Cold.

  It creeps into my bones, numbing my skin, hollowing me from the inside out. My fingers press against rough stone, but I barely feel it. My arms are weak. My body - distant. Disconnected.

  I kneel. Breath slow. Shallow.

  Something drips down my face. Blood. My left eye. Or where it used to be. I should be in pain. I should feel something. But all I feel is the cold. A deep, biting chill that doesn’t belong.

  I exhale.

  The air is light. Too light. Like breathing nothing.

  I look up.

  The platform beneath me glows, casting a faint, ghostly light. There’s no sky. No ground. Just a void, stretching in all directions. Endless. Silent.

  I move.

  I don’t know why.

  But I crawl forward.

  Hands against the freezing stone, body sluggish. The platform extends into nothing, a thin path suspended in the dark. No walls. No horizon. Just me. Just this.

  I keep crawling.

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  Seconds. Minutes. Hours. I don’t know.

  Cold.

  Then - something ahead.

  A shift.

  A larger platform. Wider. Twisted.

  I stop. My breath catches. My pulse echoes, slow and hollow, like sound bouncing in an empty space.

  I lift my head.

  The sight before me is wrong.

  The chamber where I died - distorted, inverted. The monolith juts downward from an unseen surface, as if hanging from the sky. But the sky isn’t there. The stone above ripples, like water disturbed by something beneath.

  A weight presses on me.

  Not gravity. Heavier.

  My limbs drag, my body sinking into the stone beneath me.

  I cover the left side of my face.

  I don’t move.

  I just breathe.

  Then - light.

  A flicker in the dark.

  I squint.

  My sword.

  It rests on a smooth slate of stone, untouched. Waiting. But something is wrong.

  Shadows coil around the blade, twisting like living ink. The edges swallow the light, bending it inward. A wound in reality. A void of its own.

  I raise my left hand, pressing my palm against the place where my eye should be. Blood leaks between my fingers, just as cold as my frozen skin.

  My right hand moves.

  Fingers stretch forward, reaching for the hilt.

  A pulse.

  I jolt. My arm seizes, my fingers burning. Strength floods through my veins, a force shoving its way back into my deadened flesh. The moment I grip the hilt, the stone beneath me reacts—white glyphs igniting, casting pale fire against the darkness.

  I look down.

  A single drop of blood runs down my left hand and drips down on the cold stone below me.

  Then - heat.

  Burning.

  The back of my left hand ignites, pain flooding through my nerves. My vision explodes - blinding light, consuming the left side of my world, even though there’s nothing left to see.

  It grows.

  Brighter. Brighter.

  A flash.

  A roar.

  Thunder cracks through the void, splitting through my skull.

  A final surge of burning light - through my hand, through my eye, through me—

  Then -

  Nothing.

  Darkness.