The alleyway was pitch black; it was an all-consuming darkness that threatened to swallow him and the fear of the unknown almost led him to collapsing into an incoherent mess. But there was still someone left for him to protect. A girl who looked about the same age as him, laid collapsed at the end of the alley only a few feet away from him. The darkness around him started to collapse inwards, almost like invisible lights above the alleyway were turning off one by one. And in that darkness, there lay only a single thing. A single noise, deafening in how small it sounded. All that remained in that seemingly empty darkness was the sound of a boot on the cobblestone. Moving every so steadily towards them, marking their doom. Peering deeper into the darkness, the boy backs up and shields the girl with his body has he begins to shiver ever so uncontrollably.

Finally, he can see something in the darkness—a set of tiny blue flames which seems to be unbelievable close yet so far way at the same time, he then hears something whistling through the air, then nothing at all.

I awake with a start and immediately sit up; my entire body drenched with sweat. Most of the nights when I dream, it always of this memory. That pitiful boy was supposedly me, and the girl behind me was my then fiancé, Ariel Benedictus, third in line to the holy throne of Yeshua. For a lack of a better term, she was a princess. After the attack the marriage was annulled, and I once again faded into obscurity.

Hundreds of years ago a rebellion in one kingdom had let to the unification of half the continent under the religious leadership of Gilgamesh Benedictus, but with this came a caveat. He basically led a rebellion who believed that all leaders were naturally corrupt and meant to die, so the question then became how do you turn a rebellion into a functioning government? The answer was to promote some commoners into noble peerage, then place even more commoners under their control in bureaucratic harmony, seemingly blurring the line between noble and middle management. He also established the best schools which commoners could get into if they were rich or talented enough, once again seemingly lowering the difference between a commoner and a noble. And in a strange tradition Gilgamesh decreed that one royal descendent would be married to a commoner, and that commoner would then be raised into the position of royal consort.

Hundreds of years later this tradition was still in place, and that’s what who I was. I was a former royal consort, current commoner who once attended the royal academy of the sciences and the arcane. That was where I met and fell in love with Ariel, and I enjoyed that bliss for two years, it really was just a teenage love. At the end of our senior year, after sneaking out we were ambushed and attacked. Some form of acid cocktail was thrown at me, and I managed to block it with my body, but severe damage was done to my face, neck and back. My throat was pretty much seared to a bloody mess, meaning I could no longer talk, and one of my eyes was seared to a sludge, and most of my face was burned to the skull. I was soon rescued by our protectors who soon noticed our absence, but once they arrived at the scene only a couple seconds after the attack, all they found was me lying in a puddle of my own blood and a catatonic princess. I was saved that day, and the princess soon recovered from her shock. But then I found that I was soon being shunned, not from the royal family but Ariel herself. Over the course of my treatment, I was hit with three truths, one was the fact that I would never be able to talk again, I would probably only live for a few more months due to the poison found in my blood that couldn’t be removed, and the last and probably the hardest hitting one was one that wasn’t apparent to me in the beginning, but it looked and felt like an uncrossable chasm had formed between us. We went from talking every day to talking a sentence or two every other month. Over the course of the next six months friends who I thought I was close to slowly started to distance themselves from me. It soon felt like the walls had formed eyes and everything was watching me, just waiting to jump on me for some perceived fault. It wasn’t soon after this that I was quietly removed from my royal consort position and moved out of the castle and back with my family. My parents were middle level administrators in the royal capital, so they were rich for a noble, much less a commoner so I never added any extra baggage to their life, but it became painfully clear that my love for Ariel had always been one sided. In pain, it was decided for me to leave the royal capital and live with relatives out on the border, I didn’t mind this as the capital held too many painful memories for me now. The final nail in the coffin for me was the fact the defenders that had arrived only a couple seconds after the attack couldn’t find any evidence that there even was an attack other than the half dead boy and a traumatized princess.

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By the end of this straight trip to hell I was fundamentally a walking corpse, my blood had literally turned into a poison for my own body, slowly eating away at my brain and internal organs, I had become mute so I could even express the amount of pain I was in, and it felt that all the relationships I had put my blood, sweat, tears and faith into had ultimately failed me like I was nothing but an afterthought.

I was sent out of the capital through the teleportation portal used exclusively for those of the royal family, but this time it wasn’t used to show how close the royal family was to the person, but instead to have me quietly removed from the political scene in the capital. My only companion was a clerical puppet my parents had left lying around their estate and had repurposed to become my caretaker.

My last lucid memory of the capital was an empty hall, tall imposing pillars casting long and dark shadows with eyes that could see right through me… the steady sound metal scraping against the floor sounded oddly comforting in this cold time, and as we approached the portal, I could see it. I could see what was hiding behind it this whole time.

With an eye as big as life itself it stared at me from the portal, with its shadows it beckons to me. I should have been scared, terrified, but it instead resonated with me, like finally being reunited with a friend in a foreign land. The glowing portal seemed to loom closer and closer, growing in scope, yet the edges remained unseeable and indescribable, almost like a mighty jaw slowly closing in around me, but somehow it felt comforting. It became harder and harder for my eyes to stay open, not as if something was forcing them shut, it was more like a conflict of thought, almost as if I wanted to shut my eyes but something was telling me not to.

As the puppet brought me closer and closer to the portal my eyes became heavier and heavier, and my body started to hurt less and less. There was a vibration running through my very body, through my very blood, and it almost seemed to synch with the ebb and flow of the edges of the portal. It felt like something was calling to me from inside the portal, almost like the void in between the entrance and end of the portal was beckoning towards me, asking me to come forward and embrace it.

The instant my toe touched the entrance to the portal I could feel myself being sucked into it, almost like an inverse of a blast, my vision got flooded with absolute darkness. I had been told that transportation was instant, and I had expected to get tossed back out on the other side of the portal, but instead all I was greeted was an infinite darkness. Darkness so thick it was almost like I could feel it sticking to my skin, flooding through my pores and directly entering my blood stream. It felt like this darkness was seeping throughout me, healing my broken body and mind. No longer did I think of ending my suffering sooner, I wished to embrace this void, almost like it had embraced me.

I could see nothing in this void, it felt like I wasn’t breathing in air, but breathing in the void itself. I died a million times in that void, yet I was reborn each time, each time stronger and more aware of my abilities each time. I could feel every part of my being broken down and being rebuilt with this void, but it didn’t hurt. Instead, it felt like the very shackles of my flesh were unlocked, freeing me and my very soul.

I don’t know how long I stayed within this void, floating as skin, flesh, blood and viscera was ripped from my very core and slowly built back up. It could have been mere seconds, or it could have been years, decades, centuries. Who knew, and more importantly who cared, all I knew or cared about was my freedom. Soon, my rebirth ended, and I just laid there in this eternal void, floating around serene within its grace. This meditation like calmness seemed to soak into my very bones, The Void was calm, and I was calm, therefore I was The Void, just another part of it, soon to bring it back into this world which had shunned it from the very creation of the universe. The Void was infinite, and therefore so was I. I was everything, yet I was nothing. Yahweh fashioned the universe from within my very depths, for I was the void. Before there was light, there was darkness, and before there was darkness, The Void was.

I had a new purpose in life. This life had become useless since I had an infinite amount of them. I was no longer Adam, I was Amos, carrier and progenitor of the Void!