Get used to your life.
It will not change for your sake. The past will not return to you. Your life will continue — and it will not become paradise overnight.
I tore open the chest of the body before me.
Inside, resting in the cavity where something vital had once been, was a stone.
Transparent. Colorless. No distinctive shape beyond its perfect roundness — a sphere that seemed to exist slightly outside the normal rules of what objects are allowed to look like, as though the light passing through it couldn't quite decide what to do with itself.
I reached in and touched it.
My entire body seized.
Not pain — something prior to pain, something that happened before the nervous system had time to assign a category to what was occurring. Every muscle locked simultaneously. The sensation of my own body disappeared — replaced by absence, by a hollowness so complete it felt like every cell had been evacuated at once, leaving behind only the shell.
Then the energy arrived.
All of it. Everywhere. At once.
The hollowness inverted — filled, overfilled, pressure building from the inside with the specific quality of something structural that has been pushed past what it was designed to contain —
Everything went dark.
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Where am I?
Darkness. Complete and total, the way darkness only is when there is genuinely nothing else — no ambient light, no bioluminescence, no distant glow of anything alive or magical. Just the absence of everything.
Am I dead again?
I have ended up here before. This particular quality of dark is familiar — the void between lives, the space between one thing and whatever comes after. I am not afraid of it. I grew up in darkness of one kind or another. The dark and I have an understanding.
But still.
Dark is dark.
Then the ground appeared.
Green — vast, extending outward in every direction, the kind of open space that exists in landscapes that have never been limited by anything. And from above, descending through air that hadn't been air a moment ago, trees: enormous, ancient, their canopies arriving before their trunks, settling into the earth with the unhurried certainty of things that have always been here and are simply returning.
The darkness became a world.
And then the blood came.
A battle.
Everywhere and in every direction — soldiers with swords, creatures of sizes that violated reasonable expectations, demons moving through the chaos with the efficiency of things that have been doing this for a very long time. The air was thick with the specific noise of mass violence: metal, screaming, the wet sounds that happen when bodies encounter blades with sufficient force.
I stood in the middle of it and felt the euphoria rise through me like warmth.
This.
This is beautiful.
I reached for Athena's Blade — wanting to be inside this, wanting to be a contributing factor to the arithmetic of the dead —
My hand found nothing.
I reached again. Nothing.
I tried to touch the nearest soldier — a man with a wound across his face, still fighting, still moving — and my hand passed through him like he was constructed from the same substance as the air around him.
I sat down on the green ground and watched with my chin in my hand, mildly annoyed at being excluded from something this entertaining.
Then the third force arrived.
From the edge of the battlefield — a dragon, massive and unhurried, moving through the air with the particular confidence of something that has never needed to hurry. On its back: a young man.
Pale face. Handsome in the specific way of people who have never had reason to be anything else. Long hair. An aura that pressed outward from him with the weight of something that had been accumulating for a very long time. He was a Hybrid — demon ears on a human body — holding in one hand a sphere identical to the one I had just found in the tomb.
Behind him: two hundred thousand soldiers.
Black cloaks, long. Massive swords, held at rest. Their auras were strange — distinctive, powerful, and carrying a quality I had never encountered before. Something adjacent to living without being fully within it.
When they reached the battlefield's edge, every combatant simultaneously dropped their weapons.
The battle — which had been moments from escalating into something truly spectacular — simply stopped.
And then the strangest thing:
Everyone sat down and wept.
I walked among them. I found a man with his face in his hands and looked into his eyes when he raised them —
I know that look.
It is the look of people who have already decided.
He reached for his sword and drove it into his own heart. Methodically. Without ceremony.
Around him, dozens doing the same. Hundreds.
Why?
I found a young soldier — barely old enough to be here, still wearing the expression of someone who hasn't yet processed what is happening — who hadn't moved. Hadn't reached for his sword.
An old man grabbed his arm:
"Kill yourself. Quickly."
"Why?"
"That is Darius. Do you want to end on a stake, dying slowly without any honor?"
The old man said it. Then drove his own blade home with the calm of someone completing an administrative task.
The boy stood holding his sword, hand trembling, unable to complete the motion. Then he looked up — saw the stakes being erected in the middle distance, saw the shapes already hanging from them — and made a different calculation.
He ran.
A figure appeared in front of him. No warning. No approach. Simply present, the way certain things are present when they have decided to be. Ugly in the way of something that has never needed to be otherwise. One strike to the back of the head. The boy went down.
And went up — onto a stake, positioned with the specific expertise of someone who knows exactly how to make this last as long as possible.
I turned to Darius.
He stood where he had been standing since the beginning — on the dragon's back, on the back of his two hundred thousand soldiers' surrender, on the back of an entire battlefield's decision to die rather than face what he represented. His expression had not changed once. Not when the weapons dropped. Not when the self-inflicted deaths began. Not when the stake work started.
Where does this kind of cruelty come from?
He turned.
And looked directly at me.
Can he see me?
He looked at my hands — still dark with everything that had happened in the last few days of fighting and cutting and burning — and said:
"Your hands are very dirty."
I met his eyes with everything I had. The look I use when I have identified something and decided what it is.
"No dirtier than your soul. Or mine."
He stared at me for a long moment.
Then he laughed.
Not the calculated laughter of someone performing amusement — genuine laughter, from somewhere real. And I laughed too. Genuinely. One of the few times in either of my lives that the laughter came from somewhere that wasn't performance or cruelty.
"You truly deserve to be the Chosen One," he said. "We will meet again."
He disappeared.
Everything disappeared.
As though none of it had ever been.
I opened my eyes.
The tomb was as I had left it — the stone walls, the blue-glowing inscriptions, the coffin, the room that had been sealed against time for longer than most things in this world had existed.
Except:
The bodies on the stakes had opened their eyes.
All thirty-two of them.
And in the time it took me to register that — to process what I was seeing — they were no longer on the stakes.
They were standing directly in front of me.