He screams and falls away.
And then I’m falling too.
Backward.
Into nothing.
The world fades.
My lungs stop.
My heart stills.
I leave my body.
In the silence that follows, I see her.
Sabine.
My beautiful sister, the one who never wanted anyone to get hurt.
Her head is tilted to the side, lips parted as if she’s about to speak. Her eyes don’t blink. Blood runs in thin streams down her arms from those awful cuffs. Her dress—a soft silver-blue—looks like something meant for a gala. But it’s stained with deep crimson, the blood pooling around the cuts.
I can’t look away. There’s something haunting about the way she’s gone still. I’ve seen this kind of stillness before, but this is different.
It hurts more.
No—it hurts more than I ever thought was possible.
There’s no tremble in her fingers. No breath near her collarbone. No flutter in her lashes. Just that wide-eyed, parted-lip look, like she almost said my name... but never made it.
My legs buckle, though I don’t think I’m standing. Maybe it’s just my soul dropping out of my body. I try to scream. To cry. To reach her. I try to crawl.
But it’s too late.
The air grows cold. Heavier.
Something shifts in the space that used to be a room.
And then I see it.
A figure standing behind her.
It doesn’t make a sound as it steps forward. It doesn’t look like it belongs here. Or maybe it belongs more than I do. It looks like a man in his mid-forties—tall, lean, dressed entirely in black, with a raven perched on his shoulder. But even though it has the face and eyes of a person, it doesn’t feel human.
His eyes shine like wet obsidian. When it looks at Sabine, there is nothing in its gaze. No flicker of pain. No hesitation. No recognition that what it's seeing is a person—was a person. There’s no grief. No disgust. No horror. Just a hollow stare that passes right through her like she’s already gone.
It doesn’t even feel cruel. Cruelty would mean feeling something.
There is nothing in it.
Like it’s been carved out and left hollow. Like it was never meant to understand pain or love or loss. Like the dark folds of whatever heart it might have were stitched together with absence.
If it even has a heart.
How?
How can anything stand in front of Sabine—my sister—like this, her body torn and bound, still echoing with the pain she felt, and not react? Not even blink?
