What do you think of yourself?
What do you think when something you held is gone? What you find was already leaving, and will leave again. What was lost may never return. We carry that knowledge without being taught it.
Loss is the one thing you cannot prepare for, even when it feeds on your memories, corrupts your feelings, and leaves the world tasting like ash in the place where something whole used to be. What is the worth of anything you gain when time will take it? And what of the moments when your memories are simply gone, offering nothing to hold?
It began with absence.
A vast and perfect absence.
It started when the memories were not there anymore.
It was a darkness.
Quiet.
Peaceful.
Blind.
But it became more.
There was a light.
And there were colors.
Yellow.
Red.
Blue.
Yellow again.
Then, it became white. All-consuming, blank, yet full.
Until his eyes opened, and they met the sky.
His eyes did not open to light. They opened to the absence of darkness, which was its own kind of discovery: the sky above him, pale gray and indifferent, clouds pulling slowly across it the way water moves when no current urges it anywhere. The sun was somewhere behind all of that gray, leaking through in a form so weakened it cast no warmth, only color, a muted silver-white that belonged to neither morning nor evening but to the suspended hours between. The trees at the edges of his vision moved. Their branches shifted in a wind he could feel on his skin but not hear, leaves turning their bellies skyward in that particular, private language of foliage before rain. The sound the branches made was low and patient. It did not acknowledge whether he was alive or not.
"Where am I?"
The words left his mouth before he understood he was speaking them. They rose into the air and were taken by the trees. No answer came back.
He pressed his palms against the earth and pushed himself upright, slow and careful, the way a person moves when they are testing whether their body still belongs to them. The soil yielded beneath his hands, cool and slightly damp, the kind of ground that has absorbed many mornings. Blades of grass dragged across his knuckles as he shifted his weight forward. He rubbed at his eyes with one hand, felt the soft chaos of his black hair falling against his forehead in the breeze. The gesture was automatic. It asked nothing of him in the way of memory.
But who is that? Who is doing this?
He looked down.
His shirt caught his attention before anything else did. Long-sleeved, stitched from squares of fabric in colors he had no name for yet felt attached to: soft blues like the underside of a cloudy sky, yellows the shade of old cream, pinks pale enough to be almost white, greens the color of new growth at the tip of a branch. Each square had been joined to the next with tight, careful stitching. The seams were precise. Someone had made this with care, had chosen each patch deliberately, had sat somewhere and worked with patient hands toward this particular result.
"It's nice," he murmured, pressing his palm flat against the fabric. The texture was warm, already holding the heat of his skin. "But... why?"
The question reached further than the shirt.
He looked at his pants, plain white and worn at the hems as if they had walked a long road before arriving here. His shoes matched the shirt in their patchwork of soft squares, colors that were by all logic ridiculous and by every feeling correct. His attire made no sense, and yet wearing it felt like the truest thing in a morning full of strangeness.
Someone chose this for me. Or I chose it. And I cannot reach whichever it was.
His gaze dropped to his hands. Light brown skin, smooth across the backs of his fingers, the knuckles unblemished, the palms unmarked by any labor he could identify. His fingers trembled when he held them still and let them, a fine, private shaking that came from somewhere deeper than cold. He turned his hands over. He pressed one palm against the other. They were warm. They were his. He could feel the pressure of one against the other as a definite, real thing, but the person they belonged to existed somewhere just beyond his reach.
He touched his face. He found the small mole beside his left eye, traced the line of his jaw, pressed two fingertips to his lips. Young skin. Soft. Unmarked. He touched the face with the same careful attention a person gives an object they found without knowing where it came from.
He had no name.
He had no memory of where he had been before the darkness that had preceded this pale sky.
He had no understanding of how he had arrived in this grass, in these clothes, in this body, in this quiet that was not quite quiet.
There is no reason to panic about that, he thought, and the thought surprised him by arriving at all. Something is wrong and I am not afraid of it the way I think I should be. Is that wrong too?
He stood, and his legs held him. The wind moved through his hair. Around him, the air carried the clean, complicated smell of earth and green things, the particular sharpness of living ground after recent moisture. He turned slowly where he stood, taking in the trees, the grass, the pale sky above the canopy.
And then he saw them.
People.
