The Abyss was never truly silent.

  Even in the absence of whispers, even when the air was still and the shadows slumbered, Coco could feel it—like a heartbeat beneath her feet, steady, waiting. The souls that drifted in the endless dark stirred restlessly, their fragmented thoughts brushing against her mind like brittle leaves caught in an unseen current.

  She had spent what felt like an eternity within the Abyss, though time did not move here as it did in the world above. It stretched and folded, existing in loops and pauses that had no beginning or end. Yet Coco knew, deep within her core, that something had changed since the figure in the dark had confronted her. The Abyss itself had begun to shift.

  Roo and Rem remained by her side, ever watchful. Roo nuzzled against her palm from time to time, offering quiet comfort, while Rem sat poised like a sentry, its tail twitching at unseen disturbances. They, too, felt the shift—the presence of something growing, something forming.

  Coco let out a slow breath. "They're remembering."

  The souls. The lost, the forsaken, those who had wandered for so long that they had become nothing more than fragments of what they once were. Before, they had been nameless, shapeless—only voices in the dark. But now, they stirred with purpose, drawn to her, pulled by the force of something they could not yet grasp.

  Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

  One of them drifted closer. Coco turned her head, eyes meeting the faint outline of a figure—a silhouette barely visible against the abyssal black. It trembled, flickering like a dying ember, caught between existence and oblivion.

  Coco reached out, fingers just a breath away. "Who are you?"

  The figure wavered. Then, in a voice that sounded like wind through hollow bones, it whispered, "I don’t remember."

  A pang struck deep in Coco’s chest. She had expected that answer, yet it did not make hearing it any easier.

  She closed her fingers slowly, curling them against her palm. "Then we’ll find out together."

  The figure hesitated. Then, for the first time, it did not fade. It remained. And beyond it, in the shifting sea of darkness, others began to take form.

  Rem let out a soft trill of approval. Roo merely blinked, tail curling in satisfaction.

  Coco straightened, shoulders squaring. "So it begins"

  The Abyss had long been a place of forgotten sorrow, but she would change that. She had claimed it. She had been called its queen.

  Now, she would become its guide.

  And the lost would no longer be alone.