Chapter 0. Falling down.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die."
— H.P. Lovecraft

The last moments were a blur.

A fracture of sound.

There were screams. I remember that. High and panicked and breaking apart in the cold night air. The Holokon Party had been nothing but lantern light and laughter and hands — always hands — and then it wasn’t.

Someone was screaming my name.

“Ydoc!”

It was not one voice. It was several. It tore through the music like a blade.

Warmth still lingers on my cheek.

Felinkin was such a kisser.

The warmth was real. The hands were real. The laughter was real.

And then the floor was not.

I sank.

There was no cracking wood, no splintering. No dramatic rupture. The Divide did not roar open beneath me. It simply softened. As if it had always been liquid and I had only just now remembered.

Did the Divide itself eat me?

There was no time to brace. No time to reach.

I cannot see a thing now.

Only dark.

Not the absence of light — no. This is something older. Thicker. Primordial blackness pressing in from every direction. It has weight. It has temperature. It hums faintly, like something alive and thinking very slowly.

Save for the small motes of light.

Tiny.

Flickering.

Like distant stars suspended in ink.

It is liquid. It must be. My body drifts, slow and suspended, as if caught in tar or oil or memory too dense to breathe through. My lungs have already filled — not with air, but with pressure. Something pushes inward, squeezing the breath from my chest. There is no choking. No coughing.

Only displacement.

Air does not belong here.

“Should we applause?”

The voice arrives without direction. It has no mouth and yet too many. It vibrates through the liquid itself, through my ribs, through the spaces between my thoughts.

It has many tones. Layered. Like several mouths speaking the same sentence with slight differences.

“The show has only just begun…”

There it is again.

Around me. Inside me. Above and below and everywhere at once.

I try to speak.

To answer. To scream.

Nothing leaves me.

The ink holds me perfectly still. It has crept into every muscle, every joint, every vein. It is not binding me from the outside — it has become the inside. My fingers will not curl. My jaw will not open. Even my eyes feel pressed shut by something thick and patient.

“No… it is not ready yet. It needs to suffer.”

Suffer?

The word lands strangely.

Am I being addressed? Examined?

This voice does not sound like a god. Not quite. It does not speak as a creator. It speaks as something that has found a specimen in the wild.

Curious.

Detached.

“It yearns?”

Another tone overlaps the first. Slightly higher. Slightly amused.

“What does it yearn?”

Are there more than one? Or is it splitting itself, like a cracked mirror arguing with its own reflection?

“It yearns to dance to disco… to walk the desert again.”

Desert.

Music.

The memory stirs somewhere in the blackness.

Sand against my boots. Heat shimmering across dunes. A laugh that may have been mine.

Disco.

Light.

Movement.

The ink tightens at the thought. As if the memory irritates it.

A bell rings.

Sharp.

Shrill.

Not distant — immediate.

It slices through the abyss like glass dragged across stone.

Ding.

The motes of light tremble.

Ding.

A ripple moves through the liquid. Not outward — inward. Toward me.

Ding.

The pressure around my chest shifts. The blackness convulses, pulling back from my face as though startled.

Then—

A wave.

A violent surge.

I am pushed upward.

Fast.

Faster.

The liquid tears away from my limbs. My body rises as if caught in the throat of something coughing me back out.

Ascending.

Faster.

The motes stretch into streaks. The pressure becomes force. The bell keeps ringing, impossibly loud, impossible to escape.

Is that—

Light—