The drop hovered.
I didn't know how long I stared. Could've been seconds. Could've been years. Time had emptied out of the room.
What replaced it wasn't sound or presence, but pressure—deep and unspoken.
The chamber didn't move. The air didn't stir. The stone walls held their silence.
But I knew something had changed.
My shoulder burned. Throbbed. Like it wanted to tear itself open.
A flicker at the edge of my vision drew my eyes away.
Another drop of blood floated up in front of me—this one drifting slowly.
I stared at it.
Red and black.
Was it... mine?
It didn't fall. It kept rising—slow, unnatural, like gravity had reversed.
Then came another.
Off. Unsteady. Wrong.
Then another.
And another.
I looked down.
The blood leaking from my side had stopped falling. It was rising now—slow at first, then faster.
Like something above had called it.
Like it was being drawn upward.
Toward the drop suspended in the air—as if it obeyed a higher law.
When the first of mine reached it, the change was instant.
The hovering drop stirred. Just a tremble—but enough to freeze everything inside me.
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.
Dragged forward. Not by wind. Not by force.
By will.
The moment stretched. A heartbeat locked in place. Then:
Contact.
There was no pain. No impact.
The drop entered me
It passed into me like breath moves through lungs. Like memory.
Everything stopped.
My legs. My breath. My mind.
Colors vanished. Sound flattened. The edges of the world faded. Shapes blurred.
My thoughts stretched into nothing. They didn't shatter—
they just... left.
No fear.
No anger.
No anything.
It felt like floating.
And then—falling.
Something pulled me down, deeper than the chamber, deeper than the earth.
And what I saw, I wasn't meant to.
I couldn't describe it. Not with words. Not with form.
But I remember the feeling.
Life.
Not as beauty. Not as hope.
Life as hunger. As pulse. As refusal to end.
And I felt it enter me.
Not with blessing. Not with peace.
But with 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 way to know.
The feeling was wrong. Distant.
I tried to sense my body, but the edges of sensation had dulled. Floating. Suspended.
Unable to move, no matter how hard I tried.
I strained to lift my arms. They didn't respond.
Tried to open my eyes.
Nothing.
Again.
And again.
Until finally—light. Blurred. Distant. But there.
I had opened them.
The air felt sealed around me, oppressive and still.
Whatever place I was in 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, silent and absolute—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.
No wind. No sun. No shadows.
This felt like a battlefield.
Yet there were no bodies. No blood. No destruction—only ruins.
"They left no traces. Only scars" I whispered to myself. "Gods?"
I blinked, and everything vanished.
Suddenly I was falling—yet there was no sensation of descent, just emptiness.
Then, just as suddenly, I was somewhere else. Suspended above an endless lake.
A lake of blood.
It stretched infinitely beneath me, motionless. No ripples, no reflections. Red so deep it stung my vision. This lake was the only thing alive in that gray void.
But it offered no warmth, no comfort, no 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.
No breath. No voice.
Just the motion of a scream, swallowed whole.
The face twisted—not from fear, not from agony. It was 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.
Not from weight.
From absence.
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.
No blood. No wound. No movement.
Only the husk that had been Ereshgal.
The chamber fell silent. Utterly.
As if the world was holding its breath.
The silence cracked. A voice echoed—vast, detached, and weary.
"So much effort… for this?"
AN: Quick heads-up!
I won't be able to write until Monday since I'll be really busy, so the next chapter will be out Monday night or Tuesday.
I'm a bit sad about it—I really wanted to keep going, especially with the story getting intense.
Thanks for reading and sticking with me.
Big things are coming soon.
See you next week!