Then another.
And another.
All at once, their attention snaps into place, hollow eyes finding mine as if they’ve been waiting for me to notice them. The air crushes inward, thick with a silence that feels heavier than sound. Panic spikes sharp and bright.
I try to move, to pull back, to say something, but my body refuses to answer. My mouth opens to scream, but no sound comes out, the Null Pulse swallowing my voice before it can exist.
I can’t move.
I can’t look away.
The beings move closer without stepping, forms gliding forward through space that doesn’t belong to them, and the cold deepens until it feels like frost creeping through my bones.
Hades watches me the entire time.
Not surprised.
Not alarmed.
Just knowing.
His eyes hold mine as if he can see exactly what I’m seeing, as if this world is as familiar to him as the living one is to everyone else. The runes along his skin glow faintly, and the ghosts shift subtly toward him, drawn by something inevitable.
I realize with a jolt that I’m standing at the edge of his world now.
And he’s letting me see it.
Cold sinks deeper into my bones.
It isn’t painful.
It is worse than that.
It is an absence.
The hunger inside me falters, freezing mid-lunge. My thoughts slow, stretching wide and thin until each one echoes against an endless stillness.
For a terrifying second, I feel disconnected from everything.
From Rogue’s hand around mine.
From the cabin.
From the world itself.
And it feels as though I’m standing on the edge of something vast and dark.
The veil is thin now, transparent enough that I can see what waits beyond.
Hades’ power brushes through me, not tearing, not forcing…
Just taking.
Drawing out the frantic edges, the violent urgency, leaving behind a quiet so profound it feels like being erased.
My skin prickles with frost, breathless though I don’t need breath, and the emptiness presses in harder than any pain. The ghosts blur at the edges, their forms dissolving as the Pulse reaches its peak, the world reduced to shadows, and the distant echo of my own existence.
I almost panic.