Dozens of them, rising from the ground across the forest floor, scattered at intervals of several meters, each one pressing upright from the grass with the same disorientation he had just passed through. They wore clothes from a dozen different contexts: the pressed blue of a nurse's uniform, the fraying cotton of athletic shorts, the stiff crisp of office attire, a thin hospital gown that clung to its wearer's frame and provided nothing against the chill. Their faces, despite every difference in their ages and their dress and their postures, carried the same expression. They were trying to determine whether what surrounded them was real.
They look like me, he thought. Lost in the same direction.
"Are we possibly... dead?"
The words came out before he fully formed the intention to speak them. He turned his right hand over in front of him and pressed the fingers of his left hand against its back. The skin was warm. The sensation was precise and undeniable.
"Is this heaven?" he added, looking out at the growing number of people around him.
More were rising now, pulling free of the grass as though the earth had been holding them down and had finally released its grip. Some wrapped their arms around themselves. Some stared. Some had already begun to move, circling their small patches of ground, turning in the particular directionless way of people trying to find a reference point.
"What in the fuck happened? Can someone tell me?"
The voice came from a man in red and white athletic shorts, his hands balled at his sides, his face twisted in the kind of frustration that is close kin to panic.
"Shit. I was just promoted and now this?"
A young man in office blacks yanked at his tie as though it had been what was choking him. He let it fall loose, already forgotten.
"Or hell?" he said quietly, to himself, and followed it with a short, dry sound that was only technically a laugh. It left his throat feeling strange.
Around him, the voices were multiplying, voices full of anger and confusion spilling into the morning air.
"YES! Those fucking ass-kissing cops thinking they'll catch me, huh?"
A middle-aged man in a worn jacket shouted at no one, his voice cresting with something that sounded closer to triumph than terror.
"Hey, you fucker! Come with me, let's have some fun!"
"H-help... where's my friends?"
"Stay away from me, you motherfucker! I'll beat your ass!"
The voices layered over each other, tangling into a sound that filled the trees without going anywhere in particular. Some people were already walking, their steps aimless and urgent at once. Others argued. Some screamed at each other across the grass.
This is humanity, he thought, watching them. This is all of them, in one morning, in one clearing, trying to understand what happened before their minds are ready.
And then something slipped through the chaos at the edges of his attention, a color, a quality of warmth, the trace that memory leaves when it has been taken away. The sky above had been pale. But before the pale sky there had been color: first yellow, warm and close, then something shifting orange, then red, fire-red, blood-red, the red of something large and old consuming itself.
There was fire, he thought. Before this. There was fire, and I don't know what it was burning.
A voice cut through the crowd noise, louder and more specific than the rest.
"Where's dad? I need my medicine now!"
He turned.
A young woman in a hospital gown had been standing near him, but by the time he found her she was already going down, knees folding without warning, hands reaching for nothing. The thin cotton gown billowed and settled. Her face was tight with something near panic, her breathing audible from where he stood.
He moved toward her before thinking about it, his hand reaching out.
"Can I help you..."
"You! You're, no!"
She recoiled from him as though his approach was the threat itself, pulling herself upright with the same motion, backing away fast, then turning and disappearing into the growing bodies around them.
His hand hung in the air, still extended toward the space where she had been.
I wanted to help and that made her afraid of me. So either I look frightening, or helping does.
He lowered his hand and stood with the sound of the crowd rising around him, the voices mixing into something like weather. A few of the people near him were clearly beginning to remember things, details of lives that had preceded this gray morning, because their fear was transforming into the particular grief of someone who has just understood what they have left behind.
They remember. All of them seem to. And I have nothing. Not a name, not a face from before, not a single thing I came from.
He looked down at his hands again. Raised them to his chest, turned them over, watched the faint tremor in his fingers.
Is there something wrong with me specifically? Or is there something right about this?
He tilted his face toward the sky.
The gray was changing.
He noticed it gradually, the way you notice temperature dropping before you notice you are cold: the pale, suspended quality of the clouds was thinning. Their edges were losing definition, bleeding into the air around them, until the sky behind was not merely gray but something deeper, something that pressed down on the air the way stone presses on the ground below it. The light was draining away, replaced by a blue-black depth that arrived too quickly, as though the day had simply decided to stop. The trees became silhouettes. The grass at his feet turned from green to gray to a color that had no name.
"Or I spoke too soon?" he said to himself.
