Alastor’s world shattered.

The edges of his vision cracked like glass, jagged and splintered, as his body was pulled into a state of unfeeling weightlessness. The sensation of falling never came—there was only the violent tugging, the tearing of his very essence from the body he could no longer feel. A pit opened beneath him, swallowing him whole, and then everything went black.

But the blackness wasn’t empty. It wasn’t still. It was alive.

He fell. Or rather, he was consumed.

Time meant nothing here if it ever had. Seconds stretched and collapsed into themselves, and hours spiralled and splintered. His mind was a ragged thread pulled across a jagged edge, unravelling and reeling back in on itself with each passing moment. He could no longer separate his thoughts from the abyss around him. His sense of self—a fleeting, fragile thing—crumbled under the pressure, leaving him naked, exposed. The screams of his past life echoed in his mind, but they were distorted, muffled. His voice was buried beneath the oppressive weight of everything that wasn’t him.

The darkness was alive—it moved like liquid, pulsing, undulating with a rhythm that didn’t belong. It whispered, not just in words, but in feelings, in memories he hadn’t lived yet. The voices surrounded him, a cacophony of sibilant murmurs that clawed at his mind. They were everywhere, in his ears, inside his skull, slipping under his skin, filling every empty space with taunts, accusations, promises, lies.

The voices mocked him, twisted the memories of his past—his failures, his regrets—warping them into grotesque shapes. Faces he once loved—Rebecca—morphed into monstrous caricatures of fear, their eyes empty and accusing.

He tried to scream. To move. To do anything.

But there was nothing. There was only the whispering, the darkness, the endless, suffocating nothing.

The void felt like being dragged into a vat of thick, suffocating crude oil. It was black and viscous, pressing in from all sides, coating his skin and sinking into his lungs, making every breath a struggle. The deeper he was pulled, the heavier it became, weighing down his limbs, constricting his chest, as if the darkness itself was alive and choking him. The sensation was like drowning in a substance that refused to let go, clinging to him with an unnatural strength, dragging him further into its endless depths. His mind screamed, but the oil—the void—swallowed the sound, muting his terror as he sank, helpless and alone, into its cold, unfeeling embrace.

Days? Weeks? Time was irrelevant. What did it matter when everything was eternal?

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Alastor’s mind fragmented. At first, he fought it. He railed against the madness, tried to pull himself together, to remember who he was, to clutch onto anything familiar. But the longer he was here, the harder it became to tell where he ended and the void began.

The whispering changed. It grew more... insistent, less mocking. It wasn’t just trying to tear him apart anymore—it was showing him things. Horrible things. Nightmarish visions that felt both real and unreal, like flashes of memories he hadn’t experienced. The faces of his past danced before him, distorted and out of sync. Then, there was something else—power—surging through him, though he couldn’t place it at first. It thrummed beneath his skin, in his blood, like an electric current that could burn through bone.

And in that moment, something clicked.

The darkness wasn’t something to fight, something to escape. It was chaos—raw, untamed, unfocused. If he could control it... If he could wield it, shape it to his will... He could be free. He could be the one in control.

The whispering voices no longer mocked him—they hushed, as if waiting, anticipating. Alastor took a breath. It was a breath he shouldn’t have been able to take. The air here was thick, and oppressive, but he inhaled it anyway, filling his lungs with its acrid, liquid taste. He felt the power inside him like fire coiling in his gut. He didn’t understand it yet, but he could understand it. It was a matter of learning, and adapting.

He began to reach for it, to draw it into him, to shape it, just as the void had shaped him. The shadows curled at his fingertips, forming into twisted shapes that writhed like snakes. They obeyed him. He commanded them.

The voices, still there, fell into a rhythmic chanting—a low hum that synced with the beat of his heart. He could bend them. Use them. Control them. He was not weak. He was powerful. No longer a victim, no longer at the mercy of this forsaken place. He was the one who would decide who lived and who died. He would break the void, make it serve him.

But first, he had to embrace it. The pain. The darkness. The madness. All of it had to be swallowed whole.

And he did.

That was when the true monsters of the void came. The Void Callers.

They emerged from the suffocating blackness, their forms twisted and ever-shifting as if they were born from the very chaos that consumed him. Their bodies flickered like shadows cast in flame, neither solid nor fully imagined, but existing somewhere between reality and nightmare. They moved with unsettling fluidity, their eyes glowing with a malicious hunger that drilled into his soul.

The air around them crackled with a sickening energy, a distortion that made his skin crawl. They didn’t speak; they didn’t need to. Their presence was enough—a bone-deep pressure that pressed down on him, a reminder of the unrelenting force that now surrounded him.

The Void Callers weren’t just monsters—they were agents of the void itself, its will made manifest in grotesque, living forms. They existed to tear, to consume, to break.

And they had found him.