The room was dark—no light, no life. Just an endless black void.
Kael's heartbeat echoed in his ears, his body frozen in place. He tried to move, but it felt like his skin was being weighed down by something… unnatural.
Pulse—
It was there again. Like a drum, thumping through his chest, vibrating through his bones.
He couldn't escape it. It had always been there. Always in the back of his mind, gnawing at the edges of reality.
And then—
The static.
His eyes flickered. The world around him began to glitch, bend, and distort.
The floor cracked open, and tendrils of darkness slithered from beneath. They wrapped around his legs, pulling him down.
He screamed.
But his voice was drowned out by the endless buzzing of the Pulse.
She wasn't supposed to exist.
The words echoed in his mind like a haunting refrain.
Kael's head snapped to the side, the voice coming from somewhere beyond reality.
And there she was.
Standing at the edge of the black void, her face now perfectly intact, her smile twisted in an eerie way.
> "You think you've been chasing answers, Kael?" she whispered, her voice distorted, like a radio with poor reception. "You think your memories are your own?"
Kael's heart clenched. Her face. It was so familiar, but he couldn't place her.
Her eyes, though… empty. Hollow. And yet, there was a pain in them—something he recognized, but couldn't understand.
He reached out to her, but the moment his hand touched the darkness, the tendrils wrapped tighter around his body, dragging him further into the void.
"Stop," he begged, gasping for air. "Please…"
But the world only twisted more.
The walls pulled inward, suffocating him, trapping him in the center of his own mind.
And suddenly—
It all fell apart.
Memory.
A flash of light.
His mother, her hands covered in blood, whispering "I'm sorry, Kael…" as the world burned around them.
The black shadow of a man standing behind her, pulling the strings of her fate.
And then… his own scream. The last sound of his past life.
Kael's knees buckled.
He couldn't breathe. The pain—it was real.
His eyes shot open, and he was no longer in the black void.
He was back in the classroom, in the hospital, in the empty world.
Everything was broken.
The sky was torn apart. The sun flickered like a broken lightbulb, casting dark shadows that moved against the wind.
And there, standing in the middle of it all—
The girl.
Her smile wasn't a smile anymore.
It was a grin—wide, unnatural. The smile of something that wasn't human.
She held something in her hand. A red notebook.
And as he reached for it, his mind shattered again.
---