The moment Pryce died, the world did not fade. Death did not grant him the mercy of darkness, nor the gentle numbness that stories liked to promise the dying. What awaited him instead was something far older than death itself.
The void.
And the void was vast beyond comprehension.
For a fleeting instant that might have been a heartbeat or an eternity, Pryce simply existed within it—a thin, trembling awareness suspended in an immeasurable abyss. His body was gone, his breath extinguished, his heartbeat silenced forever, yet something stubborn and fragile remained behind.
Him.
Not in flesh, bone, or blood. Just the bare imprint of a soul drifting naked through a realm that had never known life.
The darkness stretched endlessly in every direction.
This was not the darkness of night, nor the soft blindness behind closed eyelids. This was something deeper, something primordial—a blackness so complete it felt as though it predated the birth of stars.
It did not merely surround him; it pressed against him with a quiet, tyrannical weight.
Pryce felt it immediately.
The void had a presence.
It loomed around him like an infinite ocean whose waters were made not of liquid but of absence itself. A crushing pressure seeped into his being, the way the abyssal depths of the sea would slowly crush a diver foolish enough to descend too far.
Except there was no suit protecting him.
No barrier.
Nothing shielding his soul from the immense, suffocating vastness.
The void wrapped around him with cold indifference, ancient and oppressive, as though he had been dropped into the hollow heart of a dead universe where existence had never managed to take root.
And Pryce felt something then but not pain yet but something far too quieter.
A creeping realization that settled into his awareness like frost spreading through bone.
'This is it.'
The thought formed slowly, almost timidly, like a child stepping into a room it did not belong in.
'I died.'
There should have been panic.
There should have been terror.
Instead there was only a strange, hollow disbelief, as though some stubborn part of him refused to accept that the world he knew had ended so abruptly. Images tried to surface in the fog of his mind—the flash of lightning, the smell of scorched air, the desperate moment he had thrown himself forward to shield his sister.
The memory fractured before it could fully form.
The void swallowed it.
And with it went the fragile illusion that this might somehow be a dream.
The silence there was unbearable. It was not merely the lack of sound. It was the absence of everything that made reality feel real—no vibration, no warmth, no movement, no distant hum of matter brushing against matter.
Even the concept of direction felt meaningless inside that boundless abyss.
Pryce drifted in that suffocating stillness, and the longer it lasted, the more a dreadful thought crept into the edges of his mind.
'What if this is forever?'
The idea was small at first.
Then it grew.
An eternity trapped in a place where nothing existed, where even the passage of time felt uncertain. No body. No breath. No heartbeat. Just a fragile awareness drifting endlessly through a universe-sized grave.
A quiet horror began to bloom inside him.
Then the void moved.
Not around him but rather through him.
Something tugged at the core of his existence, a faint tightening sensation that coiled around his soul like an invisible thread being slowly pulled taut from somewhere far beyond the horizon of perception.
The pull strengthened.
Subtle at first.
Then insistent.
Then irresistible.
The stillness shattered.
In the next instant Pryce was no longer suspended in quiet nothingness. His soul lurched violently as unseen currents seized him and hurled him forward with terrifying force, dragging him into the spiraling depths of a colossal voidstorm that churned like a cosmic maelstrom.
The abyss twisted around him.
Darkness folded over itself in vast, monstrous currents that spiraled endlessly inward like the throat of a black hole. Pryce's soul was caught in their grasp, ripped from stillness and thrown into a violent descent that defied any measure of speed.
The acceleration was catastrophic.
It felt as though the universe itself had grabbed hold of him and begun dragging him across the bones of reality.
And then the pain began.
At first, it was subtle, a dull pressure gnawing quietly at the edges of his existence.
Then the pressure sharpened into something malignant, something invasive that began grinding against the very shape of his soul but it did not behave like physical pain; it ignored the absence of flesh entirely and sank its claws directly into the essence of him.
The void was eroding him.
Every moment he spent inside that storm felt like being dragged across an endless field of invisible blades. The currents scraped against him with relentless cruelty, shaving away fragments of his being grain by grain as if attempting to reduce him to nothing.
Pryce tried to scream.
The instinct was primal, desperate.
But there was no throat to tear open, no lungs to fill with air, no mouth capable of releasing sound.