The words came out shaped like a joke, but his jaw had already tightened, and his eyes tracked the accelerating dark with the attention of someone who knows they are watching something real.
Then the moon appeared.
Red.
The warm red of embers it was not, nor the rich red of clay earth. This was thinner, more sickly, the red of a wound left too long. The moon hung low and too large, its surface featureless, throwing light that was less like illumination than like the absence of the dark being temporarily interrupted. Everything it touched looked wrong. The faces of the people around him, already pale with fear, took on an undertone of fever in that light.
"Red?" he whispered.
The air changed with the moon's appearance. The crowd noise, which had been continuous and overlapping, cut off. He felt it before he understood it: the particular heaviness that settles on a space when many people, all at once, stop speaking. Heads tilted upward. Bodies went still. Whatever argument or flight had been underway became, for this moment, irrelevant.
The moon pulsed. Once, twice, a slow and rhythmic swelling of its red light, each throb sending a ripple of color across the black above them.
Then something appeared in the sky above the moon.
It began as formlessness, a coiling and uncoiling of dark against the red behind it, moving against gravity, against wind, against everything the eye expected from the behavior of matter. It climbed and spread, the edges of it blurring and reforming, until it had gathered itself into something that approximated a shape: too tall, proportions that refused to resolve into anything the eye could hold steady, limbs that seemed to continue past where they ought to end. It was not a man. But it carried the negative space of one, the outline of a figure standing very far above them against the burning red of the moon's face.
It did not move.
And yet its presence was a weight in the chest, a cold and specific pressure against the back of the skull, the particular chill of something vast attending to something small.
Then its eyes opened.
Two points of red ignited within the dark of it, concentrated and unblinking, burning with the steadiness of something that requires no fuel. They were not eyes in any sense that corresponded to eyes as he knew them. No white, no pupil, no iris. Only that red, precise and absolute, fixed on the crowd below with an intensity that moved through distance the way cold moves through stone.
Every person in the clearing went still.
He felt it too, that involuntary cessation, the body overriding the mind's questions and making its own assessment: do not move. Several people around him had pressed their hands to their chests without seeming to know they were doing it. Others had stepped back, feet finding the earth and staying there.
The air had grown cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. It was the cold of a sealed place, the cold that lives in spaces from which the living have long been absent.
And then the voice arrived.
Not through the air. Not through the ears. It simply existed in the space behind his thoughts, fully formed, as though it had always been there and was only now allowing itself to be noticed.
"After a millennia, the Goddess of Light finally made her move."
The tone was measured. Warm, even. The tone of someone who finds the matter mildly interesting, someone with leisure enough to enjoy the telling of it. The contrast between what the voice carried and what it said was its own kind of threat.
"Welcome to Terraldia, Outworlders."
Terraldia. Outworlders.
Both words landed with the weight of things that had been true before they were spoken, names that this place and these people had been waiting to receive. The mention of the Goddess of Light, a name that did something in his chest even without context for it, invoked by a presence that radiated nothing gentle.
We were brought here. That is what the voice means. Someone brought all of us here, and someone else is not pleased about it.
Before any of the people around him had fully formed a question to speak aloud, the voice continued.
"And welcome to my demon dominion."
"The Tribunal of the Damned."
The earth lurched.
It was a convulsion, the ground leaping upward and sideward at once, throwing bodies off balance, sending arms windmilling for something that was not there. The trees, those great old presences that had formed the perimeter of the clearing, began to move, and not in any direction a tree moves. They descended. They sank, vertically, with the slow certainty of something being swallowed. The bark groaned, a sound that was less like breaking and more like a voice, deep and resonant and coming from everywhere. The trunks vanished first, then the lower branches, then the canopy, leaves folding down and inward as the crowns went below the level of the ground. The forest floor closed over them without a seam.
Screaming erupted. Bodies fled in every direction, or tried to, stumbling over ground that rolled beneath them, over roots that had become absent, over soil that moved in slow, muscular waves.
"This can't be real!"
The shout tore from his own throat before he registered forming the thought. His knees buckled and he hit the earth with both palms, the impact jarring through his wrists, the soil beneath them warm in a way that soil should not be warm, pulsing very faintly, as though something below it was breathing.
Then the grass moved.
It began at the perimeter of his vision, a rustling that had no wind to justify it, blades extending and thickening and reaching upward with the slow deliberateness of growth sped beyond its natural rate. The rustling grew to a hiss. Tendrils wrapped his ankles before he recognized what they were. He felt them tighten.
