The world was no longer the world.
It was a fractured dream.
Kael walked through the school hallway, but with each step, the walls bent and shifted, like the air itself was alive—breathing. His mind throbbed. The Pulse inside him was getting louder, demanding something, something he couldn't understand. It wasn't just pain. It was a hunger.
"Kael..."
The whisper sliced through the air.
Aria.
She was standing at the end of the hallway, but her face was a blur—her features distorted, shifting between her face and the faceless boy Kael had seen in his nightmares. The boy who once loved her. The boy who had once been him.
"Aria..." he croaked, but his voice didn't sound like his own. It felt… foreign. It sounded like the boy who had been erased.
Her lips moved, but the words didn't come out right. Her eyes… they were full of tears, but they were empty at the same time. Like she was seeing another Kael. The real one.
Kael took a step toward her—but the world around him cracked. The floor beneath his feet splintered and shifted. The walls warped, bending at angles that shouldn't be possible. The lights above him flickered, casting shadows that twisted and danced around him. It felt like the Pulse had grown too big for him to control.
"Kael," she whispered again, but it was different this time. The voice wasn't hers.
It was the boy's voice.
"She remembers me... Kael, she remembers me..."
The hallway stretched, impossibly long. The school was gone now, replaced with an endless void of shifting colors and cracking walls. The floor broke apart under his feet, pieces floating in midair, and he was falling.
He screamed—but the sound was swallowed by the void.
The Pulse slammed against his chest. The pain was excruciating. His body trembled, and he felt something tear inside him.
His watch.
It started to glitch violently—the hands spinning backwards faster and faster, a distorted, maddening sound filling his ears. Kael reached for it, but his fingers couldn't grasp it. The world twisted, and everything shifted—his past and present collapsing into one.
His body split in two.
One Kael was running toward Aria. He could see her face—her tears. He could almost touch her.
But the other Kael, the real Kael, was drifting away.
He could feel it.
The boy whose soul was locked inside him.
He was fading.
"Aria... Please..." he gasped, but his voice was a whisper now. The boy in him screamed, but Kael couldn't hear him anymore.
---
Kael fell.
And landed on the cold floor of his room.
But this wasn't his room.
This wasn't his world.
This was a place of empty voids—like nothing had ever existed here. His bed, the chair, the walls—they were gone.
He was in a space made of nothingness—no boundaries. No rules. Just him. Alone.
And then, the Pulse hit him.
Not physically.
But mentally.
A wave of pain—raw, sharp, intense—flooded him from the inside. He gasped, clutching his chest, falling to his knees. It wasn't just the Pulse. It was the boy's pain. His suffering.
The erased Kael's memories were flooding his mind.
And in the chaos of all the pain and the flashing memories, he saw Aria again.
But she was different.
Not the Aria he knew.
The Aria from his erased memories.
The one who had died with him. The one who had been trapped in the void before Kael was stolen and rewritten.
Her eyes, hollow and cracked, stared back at him.
"She remembers me," she whispered.
"She remembers us."
---
The Pulse started to grow louder.
Stronger.
The world around him flickered.
He had lost his grip on what was real.
---
Now, the question was:
Who was he?