“The first lie is that life begins at birth.”

  The chalk fractured in her grasp—too delicate for devastation, too obedient for mercy. Charcoal dust lingered mid-air, obstinate against the white abyss. Not descending. Not liberated. Merely suspended—like a blasphemous thought paused at the edge of confession.

  Her fingertips sank into her cheek, flesh folding like damp vellum. Legs moved in slow, metronomic rhythm. Up. Down. The exhale of a tired machine.

  Stella blinked. The chamber blinked back—pupils constricting beneath the antiseptic glow.

  Her dress was neither opulent nor tattered, but something beautifully dissonant. The fabric clung like a memory unwilling to fade—silver, like the strands cascading from her scalp, a frayed halo orbiting what others named a body. (But bodies are meant to feel real, aren’t they?)

  The floor might have been marble. Or frozen glass. Or polished bone. Warmed now by the ghost of her presence—though warmth should’ve been beyond her. (Was she truly alive enough to leave heat behind?)

  White. White. White. Walls stretched like a scream paused mid-vomit. The ceiling mirrored the inside of a cleansed skull. Was it concealing something? A scar? A deity? Or simply the coagulated remnants of a dream she was forbidden to recall?

  She didn’t ask. She created.

  Lines spasmed beneath her fingertips, more vital than flesh. Shapes writhed, unwilling to stay dormant. Her wrists throbbed. Her fingernails blackened beneath dust and effort. The room seemed to hunger for her conclusion.

  And sometimes—when silence bared its fangs— the drawings detached themselves.

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  Like flesh sloughing from a radiant burn. Like a falsehood being unsaid, syllable by rotting syllable.

  Today, she conjured a boy.

  Spines of aureate flame, tousled like storm-lit wheat in mourning. A prince sculpted from chalk and borrowed breath. Hers. (Was that blasphemy?)

  "Arden," she murmured— the name melted on her tongue, saccharine and sacrilegious, like forbidden fruit crushed beneath a child’s teeth. A lullaby plundered from the altar of a forsaken god.

  Then—the realm quivered. Not in wrath. In remembrance.

  Stella rose—fluid, precise— like a blade unsheathed from velvet. No fear. (Had she ever been taught the taste of terror?)

  Above, the heavens ruptured. No thunder. No spectacle. Just a clean incision through the monochrome.

  From the breach poured darkness—viscous, ravenous. Not emptiness, but negation. A celestial oil, veined with constellations flickering like ancient insects trapped in cosmic resin.

  And then— It descended.

  Not a body. Not a soul. A silhouette sculpted from absence, a paradox given gravity. A wound with wings.

  Something fell. (Or perhaps— the world simply knelt to receive it.)

  "...Stella, why do you dream?"

  The voice was not spoken. It was a laceration—threaded into the fabric of space with surgical indifference.

  Somebody's foot met the alabaster floor. From his sole, a sable ichor bled—lascivious, viscous—spilling like oil over sacred marble. It writhed. Hungered. Then recoiled—snapping back into him like a serpent into its coil.

  His form mimicked a man… but only as a shadow mimics flame. Limbs elongated with deliberate error, as if the architect of his being forgot mercy. Shoulders tilted like fractured sculpture. His flesh—or what passed for it—was a negative silhouette threaded with stellar detritus. Galaxies pulsed beneath his skin, a dead firmament given form.

  And then, he spoke— though there was no sound.

  Stella did not hear it.

  She tasted it. It curled on her tongue like rusted hymns and scorched nectar. The syllables dripped into her blood, reverberating in her marrow like sacrilegious lullabies spoken through a cathedral’s ruin.

  She said nothing.

  (For how does one respond to a god who carves his question into the latticework of your bones?)