Around him, others were caught too. He watched the grass rise around calves and thighs, watched people tear at it with their hands and free one leg only to find new growth already curling around the other. The more force they used, the faster it came.
"What?!"
He shook his legs, twisting his body to keep his hands free of the ground. If he pressed his palms down, they would be taken too.
Don't touch it. Keep them up. Think.
"It seems you humans of Earth are not that different from other Terraldians."
"Your first step into this beautiful world is already destruction of nature."
"With that, your resistance is worthless. The Goddess cannot help you in my ultimatum game."
Demon. Dominion. Game.
We were summoned to this place by the Goddess of Light. This demon opposes her. And all of these people, all of them, are pieces in whatever is happening between those two forces. We arrived without weapons, without knowledge, without a single thing that might be useful, and we are already losing.
"I doubt you'll be able to use the prophesied weapons of your souls, Outworlders."
"I haven't even witnessed anyone from you using even the simplest magic right this instant. As if you never had any magic to begin with."
No light had appeared from anyone's hands. No shield had risen. The grass continued its patient, relentless work.
"And for the strongest demonic magic ever known: dominion. It ends with either the caster, I, die by the hands of you, or the sole purpose of the game is achieved, which is for all of you to meet your end."
"There's nothing in-between."
The quiet that followed was the quiet of minds shutting down one by one, the body's own intelligence finishing the calculation the conscious mind did not want to complete.
We are going to die.
He had no past to compare this to, no prior experience of facing death to draw on. But the certainty was in his body, in the slowing of his lungs, in the particular quality of attention that comes when time begins to feel finite.
"This is... a slaughter? A massacre. A spawn kill?"
He spoke quietly, his jaw set, his gaze fixed on the silhouette above.
"Some of these people have lives worth more than anything you can think of. And yet you'll kill them like nothing. Like I am."
The word came out harder than he meant it to.
"Demon."
"Having accepted your fate now, to play my game, I only need you to do one thing."
"One thing for a life so precious?" The question escaped him, and he was not entirely sure whether it carried hope or bitterness. Perhaps both.
"I, Neroth Aconite, Demon Lord of the Withered Souls, serving the God of Darkness, ask you all to answer this question with the rules of my dominion."
The name settled into the air like ash settling on still water.
Neroth Aconite. Demon Lord. God of Darkness.
Then the question arrived.
"What do you think of the dark?"
Four words. Spoken with the same unhurried calm as everything before them, the same warmth that sat so wrongly in his chest when he felt it. The question pressed into the minds of everyone present, not as an external sound but as something that had been placed inside them, something that required the mind to turn toward it and produce an answer.
Then the silhouette was gone.
The red moon remained, its slow pulse unchanged. But the figure had simply ceased to occupy the sky above it, leaving no departure, no sound, no indication of where it had gone. Only the absence where it had been.
And the question, still present, still asking.
The screaming recommenced, and with it the sound of bodies trying to run, of hands tearing at grass, of voices piling over each other in the panic of people who understand that time is very short and an answer is required and they do not know what answer is the right one.
Is there a correct answer? he thought. Or is this the kind of question that has many answers, and only some of them are fatal?
He did not know. He watched.
The nurse pulled the last tendril from her ankle with a tearing sound, her pale blue uniform damp at the hem, her feet bare against the earth. Her voice carried a crack in it, the specific crack of fear reaching its limit.
"I... I won't answer this! It's terrifying! I don't want to die!"
She ran. Barefoot, the slap of her feet against the ground uneven and fast. She covered ten steps, then fifteen, her breathing loud in the clearing.
The red among the dark shifted.
Neroth arrived not by crossing distance but by rearranging it. He was not there and then he was, the space between where he had been and where he appeared now collapsed without transition. His blade moved with a sound like air being parted by something very thin and very fast.
The nurse's momentum carried her two more steps before her legs ceased to obey her. She folded, the life already gone from her face before she reached the ground. Her body settled into the grass, and the grass, with its own patient hunger, began to rise around her.
"Fear only hastens your demise."
The voice threaded through every watching mind, smooth and without emotion.
He pressed his teeth together and looked away. Then looked back. He could not decide which was worse.
