, no animal, no thing should be capable of that sound. It vibrated through his bones, through the air, through his soul. A liquid, almost gurgling wail, impossible to place. It was hunting him.
Vira dove behind a dresser, pressed against the cold hard wood, breathing shallow. He prayed, he prayed to anything that would listen — not to be saved — but for strength, for the power to survive.
Something answered.
Reality fractured around him. Air shimmered, the edges of the walls warping, stretching and ripping like wet paper. The world pulled away, and then nothingness came, cold and absolute.
---
Elsewhere in a facility — a man entered the Energy Reading room, sharply dressed, stern, and high-ranking.
"How is everything looking here Agent?"
He looked at the shorter blonde next to him, as she glanced at a screen and then turned to the man:
"Everything appears normal, sir. No spikes in Nyxar readings... no Nullborn activity near the city."
The man's face relaxed into relief — momentary satisfaction.
Not a moment later alarms blared. Red warning lights filled the room. Screens flickered, and the building itself seemed to glow crimson as chaos erupted.
"What's happening?!" He barked. His face drained of color; he had never seen the system respond like this.
"There's a massive rise in Principle energy here!"
The agent shouted, pointing at the map. Her finger pressed hard against the screen, almost breaking it.
"Principle...?"
The man whispered, his face now looking inhumanly white. Only one being emitted that kind of energy.
"A Concept!?"
The thought made him nearly retch. One of these entities descending in its true form had never happened before. Everyone knew they only appeared through avatars — and even that was rare.
"Sir, we need to contain it before it grows beyond our control! Whatever it is seems to be weak currently. We have to initiate Axiom, or we'll all die!"
The agent grabbed onto the man's shoulders shaking him as she explained what they had to do, he could only stare in disbelief before collecting himself.
"An Axiom only works for Avatars! Are you insane?! This is beyond our power!"
Rage flared in the agent's eyes. How could her superior give up so quickly?
"What fucking choice do we have?!"
Panic spread through the facility. A concept — here? In its true form? Such an anomaly was unprecedented, it was a fairytale to scare kids. Yet one was actually here?
The man spoke into the intercom, calling in two others of equal rank. They drew energy from deep within their souls, holding them like sacred weapons.
"Are we ready?"
"Yes!"
"Just hurry — I don't want to die!"
The three placed the orbs into a capsule. Energy surged, beams of pure light launching from the building toward the location of The Void.
The world itself seemed to freeze as everything depended on this protocol to succeed.