Aryan did not feel the rough, organic texture of the tunnel floor. He did not hear Jaya's frantic whispers or Elian's healing chants. The searing pain of acid burns, the deep ache of psychic exhaustion—it was all distant, trivial data. The Null-Shard had completed its circuit. It had pulled him under, not into sleep, but into its native state: a consciousness adrift in the void.
There was no light. No sound. No temperature. This was not the black of space, which was merely an absence of light. This was the black of before. The conceptual opposite of existence. The Null.
He floated, untethered. At first, there was panic—a final, fading spark of the man he had been, screaming into the absolute silence. But the void did not shout back. It simply… was. And its sheer, overwhelming presence began to smother the spark.
Memories, the anchors of his identity, began to unravel.
The face of his mother, a comforting warmth from a life before the labs, dissolved into a pattern of meaningless light, then into static, then into nothing.
The searing pain of the Shard's implantation, a memory that had once defined his trauma, was now just a neutral data point, a fluctuation in the void's perfect equilibrium.
Jaya's hand on his shoulder, Rohan's grudging respect, Elian's quiet support—these concepts of [Connection] and [Loyalty] frayed at the edges, their emotional weight bleeding away into the infinite, indifferent dark.
Why cling to them? The thought was not his own, yet it echoed in the emptiness that was now his mind. They are friction. Resistance. The source of your pain. Let them go. Embrace the stillness.
It was a seductive logic. Here, there was no fear. No loss. No exhausting struggle to be a hero, a physicist, a man. There was only the serene, perfect peace of non-being.
A figure coalesced from the darkness. It was him, but perfected. His doppelganger from the Ossuary, but now stripped of its pain and rage. Its form was clean, geometric, carved from solidified nothingness. Its eyes were twin event horizons.
"They use you," the Doppelganger spoke, its voice the soft sound of entropy itself. "The healer sees a tool. The soldier sees a weapon. The scholar sees a specimen. They do not see the cost. They cannot comprehend the beauty of the gift you carry."
It gestured with a hand that erased the faint, dying echoes of Aryan's memories as it passed through them. "This 'Parasite' they fear? It is merely another form of existence, clumsy and loud. We are its purifier. Its conclusion. To 'sever its link' is a paltry goal. We can offer it… silence. We can offer this entire screaming, diseased universe the same eternal peace."
The truth of it resonated deep within Aryan's core. It was so much easier than fighting. It was so much cleaner than caring.
Yes, a part of him sighed in relief. Yes.
But then, a flicker. A single, stubborn point of his sub-conscious refused to be erased. It was not a memory of sight or sound. It was a sensation. The ghost of a pressure on his palm. The warmth of another hand holding his, back in the Weald, when he had first learned to manipulate concepts. It was a simple, fundamental truth that predated language, predated even consciousness: YOU ARE NOT IT.
The Doppelganger's perfect form wavered, a crack in its absolute geometry. "A sentimental echo. An error. Let it go."
But Aryan focused on the sensation. He gave it no name, attached it to no face. He simply held onto the raw, conceptual fact of it: [Connection].
It was not a shout. It was a single, unbreakable thread in the infinite dark.
"It is a leash," the Doppelganger hissed, its voice losing its perfect serenity, showing a sliver of the rage that once defined it. "They will lead you to your destruction! To feel is to be vulnerable! To be vulnerable is to be erased!"
The void around them began to churn. The Doppelganger lunged, no longer a persuader, but a predator, its form shifting into a maw of annihilating darkness, seeking to consume the last flicker of Aryan's humanity.
And in that moment, faced with the final choice between the serene peace of nothingness and the painful, fragile struggle of connection, Aryan made his decision.
He did not fight the void. He did not reject it.
He willed the thread to hold.
He poured every shred of his remaining consciousness, every stolen moment of hope, every remembered pain that was proof he had once lived, into that single, conceptual thread. He anchored himself to it.
The Doppelganger's maw closed around him.
—
A violent, wrenching gasp tore through Aryan's body. He convulsed, his back arching off the ground, his eyes flying open. They were no longer void-black, but his own, wide with terror and a desperate, clawing hunger for air, for sound, for sensation.
Jaya recoiled, one of her mend-blades half-raised, her face streaked with tears and soot. Elian fell back with a cry of shock.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of Aryan's ragged, sobbing breaths.
He looked at his own hands, turning them over, feeling the rough texture of his gloves, the dull throb of his burns. He looked at Jaya, really saw her—the fear in her eyes, the determined set of her jaw, the faint glow of her blades holding the stored pain of their journey.
He was back. The void was still there, a cold ocean beneath the thin ice of his sanity, but he was on the surface. For now.
He tried to speak, but his voice was a desert rasp.
Jaya was by his side again, her bio-blades caressed him gently. Absorbing all ailments "stay calm, don't speak"
He swallowed and tried again.
"It… it wanted me to let go," he managed, the words a confession and a warning. "It's so… quiet there."
Jaya slowly lowered her blade, her expression shifting from alarm to a grim, understanding horror. She simply nodded. No platitudes. No false comfort. She understood the enemy within was now as real as the one they marched toward.
Aryan pushed himself up, his body screaming in protest. He was weaker, colder. A part of him had been permanently claimed by the abyss. But he was here. And the thread, that single, stubborn concept of [Connection], now felt like the only thing in all of existence that was real.
The path ahead was darker than ever. But he had stared into the absolute zero of his own soul and had chosen, against all logic, to feel. The war for the Primordial had just become a war for Aryan's very soul, and the next battle line was drawn not in flesh, but in the freezing depths of the void he carried inside.