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The ossification finishes its work. It swallows him whole, trapping him in his own body. He can’t move. Locked into stasis. The darkness presses into him until he no longer knows where it ends and where he begins. He claws at the dark with his mind, desperate for something. Anything.
Terror consumes him at first—trapped, helpless, alone. He screams, his voice scraping against the walls of his bone-wrought tomb. His screams become sobs. Then whimpers. Eventually, his voice gives out. Silence.
No one can hear him.
Pain claws at him—sharp and fierce, stealing breath as his bones snag, crack, lock him in tight. It is a bright, snarling fire in the dark. But then his body does its work, dulling it to a low, throbbing ache, leaving a murmur in his calcified joints, his pierced flesh, his overgrown bones. Hunger gnaws at him too, a deep, hollow ache that never fades, never kills him—just is. His body—this infernal prison—keeps him alive, feeding on itself in some twisted loop of regeneration. Eventually, even that fades. Pain, hunger… it all fades into the background in one ceaseless nothing.
Days bleed into weeks. Weeks stretch into months, or maybe years? Time dissolves in the chasm’s grip—a concept too fragile to survive the dark.
He tries to count at first to keep himself sane. Heartbeats. Breaths. One… two… three… One hundred. One thousand? One million? But he starts losing the numbers as they slip through the growing gaps of his mind. He tries again and again, but each time they collapse in on themselves, dissolving into the emptiness like blood in water. Soon, the numbers stop making any sense. His heartbeat becomes white noise, a rhythm he can’t feel. His breath a murmur in the haze. It doesn’t matter. Nothing marks the passage. Nothing changes.
His mind wanders—or tries to. But there is nowhere to go. He chases thoughts of food, warm bread, fresh meat, reaching for sensation. He tries to conjure up memories, faces, sounds, sensations—his tribe, the empire’s cruelty, scientists, soldiers, lusterborn. But they are all faded, too far away—an echo of terror. His thoughts crumble, words slip through his grasp. His own name is a wisp he can’t remember the shape of. His mind frays at the edges, unravelling into fragments that drift nowhere.
He stops trying to remember.
Sometimes, he thinks he drifts off—feels a heavy pull of something deeper—but when he comes to, nothing changes. He is in the same, endless night. So, has he really awoken? Has he even slept? What is sleep in this eternity? It doesn’t matter. There is no way to tell the difference. No edge between consciousness and oblivion.
It is eternal, this limbo. Not sleep, not death—just being. A thread of consciousness stretched thin across a chasm of nothing. And there, he remains. A mind without a body. A body without a will. A soul unmoored, drifting in the dark forever.