People can answer that, he thought, the words already hollow before they finished forming. Around him the panic was animal now, beyond reason, bodies thrashing at the grass and feet scrambling for any solid ground.
And it is not enough.
"It's scary... I hate it!"
The man in athletic shorts staggered backward, arms out for balance that was not coming. His voice was climbing toward the register where it would stop being a voice.
"Only God answers for me! Please don't..."
The dark shifted.
It did not run. It did not leap. It simply ceased to be in one location and began to be in another, the crimson and black of it bleeding together for the eye that tried to track it.
Neroth's gaze settled on the man with the quality of attention one gives to a thing already decided.
"Those who fear it have no place in this world." Each word delivered flat and certain, the tone of a sentence that does not require agreement. "And your God is ashamed of you."
The blade came down.
The man did not finish whatever he had been about to say. He fell face-first, the impact sending a small dark cloud from the disturbed soil around him.
Others broke in every direction. The killing that followed carried no cruelty in its performance: each death was precise, unhurried, the blade finding each person in turn with the same absolute efficiency. One by one the screaming cut off. One by one the grass accepted what fell into it.
"I... I don't know what to think!"
The man in office blacks stood with both palms pressed to his chest, his torn collar hanging loose. His voice was high and compressed, the voice of someone trying very hard to find a way through.
"It can be a lot of things. I don't know!"
Neroth's attention shifted to him and rested there. The weight of that attention was something physical. He watched the man's face change as he felt it, watched the understanding arrive too late.
"Confusion over such simple matters..." Neroth's voice carried something that might, at a great remove, be interpreted as disappointment. "...is the truest reflection of your life's worth."
"No." The man's whisper was barely audible. His eyes widened. "No way. I'll..."
The dark moved.
The man was gone before the sentence finished. The blood scattered in fine droplets that caught the red moon's light and held it a moment before the grass claimed everything.
"Darkness?"
A woman in a hospital gown spoke the word as though confirming an address, her voice stripped of all color. The thin blue cotton with its small printed flowers hung loose on her frame. Her face was as empty as her tone.
"I don't know what to think... it's just... nothing? It's meaningless. It's just the absence of light."
Neroth regarded her with the same quality of stillness he brought to everything.
"And so is your existence."
One motion. Precise and final. She crumpled inward, as though something at her core had been removed rather than destroyed.
"It's vile and destructive!"
An elderly woman in robes of ochre and deep burgundy lifted a jade talisman above her head, her fingers tight around the carved stone, her voice carrying genuine steel beneath the tremor of age.
"The world doesn't need darkness!"
Neroth's form shifted, something in his presence expanding outward, pressing against the air until the air itself seemed to thicken. The talisman in the old woman's hand cracked, then split, the fragments of jade falling through her fingers and into the grass.
"The world has no need for your foolish disgust either."
His blade completed what the crack had begun.
He watched it all. He stood with the grass coiled around his calves, his hands raised and free, and he watched each person step forward and speak and fall. His eyes tracked movement. His mind catalogued.
Not fear. Not flattery. Not denial. Not judgment. Not ignorance.
All of it wrong. But wrong in different directions. Wrong for different reasons.
A man in military uniform raised both hands toward the sky, his face alight, his voice ringing with genuine conviction.
"Then darkness is beauty! It is pure. It is power. It is our savior. It is eternal!"
A savior.
He felt his jaw go slack.
Neroth materialized before the soldier in the same unhurried way he had appeared before all the others, his head tilted at that slight, considering angle. For a full breath, he simply looked at the soldier. Assessed him. The soldier's face carried the brightness of someone who believes they have found the right answer and is waiting for confirmation.
Then Neroth spoke, and each word arrived with the finality of a stone being placed in permanent position.
"Flattery will not save you." A pause so clean it had edges. "It is hollow when it lacks truth."
One strike. The soldier fell not backward but forward and down, the bow of his collapse grotesque in its suggestion of reverence.
Not even that. He pressed his palm over his mouth, felt his fingers shaking against his lips. Not even that was the right answer.
"Darkness means nothing to me!"
The man in the golden tuxedo stood with his chin up and his shoulders squared, his expensive fabric catching whatever light the red moon threw down, making him look briefly like something forged. His voice carried the tone of someone accustomed to rooms that rearrange themselves around his presence.
"I don't care about your question. You're just another man to kill!"
