As he stared into the abyss, everything around him felt unnervingly still. The darkness, once a looming terror, no longer seemed as threatening. It had become a silent companion.

  He matched his steps to the rhythm of his pounding heart, using it as a focus to keep himself from collapsing like a stone dropped from the sky. The fear was gone, replaced by numbness. It wasn’t the peace he had been searching for; it was a quiet resignation.

  The abyss had claimed him, and in that moment, he knew this was where he belonged. He walked forward, drawn toward the only place that felt like home. Reassuring himself that it wouldn’t be long before he reached his destination. He stopped for a moment. “What will come next?”

  Looking behind him, he saw an orange glow warm and inviting, as if beckoning him to stay. But he turned away. There was no stopping here. He pushed himself forward, chasing the chance for a better tomorrow. Even if it was years late, one good day could wash away all the bad.

  The further he went, the blurrier his vision became. Each time his eyes closed, memories of his previous life surfaced: the grand manor consumed by fire, his siblings’ laughter turning into a taunt, his parents’ morning calls twisting into screams, the once-familiar ritual of getting ready for school haunted by faces at the window. All of it always shattered, always had been. These memories clung to him like a curse, a cruel reminder of what had been taken from him by the will of the people.

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  Reality twisted as the boundary between past and present blurred into one. The stone beneath his hand felt like polished wood, his steps sank into carpet instead of solid ground, and the water ahead rippled like an indoor river laid with mosaic tiles. At the end, there was light.

  The boy gasped and began to run. ’I have never felt so alive. Not since.’

  But as he moved forward, the wooden walls dissolved into smoke, the light ahead crackled into fire. The carpet beneath him turned back to stone, the water ran red. Patches of the ground blackened, as if reality itself had been burned away.

  He walked past it all, ignoring the destruction, his gaze locked on the fire ahead.

  ’Let me forget or let me go.’

  After what felt like an eternity of trudging towards the fire, the boy touched it ignoring the warm breeze that came from it. As they connected the warmth turned into a cool sea air caressing over him, cool and invigorating. His heart quickened, trying to give a smile ripping open his lips that has healed on each other. The promise of escape, of freedom, was close now.

  His fingers stretched toward the faint glimmer ahead, hope igniting within him. As he stumbled out of the main tunnel and into the blinding sunlight, the overwhelming brightness and fresh air were jarring after the suffocating darkness. The beach, his beacon of escape, now seemed to mock him with its deceptive promise of freedom.

  As he neared the shore, the light began to wane, swallowed by an encroaching darkness. The triumphant escape he had envisioned unraveled before his eyes. The beach dimmed, fading into obscurity, and with it, his strength ebbed away.

  He collapsed onto the sand, his hope extinguished in the growing void.

  Still, his arm remained raised, reaching for a light that was no longer there.