Chapter 121: Eyes Like Abandoned Stars
The darkness was not simply an absence of light—it might as well be a living thing.
It stretched endlessly in every direction, a yawning abyss that swallowed time and space whole. There was no sky here, no ground, no horizon—only an infinite, suffocating black that pressed in from all sides like the weight of drowned dreams. The air (if it could be called air) hung thick and stagnant, undisturbed by wind or motion, as if the very concept of change had been erased from existence.
And yet - something stirred...
A lone figure, pale as a ghost, moving through the nothingness with slow, measured steps. Her bare feet made no sound against the void, leaving no trace of her passage. She might have been floating. She might have been falling. In this place, the difference meant nothing.
The girl was slight—sixteen, perhaps seventeen—but age had long since lost its meaning here. Her skin was the color of forgotten moonlight, so pale it seemed translucent, as if the darkness had leached the warmth from her veins over countless unseen years.
Shadows clung to her like cobwebs, curling around her wrists, her throat, the sharp angles of her collarbones, as though the abyss itself had tried to claim her and settled instead for marking her as its own.
Her hair also matched the abyss surrounding her.
They were black, but not the rich, glossy black of raven feathers or ink, but the absolute black of a starless night—a void within the void. It spilled down her back in a river of shadows, so long it pooled around her feet when she stood still, blending seamlessly into the darkness until it was impossible to tell where she ended and the abyss began.
Then—
Her eyelids lifted.
Silver-gray eyes, the color of tarnished mirrors, stared blankly ahead.