sciousness returo him in a rush—like gasping for air after being uer too long. His body jerked awake, desperate and disoriented, while his mind gged behind, struggling to catch up. The scream that built within his chest colpsed us ow, crushed by something heavy that had taken residence behind his ribs.

  He blinked, his vision swimming as his eyes struggled to focus. Each bli shards of pain behind his eyelids. Above him, the sky loomed like an alien presehe color of faded bruises and dried blood, swollen with clouds that seemed to press down upon him like an invisible weight. They pulsed with an unnatural violet glow, like the slow beat of a dyi, thumping against the sky. And in the midst of it all, a bck sun hung low, its hollowed ter burning with an eerie, oppressive light, casting a twisted shadow over the world below.

  His fingers dug into the damp soil beh him as the world spun viciously around him. Bdes of tall grass framed his vision like prison bars, swaying in a wind. He forced himself upright, his lean frame shuddering with the effort, muscles remembering strength his mind couldn't pce.

  The world around him felt wrong—not merely unfamiliar, but fually vioted—too still, like the breathless moment before violes. The st of decay was thick, the air cloying as though it g to his skin. There were no familiar sounds—no birds, no creatures calling to one another. Only the wind, restless and insistent, tugging at his hair like it too was desperate to escape.

  The silence pressed in, heavy and absolute. He exhaled, a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding—but the sou fn, disected, as though it beloo someone else. Something was wrong. Not just with this pce, but with him.

  He reached for a memory—anything that could ground him. A pce. A purpose. A single fragment of his past. His hands shook as he grasped the empty spa his mind, feeling it slip through his fingers like sand. The only thing that he found… was his name. Just his name. A single, hollow word in the void.

  His name—no, his truonomis was Nero. He tried to reach beyond it, searg for his on name, but it was gone, erased from his memory. His on he one he should carry, the ohers should call him by, was gone—lost somewhere deep in the void of his mind.

  The memory of who he was, of what he should know—burned like shattered gss inside his skull, each fragment refleg nothing but emptiness where recolle should exist. His identity was reduced to a single word: Nero. Just that. A hout text, floating in a void where his past should have been.

  "Finally awake, are we? How disappointing. I was hoping you'd died." The voice slithered through his sciousness, not heard with ears but felt within the marrow of his thoughts, threading through the byrinth of his broken mind. It was cruel, mog, and intimate in its intrusion.

  Nero’s breath caught. He turned his head in every dire, searg, but the voice had no souro echo. . It simply was. His fiwitched, instinctively he reached for a on that wasn’t there.

  “Ugh. Watg you fil is exhausting. we please get a move on before I lose what little patience I have left?”

  Nero swallowed against the dryness in his throat. “Who are you?” His own voice felt distant, like it barely beloo him.

  He flexed his fingers again, his body tense, expeg—what? An answer? A faatch the voice?

  “You know who I am,” the voieered, as if it could taste bitterness in Nero’s fusion, “Don’t pretend you’ve fotten.”

  A flicker of something dark and buried deep, stirred within the deepest parts of his fractured mind. The voice sounded familiar, a presehat wasn’t just known, but woven into the very fabric of his being. His fingers ched until his knuckles whitened, and his eyes squinted as memories began to unravel.

  Sinthos.

  The through his mind like a bde, sharp and undeniable. He couldn’t fet it, something so fual to his very existehis parasite of the soul, this shadow self. His stant panion, his tormentor, his curse. The ohing that he was bound to remember even whehing else had been stripped away.

  "Oh, It remembers me. How toug.” Sinthos dripped with venomous pt. “Perhaps it will remember how to be useful ."

  Doing his best to ighe voice’s pt, Nero gritted his teeth and attempted to rise from the ground, the a proving much more difficult than it should have been. Each muscle screamed in protest, as though he’d been fighting for turies—his body a battlefield of flicts and old wounds he couldn’t recall.

  "Your weakness disgusts me," Sinthos hissed. "All that power festering inside you, and you barely stand."

  "ower?" Nero mahrough ched teeth, a flicker of frustration in his voice "What happeo me? Where are we?"

  "Questions, questions. Always questions, never solutions. Your memory may be gone, but your tedious nature remains intact."

  Nero slowly steadied himself on his legs, the familiar strength gradually returning. The field he found himself in stretched endlessly in all dires, tall grass rippling like a golden o. In the distance, something that might have been a mountain range broke the horizon—jagged teeth against the bruised sky.

  "Tell me what you know," Nero demanded, his voice sharp, as though cruelty were his native tongue.

  "I know you're a failure," Sinthos replied, with what might have been ughter skittering across Nero's mind. "I know we're not where we were, but not where we are. Though, if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. Ynorance is one of my few remaining pleasures.”

  Nero realized he wasn’t going to make any progress with the voice. Steeling himself, and driven by instincts that felt both fn and intrinsic, he set his sights on the distant mountains.

  “The mountains, aye? Not a bad choice,” Sinthos uttered in his mind. ”Though you might get caught by them, somewhere between here and there.”

  “Them?” hought, fusion flickering through his mind.

  “You feel it too, don’t you? The wrongness of this pce?” Sinthos paused, as if sav the moment. “I would ask if it reminds you of that time, but I doubt you’d remember.”

  Nero felt it—the wrongness of this pce, something unnatural that twisted the air around him. He felt as if he were being watched from every ahe hairs on the back of his neck prig, refusing to settle.

  He took a hesitant step forward, his feet dragging through the tall grass. The wind stirred, but there was no fort in its touch. Every breath he took felt heavier, as if the air itself was suffog him.

  Sinthos gnawed relentlessly in the back of his mind. “You know it won’t be that simple. It never is.” It whispered, the words scratg the back of his mind.

  Nero ched his fists, sileng the voi his mind, and pressed forward. The mountains looked distant, impossibly so. They seemed to stretch further away the more he walked, as though the ndscape itself ying tricks on him.

  A strange buzzing filled the air. At first, it was faint, barely a whisper, like a far-off swarm of is. But with each step, it grew louder, more urgent. It thrummed beh his skin, crawling into his bones. He gnced over his shoulder, half-expeg something to leap forward from the shadows of the grass, but there was nothing. Only the endless sea of grass, swaying in the wind like the tentacles of some vast, patiey.

  “You’re alone,” Sinthos whispered into his thoughts, like ice water, crawling down his spihere’s no one here but you… and me.”

  Nero’s stomach twisted. The words were almost f in their malice, a sick kind of truth that settled deep in his chest. He couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something out there, watg. Every step he took felt like a slow march toward something unknowable, something he couldn’t grasp.

  He quied his pace, his heart pounding in his chest, each beat reverberating in his ears. The mountains were still far off, but they had to hold something. Anything.

  The buzzing stopped. The wind fell silent, as if the world itself was holding its breath. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled, a warning he could barely uand. Then, a sound—soft at first, like a leaf brushing against the ground, but unmistakable.

  He wasn’t alone.