The blade moved before the sound of his voice had fully faded, and the man's expression locked, his face preserving the last thing it had been saying long after the person behind it was gone.
"And your end is the darkness," Neroth said. "Empty bravado has no place here."
The golden figure crumpled.
"The darkness... it reminds me of what I've done."
The girl in the school uniform spoke to the ground. Her blue and white clothing was dirt-streaked. Tears ran down her face and caught the red light and turned it a diluted pink.
"Of the pain I've caused."
She was already empty when the blade reached her. She folded without sound.
"Regret will not cleanse you," Neroth said quietly.
"No..." He breathed the word into the space before him. The grass at his calves had tightened further. His legs were immobile. "That's just cruel."
But his eyes kept moving. Kept watching for the pattern.
"Darkness is a test!"
A man in worn overalls, fists clenched at his sides, eyes fixed on the earth beneath him as though the earth were the one he was speaking to.
"It's an enemy. It's there to make us stronger, to prove our worth to the light!"
Neroth stopped.
He considered the man with the same tilted attention he had given the soldier who praised darkness. The quiet between his arrival and his response stretched itself out, long enough to feel different from the ones before it.
When Neroth spoke, his voice carried the cold certainty of something that achieves finality without anger.
"Faith is a fragile shield against inevitability."
The blade moved with something close to ceremony, the arc of it deliberate and unhurried.
The man in overalls went down like all the others. But his words remained, hanging in the air above the place where he had stood.
Not a savior. Not an enemy. Not nothing. Not everything.
He looked down at his own chest, at the riot of soft colors stitched together across his clothing, at the bright yellows and the muted blues and the pinks that had no name for their exact shade. Everything alive. Everything contrary to what was being asked.
What is it, then? What is the dark, if it's none of those things?
"Darkness? It's where dreams come from, right?"
The voice was very young and carried the particular music of someone who has not yet learned to put fear in front of wonder. A small girl in pajamas printed with cartoon stars tilted her head back to look at the sky.
"It's where stars are born!"
Neroth's dark shifted.
For three beats of a heart, something in it paused. Something in the quality of his attention toward the girl was different from the attention he had given the others, different in a way that was difficult to name. Then it resolved.
"Naïveté is not innocence." His voice was unchanged. "It is ignorance dressed in softer cloth." A breath. "Take this as mercy."
The small body fell among the others.
He looked away from that one. He looked at his hands, at the trembling in his fingers.
Mercy, he thought. That is what that was called.
"It's an observable phenomenon."
The man in glasses and a towel spoke with the flat precision of someone who believes that naming a thing correctly should protect you from it.
"A natural part of the universe, isn't it? Our studies can tell us all of it."
The blade answered him without announcement. The man crumpled, his glasses falling from his face and landing unbroken in the grass beside him.
"You reduce it to something you cannot even comprehend."
The words arrived in every mind present, pressed there without courtesy.
"Darkness, light... it's all the same."
A young man in a gray hoodie stepped forward with the mechanical movements of someone who has accepted the outcome and is merely completing the formality. His face carried nothing, no fear, no hope, no presence.
"None of it matters in the end."
His body froze mid-step.
Then fell.
"Your apathy," Neroth said softly, "is an insult to existence."
He stood in the clearing, legs trapped, hands raised, his heart beating in the fast and arrhythmic way of a body that knows it is very close to something absolute. Around him the bodies lay in the grass that was still rising around them, still patient. The question remained in his mind, clear and insistent and unanswered.
What do you think of the dark?
He had no memories of himself. He had no past to draw on, no story to consult, no version of himself from before this morning that could tell him who he was and what he believed and what the dark had meant to him before he arrived here without it. All he had were the words of the people who had died answering this question, the shape of each failure, each wrong answer. All he had were the images of what had not worked.
He looked down at his clothing one more time. The patchwork of colors sat against his skin, warm and familiar in a way that was almost like memory.
What do all of those things mean? What do they add up to?
He closed his eyes.
Not in surrender. In something that was closer to listening.
The dark behind his eyelids was the same dark that surrounded him, the same dark that had been present before this gray morning, the same dark that held the fire he half-remembered and the warmth and the voices. It was the dark that he had come from and the dark that waited ahead. It held things inside it that the light made invisible.
The words came slowly, from somewhere that felt less like thought and more like the place thought forms before it knows what shape it is taking.
He opened his mouth.
