Chapter 35 — Between Moments
Lucien's eyes fluttered open.
Not with a blink, but as if his lids were weighed down by something far heavier than flesh—like centuries pressing slowly against fragile glass. The world snapped back into focus, but not the world he expected.
He was standing again.
The obsidian floor beneath his feet was cold, impossibly smooth, unbroken. No ash. No crimson glass. No cracks.
The same narrow hallway stretched before him, stretching into impossible darkness at both ends. The walls pulsed faintly, but not with light. Not with sound. With the feeling of something unfinished, something waiting.
Time here was different.
Not flowing forward. Not backward. Instead, it was tangled—thick and viscous like molasses in winter, slowing to a crawl so subtle it was nearly imperceptible. Seconds stretched like hours. Hours collapsed into whispers.
Lucien could feel it dragging at him, pulling him under with a weight that was not physical but deeper, somewhere in the marrow of his bones.
He tried to move. To take a step forward. But his legs trembled beneath him, unsteady, as if waking from a long sleep inside a cage. His breath caught and stuttered. It was hard to remember how to be upright. How to stand.
The corridor responded. The walls seemed to breathe, swelling and contracting with the slow rhythm of something ancient. Not alive. Not dead. Somewhere in between.
He reached out a trembling hand to the wall, but it didn't ripple this time. It was still stone, cold and unyielding beneath his fingertips. Like it had never changed.
There was no sign—no trace at all—of what had just happened. No blood. No shards of mirror. No shattered fragments of any kind.
It was as if the throne room, the twelve figures, the crushing weight of that presence—none of it had ever existed.
Lucien's mind recoiled at the emptiness.
He had been crushed, broken, reshaped... and now nothing.
His body felt empty in a new way—like a vessel unfilled, a story without a last page.
He was still standing, but his legs wanted to buckle. His chest ached with a quiet hollowness that no breath could fill.
He tried to breathe again. Slowly. Methodically. In and out. But the air felt thin here, like it had been pulled away from him without violence.
The silence was complete.
Not the silence of a quiet room. Not the silence of night. This was a silence that swallowed sound itself.
Even his own heartbeat was muted, distant. Like it belonged to someone else.
The strangest thing—he couldn't even hear his thoughts.
Usually, when the world fell away or fear gripped him tight, his mind would race, scrambling for words, memories, reasons. But now—
There was only a void where his thoughts should be.
No whispering doubts. No screaming fears. No recollections.
Just a stillness so deep it was almost a kind of deafness.
He looked down at his hands, trembling. They were his. They had to be. But they felt unfamiliar. As if someone else's skin wrapped around fragile bones.
Lucien tried to focus on the faint hum of the corridor—something to anchor him. But it slipped away before he could hold it. It was like chasing smoke.
His legs gave a small twitch, and he stumbled forward, steadying himself against the wall.
The corridor stretched on endlessly.
Behind him, no sign of the chamber he had left. No echoes of voices or breaking glass. Nothing.
Just this endless, empty stretch.
He started walking again, slow and uncertain.
Each step was a reminder of the disconnection inside him. Not pain. Not numbness. Something beyond both.
He had walked until walking lost meaning once before. Now it felt like walking was the only thing still tethering him to something real.
His feet made no sound.
No echo answered his movement.
The walls seemed to lean inward, narrowing, closing the space around him tighter with every step.
The pressure was different here.
Not the crushing weight of before. More subtle. Like the corridor itself was watching, waiting for something he couldn't understand.
He tried to push thoughts forward—questions, memories, any fragment of emotion—but they slipped through his grasp like water through fingers.
The absence of thought was terrifying.
He was a ghost trapped inside his own body.
There was no past here. No future.
Only this endless now.
He stopped walking.
And time seemed to stop with him.
His breath caught in his throat.
His skin prickled.
The silence stretched, broken only by the faintest pulse from the walls—like a heartbeat not his own.
He closed his eyes, trying to summon something. Anything.
A memory.
A word.
A feeling.
But nothing came.
Only emptiness.
When he opened his eyes, the corridor was exactly the same.
Unchanging.
Unyielding.
The void between moments.
Lucien sank to his knees.
His fingers dug into the cold floor, searching for anything solid to hold onto.
He wanted to scream.
To cry.
To break.
But no sound came.
Even his tears were gone.
He was trapped inside a silence so deep, it was like drowning without water.
Somewhere, far away, the Trial continued.
Somewhere, far above this place, time ticked on.
But here—
Lucien was lost between beats.
A single shard of a self, hanging in the endless pause before what came next.