The drop hovered.
My vision blurred around it. I wasn't sure how long I stared—seconds, minutes, maybe longer. Time felt thin, drained out of the cave like blood from a wound.
What filled the space wasn't sound or presence, but a pressure I couldn't name.
The chamber stayed still, the air dead and unmoving, the stone cold and silent.
Only my heartbeat, uneven, too slow, and the sharp struggle to draw each breath.
My shoulder burned, deep, pulsing, as if the flesh wanted to tear itself open again.
A flicker tugged at the edge of my vision. I forced my eyes to follow it, the world swimming in and out of focus.
Another drop of blood floated upward in front of me, drifting slowly through the dim light.
I stared at it.
Red and black.
Was it… mine?
It didn't fall. It kept rising, slow, unsteady, like the world had tilted the wrong way.
Another drop followed.
Off, shaking… wrong.
Then another.
And another.
I forced myself to look down.
The blood leaking from my side wasn't falling anymore. It floated upward, at first barely moving, then rising faster, as if something above was pulling it.
Calling it.
Drawing it in.
All of it heading toward the drop suspended in front of me… moving like it answered to some rule I'd never heard of.
When the first of my own reached it, everything shifted.
The hovering drop shivered. Just once.
A tiny tremble.
But it stopped me cold.
I didn't understand what I was seeing.
Then it pulsed.
Once.
And then it called.
I didn't hear it with my ears.
I felt it...
In the bone.
In the blood.
My body didn't react. It was taken… pulled forward by something unseen, not wind or force, but will.
Time stretched thin. A heartbeat locked in place. Then:
The moment it touched me.
There was no pain, nothing but a shift in the air.
The drop touched my skin and slipped through it as if the flesh weren't there at all. It didn't push or cut.
Just passed through.
It entered, like a breath sinking into lungs.
A warmth spread under my skin, thin at first, then sharper, threading itself through muscle and bone. It moved with purpose, carving a path I couldn't track or resist.
My vision shook.
The warmth climbed, up my arm, across my shoulder, into my chest, burning and soft at once. And somewhere along that rise, I realized the pain was gone.
Completely.
Then everything stopped.
It was as if the world exhaled, and I was caught inside that breath, suspended between moments.
Colors vanished. Sound thinned out. The edges of the world faded. Shapes blurred.
My thoughts stretched into nothing. They didn't shatter… they just… drifted away.
Fear slipped out of me.
Everything else followed.
It felt like floating.
And then, falling.
Something pulled me downward… past the chamber, past the stone beneath it, into a depth that felt older than the earth itself.
What I saw… I don't think I was meant to see.
I couldn't give it shape or color. Nothing in this world resembled it.
But the feeling stayed.
Life.
The kind stripped of comfort or warmth, carrying no promise at all.
Life as hunger.
Life as a pulse that refused to stop.
Life as an endless push forward, never satisfied, never still.
I felt it moving, breathing, reaching, as if the world itself had a heartbeat… and I had stepped too close to it.
And I felt it enter me.
It wasn't blessing or peace…
it was rage.
It didn't ask for permission. It didn't care who I was.
It only cared that I had survived.
That I had bled.
And that I was empty enough to be filled.
Then… everything went black.
Time passed. Or maybe it didn't. There was no sense of it.
Something felt wrong. Too far away, as if my thoughts were drifting somewhere my body couldn't follow.
I reached for myself—my limbs, my breath—but the edges of sensation had faded. I floated in it, suspended in a dark space.
I tried to move, my body didn't answer.
I pushed harder.
Nothing.
Tried to open my eyes.
Nothing.
Again.
And again.
The effort felt like shouting underwater.
Then… light.
A thin blur at first, trembling at the edge of darkness.
I had opened my eyes.
Wherever I was now… it wasn't the chamber.
Slowly, clarity returned.
The sight before me was impossible, like a dream not meant for the living.
Structures loomed nearby, vast and otherworldly. Not built by human hands. Temples or fortresses, twisted shapes defying reason. Staircases going nowhere, walls bending inward, columns hanging inverted, impossible structures.
Everything appeared ready to collapse, yet nothing moved. Chunks of stone floated mid-air, frozen, suspended as if time itself had stopped right before their fall.
I looked up.
The sky was broken...
Not completely, but it looked as if something had carved through it.
A single black line. Immense. Unnatural.
It just hung there, like a scar left by something too large to comprehend.
Reality twisted around it, as if the world couldn't decide whether to heal… or tear further.
The air was hollow, stripped of warmth, movement, and even the idea of light or shadow.
This felt like a battlefield.
Yet there were no bodies. No blood. No destruction... only ruins.
"Gods?" I whispered to myself.
I blinked, and everything vanished.
Suddenly I was falling, yet there was no sensation of descent.
Then, just as suddenly, I was somewhere else. Suspended above an endless lake.
A lake of blood.
It stretched infinitely beneath me, motionless, without ripples or reflections. Red so deep it stung my vision. This lake was the only thing alive in that gray void.
But it offered nothing… no warmth, no comfort, no hint of hope.
It simply existed.
I stared down at it, unblinking, unmoving.
And it watched me back.
…
In the chamber, Ereshgal's body lay at the center of the chamber, motionless, as if gravity still hadn't decided what to do with him.
Blood kept rising toward him, drawn from cracks in the stone, seeping from long-dried stains beyond the cave. It floated gently, unnaturally, pulled toward the center.
The body twitched.
Barely.
His mind was elsewhere. But the body remembered it was alive.
The wound on his shoulder convulsed. The flesh pulled together sharply, violently, as if something inside had taken a bite from within.
The twitching spread.
Legs jerked. Arms stiffened. Muscles arched and locked. Even unconscious, the body responded... pure pain, etched into the nerves.
Short spasms. Erratic. As if it was fighting something off.
His mouth opened.
Dry.
Cracked.
A scream tried to rise through an empty body, but all that escaped was silence, swallowed whole.
The face twisted, neither fear nor agony, but the shape pain left behind.
His hands opened suddenly. Then clenched. Grasping for something that wasn't there anymore.
Joints cracked. Bones shifted under skin that had begun to change.
Patches dried. Face. Chest. Neck.
Cracks spread across him like clay drying too fast.
Each spasm fractured muscle, split skin.
Then the body collapsed.
The shoulder that had once been torn was now whole. Not healed. Erased.
As if the injury had never existed.
The mouth stayed open, caught in that broken echo.
The body was bloodless now, the wound wiped from existence, completely still.
Only the husk that had been Ereshgal.
The chamber fell silent.
As if the world itself was holding its breath.
Then… the silence bent under something greater.
A voice rose through the emptiness—old, tired, and faintly irritated, as though it had seen this failure countless times.
"So much effort… for this?"