“Bo!” I shouted his name, trying to bring him back from the brink of his breakdown.
“Bo, tell me! Where are we?” I demanded more forcefully this time.
“This…” Bo said pausing to lift his head up, his voice quieter now, stripped of its usual ease, his expression darker than I had ever seen it, as he told me,
“…Is the Null.”
“The Null?” I repeated.
“The land of nothingness, where any hope of more is lost and your punishment is simply existing,” he told me in a pained voice that was stripped of all hope, just like he had said.
My stomach dropped.
“How do you know that?” I asked, the question barely forming past the tightness in my chest.
He didn’t look at me right away.
And when he did… There was no humor left in his expression.
“Because…this is where I’m from,”he said simply, his voice steady now, though something far older seemed to sit beneath it.
Then before I could ask more, the world around us shifted slowly into focus. As though nothing about it felt right, because this wasn’t a place that had ever known life, not truly. The ground beneath my feet was cracked and ashen, stretching endlessly in every direction as though the land itself had long since given up trying to sustain anything at all.
There were no structures, no walls, no sense of order or rule.
Only ruin.
A wasteland that felt abandoned not just by people, but by time itself.
The sky above hung low and heavy, a suffocating expanse of dull, shifting grey that churned without wind. That swirled without storm, as though something unseen moved beneath it. Something vast and restless that never quite broke through.
And then there was a sound, not loud and not sudden, but wrong in a way that settled uneasily beneath my skin. A slow echo of footsteps that didn’t belong in a place that felt so utterly dead.
My body went rigid as the sound drew closer, each step measured, unhurried, as though whoever it was had all the time in the world.
And then he appeared.
From the horizon, as though the land had simply…allowed him to step forward.
He moved with an ease that didn’t match the desolation around him, his presence cutting through the emptiness in a way that made the air feel heavier, as though it bent around him rather than the other way around.
There was something wrong about him.
But it was there, in the way he carried himself, in the quiet, controlled confidence that didn’t belong to a man who had been cast into a place like this.
He carried himself like a fallen king, or perhaps something that had once been one. His presence holding onto the remnants of power that refused to fade. His gaze found us instantly, sharp and unrelenting. Then he smiled and it was as far from the warm kind as you could get. The kind of sinister smile that only came from pleasure gained through suffering. A knowing curve of his mouth that sent something cold sliding down my spine.
And then he stepped forward.
The full scale of him hit me all at once, because he wasn’t just tall, he was towering, unnaturally so. His form stretched upward like something that had no business standing among the living. His body was wrapped in layers of dark, tattered armor and shadow-woven cloth that clung to him like it had grown there. Jagged and uneven, as though it had been forged from something broken and left to rot. Spiked ridges crawled acrosshis shoulders and down his arms, sharp and brutal, giving him a silhouette that felt more like a weapon than a man.
A long, shredded cloak trailed behind him, dragging across the dead ground, whispering against the ash with every step he took. While chains hung loosely from his form, shifting with a dull, hollow sound that echoed far louder than it should have in the silence.
As for his face, if it could even be called that…Goddess, it was terrifying.
It was half-hidden beneath a dark, skeletal helm, its surface carved into something ancient and cruel. The edges sharp, the hollow where his eyes should have been swallowed entirely by shadow. And yet I could feel them. Feel him looking at me. Like he could see straight through skin and bone and into whatever lay beneath.
In one hand, he held a blade that looked as though it had been dragged from the grave itself, long and brutal. Its edge was uneven, as though it had been used too many times. The metal dark and worn, drinking in what little light there was instead of reflecting it.