"It's madness." His voice came out steady, which surprised him. "A beautiful madness of nothingness. It's nothingness yet it's everything. It's cycle, of beginning and end, but it's freeing."
He let the first part settle. Something in the air around him did not move.
"Darkness... it's not a savior nor an enemy. It's a mirror, showing us what we're too afraid to face. Without it, and without its light, we are all blind minds and would never be the minds that we are now."
The air stopped.
Not the natural cessation of a wind dying. This was deliberate, the atmosphere holding itself in place as though attending to something it needed to hear clearly. The grass at his calves went still. The sounds of the clearing, the remaining scattered voices, the faint movement of bodies through the dark, all of it pulled back to a distance he could not measure.
A quiet smile came to his lips, small and genuine, the expression of someone who has arrived somewhere they did not know they were going.
This is my end, he thought, and the thought carried no particular weight. But I said the thing I actually believe, and that feels right even if the ending is the same.
The seconds passed.
He kept his eyes open.
The blade did not come.
The cold pressure he had felt at the base of his skull since the moon rose was still present, but it had not moved toward him. The grass was still. The air was still.
He waited. His legs remained caught, but his upper body was free, and he stood with his palms raised and his face toward the red-lit sky, breathing in the particular quality of air that comes in the gap between one thing and the next.
The quiet around him was not the quiet of absence. It pressed against his skin from every direction. It had weight and a low quality he felt in the back of his teeth more than he heard in his ears. Something was attending to him. Something was still in the space with him, very close.
Then, breaking through like stone dropped into deep water:
"You, rainbow."
Cold. Deep. Resonant, the resonance of a very still, very large thing speaking at something small. But something was different. The voice was not distant anymore, not threaded through the mind from some disembodied height.
It was near.
Close.
Real.
"What is your name?"
The words hung in the air between them, tangible as the chill against his skin. The hairs along his arms lifted. His eyes were already open, and he cast them forward.
And found the figure standing perhaps three paces from him, fully present in the physical world, no longer a shape against the red moon but a person.
Skin the color of winter light, smooth and cool-looking, carrying an inner quality that had nothing to do with warmth. White hair, loosely bound, falling past the shoulders to the waist, framing a face of such specific and deliberate symmetry that looking at it produced a feeling close to vertigo: every feature placed exactly where it should be, and the total of all those correct placements adding up to something that felt wrong in the way that perfection always feels slightly wrong. The eyes were white and very bright, carrying the cold quality of a storm seen from a great distance, fixed on him with the full and undivided weight of their attention. Above both brows, two short horns curved upward, black against the white of the hair. On his head, a jagged crown of black metal, small white stones embedded in its points, the whole thing carrying the specific gravity of something very old.
His robes were dark, the fabric bearing silver markings at the edges that refused to resolve into any pattern the eye could hold. His hands hung at his sides. At his belt, the hilts of two thin blades, elegant and without decoration.
But it was none of these specific things that occupied the center of his attention.
It was the quality of the space immediately around the figure, the way the air itself seemed to organize differently within a few paces of him, thicker and cooler and attentive in the way the air around very high places is attentive, carrying the awareness of its own potential to become a danger.
"Speak."
His voice carried the same measured warmth as before, but stripped now of the disembodied quality, arriving in full through the ordinary channels of sound. The contrast was worse somehow, hearing it with ears rather than feeling it behind the eyes.
"For I cannot see through you, your memories nor your soul."
He took one step forward. Then another, each footfall landing with a softness that was its own kind of deliberateness.
"And yet your fascinating and disconcerting answer stays true."
The head tilted, a fraction of a degree. The white eyes narrowed.
"If you mean what you said, what is your name?"
What is my name?
He turned toward the hollow in himself where his past should have been and found the hollow still there. No memory of a face. No memory of a voice. No memory of a place or a story or the person who had chosen to put him in patchwork colors and leave him in this grass.
But at the very bottom of the hollow, at the place where the absence was deepest, something was present. Vague. Fragmented. Colors again: yellow, and a white that was warm rather than cold, the two of them bleeding into each other the way dawn bleeds into morning. Words, forming themselves from nothing the way words sometimes do before the mind has decided to form them.
Milk and yellow. Gold and darkness.
What do you think of yourself?
His lips parted.
His voice arrived steady, certain in a way that surprised the person producing it.
"Millow Aurum."