Zal stepped into the dark gully, and the darkness accepted him.
---
“Absolute darkness always begins with a lie: it pretends to be nothing. But he knew this darkness was more than absence. It was something that devours presence.”
---
It was not an endless fall, but the loss of the very concept of an end. First, sound vanished—not gradually, but suddenly, as if a curtain had been drawn over a world he’d never deserved to hear. Then weight left him. He no longer felt the heaviness of his body, only a ghostly sense of the shape he was supposed to occupy. And finally, sight.
Yet, two sensations remained, anchors in the dissolving self: the cold, sharp bite of the Thread around his wrist—a pain more real than the void itself—and the familiar, gnawing burn in his lungs, his old sickness. It was as if his body had been erased, but its two oldest wounds were left behind as landmarks. A compass of agony.
A cold, heavy dampness closed his eyes before he could close them himself. Not darkness. Visual void. Whiteness? Blackness? Both words were lies. This was the absence of the very possibility of seeing.
Consciousness? Only a pulse within the void. A sensation like recalling a memory that had never existed. He raised his trembling hands—or thought he did. Nothing. No cold, no warmth, no boundary, no difference. Only an emptiness pretending to be everything.
---
“Fear arrived. Not because some monster lurked. But because it was the only thing that could grow in that void—the weed of the soul in the barren soil of nothingness.”
---
Where…? The unfinished thought circled his mind and died. Words were useless. This was not a place you could control by naming it. He flailed in the void. A futile motion in a world where forward and backward were one. A fish struggling on land at least understands the concepts of dryness and sea. Zal did not even have that.
And then, a pull.
From the Thread.
A familiar yet alien sensation, like a known hand on a shoulder that no longer existed. That invisible strand around his wrist, which he’d carried from the previous world, was now his only anchor in this shoreless sea. The only proof he had ever been anywhere else.
---
…so… you… fell here…
The message came not through his ears, but through his marrow. A pressure that carried meaning.
---
I didn’t fall… I was cast out. The reply sprouted within him, but never reached language. Because here, language was only a tool for lying.
He moved toward the pull. Or thought he did. In a place where movement and stillness were siblings, it made no difference. The space around him—if it was space—had a thick, weightless quality, like swimming in honey that never sticks to your skin.
And then, the image: himself. Not as a man. As a luminous strand of light, one end burnt and black, ghostly smoke rising from it. This strand was lost in an endless web of similar threads. Some bright, some half-charred, some mere ash. These were the threads of possibility that had never been realized, lives that had died at the crossroads of choices.
---
…welcome… severed thread… to the house of torn threads…
---
“It is not a house. It is a graveyard. The graveyard of everything you could have been and never were. Every love you didn’t speak, every courage you didn’t muster, every path you didn’t take. You are now one of these unfinished ghosts. Your only privilege is that you still think you’re alive.”
---
He wanted to scream. A scream that had been stuck in his throat since the burning of the Thread, like a stone in the belly of a fish. This isn’t fair. But when his mouth opened, only silence came out. A silence so complete it terrified even him.
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The darkness reacted. Not to the silence. To the intent of the scream. To the unfinished rage that wanted to erupt.
---
…scream… is food here… more… come and sate us…
---
And the darkness drew closer. Masses of nothingness feeding on his unrealized despair. Every wave of anguish that stirred in his chest made the darkness denser, nearer. They were hungry.
But hunger demands a specific taste. The void began to digest not just his present fear, but the sediment of his past—the regret, the love, the unsaid words. And from that digestion, it started to regurgitate. Not memories, but their emotional cores, given form. First, as a melody…
---
“Thus the first law of this realm was revealed: emotion is the food of darkness. Hope, fear, regret, love—it devours them all. The only way to survive is to empty yourself. To become a shattered vessel that holds nothing.”
---
Empty yourself. It was the only possible instruction. Zal fell silent. A deeper silence than before. Not just of mouth. Of heart. Of soul. He tried to banish even memories, for every memory carried a seed of feeling.
“Here, the only truth is silence. Any word you utter—even in your mind—will be a lie about something that does not exist. Be silent to remain real.”
And the Thread still pulled. His only guide—or his only chain—in that emptiness. He surrendered to its pull, because resistance too was a kind of feeling, and feeling meant feeding the void.
---
Suddenly, a melody.
From behind—if there was a behind—a wordless tune began. Simple. Hazy. Like the sound of running water from a childhood he couldn’t remember but whose essence his cells had preserved.
Where… is this from?
He turned.
And the world turned white.
---
“Nightmares come in many colors. But the most dangerous one is the color of false salvation.”
---
Blinding, uniform whiteness. And then the sounds, merciless, like a torrent of rotten memories crashing over him:
A scream.
“Run!”
“Get away! They’re coming!”
The greedy crackle of fire.
Choked coughs, lungs full of smoke.
Feet pounding on muddy ground.
Zal covered his ears, as if he could. “Enough… no more… I don’t want any more.”
---
“But the past, when summoned, always comes in excess. Because the past never truly passes. It only hides.”
---
The coughs grew louder. Closer. And then, from within that familiar chaos, a whisper:
“Brother…”
Zal turned sharply.
Absolute darkness.