Yet the scream still existed.
It echoed silently through the hollow chamber of his consciousness as the storm intensified around him.
Fear came but not the sharp burst of terror that a living body might feel in the face of danger, but something deeper and more suffocating. A slow, dawning dread that wrapped itself around his thoughts as the voidstorm dragged him faster and faster into its depths.
'Is this punishment?'
The thought slipped into his mind uninvited.
'Is this what death is?'
The storm answered with more agony.
The void churned like a furious ocean.
Massive currents of darkness collided and folded into one another, forming titanic whirlpools that stretched across distances too vast for a mortal mind to grasp. Pryce's soul was nothing more than a scrap of drifting debris caught in that unimaginable tempest.
Tossed violently.
Spun without mercy.
Dragged deeper into the abyss.
All the while the pressure mounted.
The void itself felt ancient in a way that made his existence seem pitifully small. Its presence loomed over him like a slumbering god whose breath alone could grind civilizations into dust.
And then something changed.
Far ahead, buried within the endless dark, a color appeared.
At first it was nothing more than a faint blemish staining the abyss—a thin smear where absolute blackness should have been uninterrupted.
Pryce's drifting awareness locked onto it instinctively.
The storm carried him closer to it while it too rushed to him.
The smear grew.
The color deepened.
'Red.'
Not the muted crimson of blood or the warm glow of fire. This red burned with a savage brilliance that felt violently alive, a furious star blazing within the corpse of the void.
It pulsed with terrifying intensity.
The darkness recoiled around it.
And something fragile ignited within Pryce.
Hope.
It was stupid.
He knew it was stupid.
Hope had no place in a realm like this, a place that did not nurture life and certainly did not reward the dead. Yet the moment that impossible red light appeared, some desperate part of him clung to it like a drowning man reaching for driftwood.
'Maybe…' The thought formed shakily. 'Maybe that's the end.'
Maybe it was an exit. A boundary. A door waiting at the end of this endless storm. Maybe the torment would stop once he reached it.
The idea grew stronger the closer the crimson brilliance came.
A foolish, fragile hope blooming inside a place where hope had never been meant to exist.
He didn't realize that what he was rushing toward was not salvation.
It was the beginning of the real suffering.
The pain ignited suddenly.
He had no eyes.
No skull.
No fragile organs tucked safely behind bone.
Yet the agony erupted precisely where his eyes should have been.
Two points of unbearable heat flared into existence, invisible sockets blazing with molten torment as the crimson brilliance poured into them like liquid fire.
His hope shattered instantly.
The sensation was catastrophic.
His entire soul convulsed beneath the assault.
Instinct screamed at him to close his eyes, to shut out the impossible light burning its way into his being.
But there were no eyelids to close to begin with and nothing capable of obeying that desperate command.
The burning intensified.
It felt as though something inside those empty sockets was melting, running down the sides of a face that did not exist. Molten agony dripped through hollows where bone and flesh should have been, pouring deeper into the fragile structure of his soul.
Pryce understood then.
That fragile hope he had clung to had been nothing more than a cruel illusion.
The red brilliance was not the end of the suffering.
It was the herald of something far worse.
The storm hurled him forward.
Closer.
Closer.
Until the crimson star expanded suddenly, filling his entire perception with blinding fury.
And it collided with him.
The impact shattered everything.
Something vast and immeasurable tore through Pryce's soul like a blazing comet ripping through fragile glass, tearing across the boundaries of his existence with catastrophic force. For a moment that stretched longer than lifetimes, his being was flung wide open beneath the passage of that monstrous brilliance.
Then it was gone.
The red vanished.
One instant it existed.
The next it was as though it had never been there at all.
The void returned to its endless dominion.
Silent.
Black.
Boundless.
Yet the pain remained.
The phantom sockets where his eyes should have been burned like twin furnaces, molten agony gnawing endlessly at the shape of his soul.
The only proof that the crimson brilliance had ever touched him.
And the storm continued.
Faster.
Deeper.
Further into the endless abyss.
Dragging him toward a destination hidden somewhere beyond the edge of creation.
The void swallowed him without hesitation.
And Pryce finally understood something terrible.
Death had not been the end.
It had only been the beginning.