"Where… am I?"
Lucian's voice echoed, weightless, into the black.
He was floating. Suspended in what looked like a void—an endless expanse of ink. There was no ground, sky, or horizon—just blackness, infinite and cold. Yet, strangely, he could see. Not with his eyes, exactly—but with something deeper. The darkness wasn't blind. It shimmered faintly at the edges, like oil on water, as if reality here bent differently.
It reminded him of something Eri had told him once, when she described the realm she passed through to resurrect herself—a space between life and death, between thought and forgetting.
But this felt... wrong.
Wrong in a quiet, suffocating way. Like he was wrapped in something that didn't want him to move.
Then, pain slammed into his head.
"Ghh—!"
He winced, clutching his forehead. His pale hand brushed through wet, tangled strands of black hair, slick against his skin.