A trap. He knew it. But knowing didn’t help. The voices came from within this very darkness. Now familiar voices: Father. Grandfather. Mother. Sister. Not with terror, but with lifeless smiles and eyes empty of the light that had once shone in them.
“Come… come to us… we’ve missed you… you’re alone…”
---
I am alone. That was the greatest truth of his life. He took a step. Toward the darkness and those smiles. One step. Two. The space around him felt soft and receptive, unlike the previous void.
Maybe here I can rest…
He hesitated.
---
Crack!
The sound of a gunshot. Sharp. Precise. Severed from any context, like a divine verdict.
---
The white scene full of smiling faces instantly turned into a bloody curtain. His family, once again—exactly as in his perennial nightmares—collapsed under a hail of bullets. Blood splattered across the whiteness, an abstract and horrifying pattern. He, exactly as always, stood frozen in place. A spectator.
---
“Some wounds are so deep they become independent realities. They are no longer memories. They are the geography of your soul. And you must travel through them every day.”
---
He didn’t know. Every choice was a repetition of the tragedy. Move toward them? Death. Flee from them? Betrayal. Then what do I do? Just stand here?
His sister’s voice came again. Not from the darkness. From the whiteness.
He turned. Looked at the whiteness.
A happy family. Around a dinner table. Candlelight. The smell of food. His sister, with that same kind yet empty face, said: “If you hesitate this time… we may never see each other again. Forever. You can stay here with us. Always.”
---
“Two abysses. Both, betrayal. One: betrayal of the dead by living. The other: betrayal of the living by dying. The guilt of not choosing can sometimes be heavier than the guilt of choosing wrong.”
---
His silence was a loud scream. I don’t want to be a traitor. I just want… But he didn’t know what he wanted. Peace? Forgiveness? Forgetfulness?
---
CRACK!
A louder gunshot, from the white world.
And that transparent world was no longer a home. It had become a derelict, ruined church. Burnt walls, shattered windows, the smell of ancient decay. And from within those ruins, charred and wounded clerics emerged. Not as men, but as statues of ash and pain. Faces without eyes screaming from their hollows:
“Why? Why did you kill us? We only wanted… we only wanted…”
And slowly, from within that deceptive whiteness, they approached him. Their ashen hands reaching out, not to kill, but to understand. To grasp the reason for their suffering.
And in the darkness before him, his family still waved with those lifeless smiles. “Come… it’s safe here… we forgive you…”
---
They took hold of him.
From the white world, ashen hands of clerics emerged, their grip like crumbling stone, pulling not to harm but to understand—their hollow eyes screaming a silent "Why?"
From the dark world, the translucent hands of his family reached out, their touch like cold mist, pulling not to punish but to console—their smiling lips whispering a hollow "We forgive."
Zal was stretched between two poles of his guilt: the guilt of action (burning the church) and the guilt of inaction (failing his family). The two nightmares were not fighting over him; they were completing the sentence of his life, each representing a half of the judgment he had already passed on himself.
---
“Choosing between two nightmares is not a choice. It is yielding to a noose whose both ends are tied around your neck. Guilt. Always guilt. And the greatest guilt is surviving when others have died.”
---
Silence.
Everything stopped.
Time died. Sounds froze. Movements hung unfinished. The two colored worlds—the white of the sweet nightmare and the dark of the terrifying nightmare—twisted into each other. They circled one another like two colossal serpents strangling each other. Colors melted, merged, and turned into absolute gray. A gray that was neither light nor dark, but the absence of both. The absence of even the possibility of choosing between bad and worse.
And in this frozen gray, in this museum of halted time, the Thread around Zal’s wrist did not just send a sharp needle of pain.
It tightened. Like a noose realizing its purpose. The physical burn cut through the psychological torment, a clear, singular truth: this strand, this consequence of his own fire, was the only thing he had ever truly authored. While the voices offered judgment or forgiveness, the Thread offered neither. It only offered direction. And in a realm where all choices were lies, following the one thing he himself had forged became the only authentic act.
---
Zal, in that gray eternity, understood. Not with his mind. With his body. With that pain that was now part of him.
He closed his eyes. Not to the whiteness. Not to the darkness. He closed them to what he had always fled from: to choice. To the responsibility of that flame which was both illumination and devastation.
He was not a victim, nor a savior. He was the fire-starter. Condemned to burn. And perhaps, only by accepting this role was there a way forward. Even if that way led into the heart of the flame.
And then, not out of despair, but out of decision—the first real decision since burning the Thread—he stepped toward the pull of the Thread. Inward. Toward the heart of that familiar pain. Toward the source of the fire that had both ruined him and given him identity.
---
“Sometimes, the only way out of a labyrinth is to accept this: you yourself are the labyrinth. And the only way is to get lost within yourself, consciously. Perhaps there, in the depths of your own ruin, lies a key. Or perhaps just more ash. But this is the only choice that truly belongs to you.”
---
Zal, in his conscious lostness, vanished. Not into darkness, not into light. Into something older than both: into choice. A choice that would neither save nor condemn him. It would only move him forward. Deeper. Toward the center of the pain.
And the Thread still pulled. And this time, Zal followed it not with fear, but with recognition. He now knew where he was going: to meet what he himself had brought into being.
“And perhaps, that meeting will be the first real act of his life.”
