Void Tree Chronicles

Black.

It consumed everything.

Wes's eyes opened—or at least, he thought they did.

There was nothing.

No light, no sound, no weight pressing against his skin. Not even the whisper of air shifting around him. Just an endless, suffocating absence.

Not darkness. Darkness had depth—shadow, texture, meaning. This was something worse. A void so absolute it refused to acknowledge even the concept of existence.

He tried to breathe—there was no air.

He tried to move—there was no body.

He reached for sensation, any sensation, but found only the maddening silence of nothingness.

Shit.

Where the hell had that bastard and the halfling sent him?

Panic bloomed, cold and sharp, but did he even have a chest for it to coil within? A pulse to hammer against? A body to ground him?

The thought scraped against his mind, raw and jagged, as he struggled to move, to shift, to feel something—but there was nothing. No tension of muscle, no resistance of bone.

Just void.

Then—

A flicker.

Something wavered at the edges of his awareness, fragile and insubstantial. A shape, barely forming, blurred at the edges like mist trying to solidify.

His hand.

Or at least… what should have been his hand.

It stretched forward, but the fingers bled into the void, their edges unraveling like smoke caught in an unseen current. There, then gone. Real, then not.

No.

No, no, no.

And then it hit him.

This wasn't a body.

This was his soul.

The only thing left of him. A trembling, unstable construct barely clinging together, flickering against the crushing weight of emptiness.

A deep, primal instinct roared to life. He latched onto himself, onto the last thing that still existed in the nothingness.

Hold together. Stay whole.

He forced his will into it, gripping onto the only thing that mattered—himself.

The flickering slowed. The unraveling stopped.

His soul wavered, fragile and thin, like a candle fighting against an endless wind.

But it held.

For now.

There was no heartbeat to steady him. No aching limbs to remind him that time was passing. No breath to mark the space between one moment and the next.

No shifting of light or dark to tell him if a second had passed—or a thousand years.

There was only the vast, stretching now.

And in that now, he thought.

At first, his mind was sharp. Images burned bright in his memory, flashing like lightning across the void. The battle. The pain. The sword piercing his chest. The grinning bastard jamming a void seed into him like it was all a joke.

Rage.

It flared, something tangible, something to hold onto.

But time—if this place even had such a thing—stretched on.

And the thoughts slowed.

Not all at once.

It was gradual. A soft erosion at the edges of his awareness, like trying to grasp a dream slipping through his fingers.

His memories felt heavier, harder to sift through, like stones sinking deeper into murky water.

What had he been thinking about?

The man. The halfling.

The pain.

Wait.

Had there been pain?

The thought vanished before he could grasp it.

It was fine. He would remember later.

For now, he just needed to focus.

His hands—he had hands, didn't he?

He looked down. They were still there, but… wrong. No longer solid. Their edges rippled, blurring into the void like ink bleeding into water. He willed them to move, and they did—slowly.

Too slowly.

Like a delay between thought and action, like the hazy moments between sleep and wakefulness where nothing quite worked as it should.

He needed to focus.

So he did.

But thinking was getting harder.

Not impossible. Not yet.

But it was an effort.

Like wading through deep water, fighting against a current he hadn't noticed before.

Had it always been there?

Had he always felt this… heavy?

He could figure that out later.

For now, there was nothing to do but wait.

Just... wait.

Time moved on.

Wait.

What was time?

A thing that passed? A thing that existed? A thing that mattered?

Here, in this endless, formless nothing, it had no meaning.

There was nothing.

Nothing to taste.Nothing to feel.Nothing to touch.Nothing to hear.Nothing to see.

Only himself.

But even that was slipping.

His edges blurred, unraveling into the void like threads coming undone.

Where was he again?

Who was he?

His gaze—or whatever passed for one—drifted downward.

A shape floated there. His shape.

Or… at least, it had been.

Now, it was barely more than a shifting mass, a ripple in the emptiness, a blob where a body should have been.

He was losing himself.

Wait.

Had he ever had a form to begin with?

Nothingness stretched, vast and endless, swallowing all that was and all that could ever be.

It did not press down on him, for there was no weight.It did not suffocate him, for there was no air.It did not blind him, for there was no light.

It simply was.

And he was not.

Not fully. Not yet.

His form frayed at the edges, unraveling thread by thread, a slow dissolution into the great void. His fingers, once solid, blurred into mist. His limbs drifted apart, dissolving into the abyss without a sound, without a struggle.

Soon, there would be nothing left.

Soon, he would be gone.

Not dead. No, death implied a transition, a state beyond another.

This was erasure.

A return to the before, to the nothing that had come before the first breath, before the first thought, before existence itself.

And yet—

Somewhere in the depths of his unraveling, a pulse.

Faint.

Small.

Unshaken.

A thought, perhaps. Or something deeper, something older than thought itself.

It stirred within him, a whisper in the void.

I will not fade.

Not a plea. Not a hope.

A fact.

An absolute, undeniable truth, one so intrinsic to what he was that even this abyss could not swallow it.

The unraveling slowed.

The void remained.

Still. Silent. Vast.

It did not fight him. It did not resist.

Because nothing does not resist.

But he was not nothing.

Something flickered at the edges of him—small, fragile, yet unshaken. A thread of self, a whisper of identity, coiling inward, pulling tighter, weaving back together.

A body.

Not just mist. Not just a fading thought. A body.

Breath.

The first inhale felt strange, foreign, like a forgotten instinct dragged from the depths of memory. No air moved—there was no air to take in—but still, his lungs filled.

It wasn't real. It wasn't physical.

But it was his.

And that was enough.

A heartbeat.

A dull, heavy thud resounded through the void—not heard, not felt, but known. A slow, steady rhythm, like the first notes of a song being rewritten.

It pulsed again.

Then again.

Until it was constant. Until it was real.

His hands clenched, the sensation strange, sluggish, but present.

Touch.

He flexed his fingers, feeling the press of his own palm, the shape of his own form. Not mist. Not an echo. Flesh.

He rolled his shoulders, stretching muscles that had no reason to exist. But they did. Because he did.

Hearing.

There was nothing to hear. No wind. No voices. No movement.

And yet, as he listened, a faint hum curled at the edges of the silence. Not sound exactly—more like the weight of sound, the possibility of it, waiting to exist.

He focused.

A slow inhale. The rhythmic drum of his heartbeat. The shift of his fingers as they pressed into his palm.

There.

A whisper of reality forming around him.

Taste.

His tongue brushed the roof of his mouth, and suddenly, he remembered flavor—iron, bitter and sharp, like blood on his lips. A sensation that should have faded with the nothingness.

But it hadn't.

Because he hadn't.

Sight.

Black.

Still black.

But not just black.

Before, the void had been absence, not darkness—emptiness so complete it defied even the concept of vision.

Now?

Now there was depth.

Shadow shifting within shadow, edges forming at the very limits of perception.

A horizon where there had never been one.

A shape—not far, not near, just there.

He was there.

He was real.

The void had not changed.

But he had.

His breath steadied. His heart pounded. His fingers curled into fists.

Piece by piece, he had reclaimed himself.

And no void, no nothingness, no abyss could ever take that away.