To ruin an Omega - Chapter 452: What souls are made of

Chapter 452: What souls are made of

ALDRIC

The darkness came first.

But it was not the kind you get when you shut your eyes and wait for sleep to take you. Neither was it the soft kind that still held the shape of things, where you could still almost picture the room around you if you tried hard enough. This was something else entirely. It pressed in from everywhere at once, thick and complete, like it had swallowed the idea of light long before I got there.

I didn’t know if I was floating or falling. The thought kept circling, useless and stubborn, because there was nothing to measure it against. No ground. No sky. No sense of direction. Just that endless void stretching out in every direction, or maybe in none at all.

I tried to move.

It was instinct more than anything, the body remembering what it used to be able to do, even if I couldn’t feel it anymore. I reached for my hands, my legs, my chest, anything that would prove I still had a shape, that I hadn’t dissolved into whatever this place was.

Nothing answered.

The absence hit harder than pain would have. There was no resistance, no feedback, no sign that I occupied any space at all. If I still existed, it was only as a thought, and even that felt thin, like it could tear if I pushed too hard.

Panic didn’t come all at once. It crept in slowly, curling through me in a way that made no sense without a body to hold it. Still, I felt it. A tightening that shouldn’t have been possible without lungs, a pressure building in a chest that wasn’t there.

This was wrong.

I had spent years thinking about death, turning it over in my mind during quiet moments and long nights when sleep wouldn’t come. I had imagined it so many different ways that it almost felt familiar. There were the stories, of course, the ones I had grown up with, where the dead walked into halls lined with their ancestors, greeted and judged, weighed against the lives they had lived. I had never been certain I believed in them, but I had held onto the possibility anyway.

There had been darker thoughts, too. Punishment of fire. The kind of suffering that matched the things I had done, the choices I had made when I thought no one was watching or truly judging.

And then there was the simplest version, the one that had almost comforted me when everything else felt too heavy. Oblivion. No more thought, no more memory, just the end.

I would have taken any of those.

But not this.

The runes came back to me slowly, like a wound reopening. I could almost see them if I focused hard enough, carved deep into flesh that hadn’t been mine to mark. My brother’s skin, as I got the witch to trace the lines, convinced I understood what I was doing, convinced I could bend something as final as death to my will.

The ritual… The binding… The promise that I would not fade.

I had been so certain.

The realization didn’t come gently. It hit all at once, sharp and undeniable. There was no hall waiting for me, no fire, no release. Whatever I had done had cut me off from all of it.

This was what remained. This was what the witch had told my prideful self about. But I had thought and had been certain I was above it.

I tried to scream.

The urge tore through me, violent and desperate, but there was no sound to carry it, no air to shape it into anything real. It stayed trapped inside whatever I was now, echoing back at me until it lost all meaning.

I fought anyway. I did not know how, not really. There was nothing to push against, nothing to grab or tear or break, but I threw everything I had into resisting it: the void… The silence and the crushing, endless nothing.

It didn’t notice.

That was the worst part. Not that it held me there, not that it refused to let me go, but that it didn’t even acknowledge I was there at all. It simply existed, vast and indifferent, and I was something small caught inside it, something that didn’t matter enough to be seen.

I don’t know how long I raged.

Time didn’t exist in any way I could understand. There was no heartbeat to count, no shift in light, no change to mark the passing of anything. The anger burned as long as it could, feeding on itself, until there was nothing left to sustain it.

When it faded, it left something quieter behind.

Something heavier.

Acceptance didn’t come as peace. It settled over me slowly, a weight I couldn’t shrug off, a knowing that this wasn’t something I could fight or escape. This was it. This was what I had made for myself.

An eternity with nothing but my own thoughts.

I had spent my life trying to leave a mark, trying to carve my name into something that would last. Power, influence, control, all of it had felt so urgent, so necessary. I had told myself it meant something, that it would carry me beyond the limits of my body.

Now as Cian had threatened, there was no one to remember any of it. He jested of course. But why did a part of me fear that so much?

I hated the thought of knowing the world I wanted to shape disemboweled itself. That there would be no legacy to hold onto.

Just me, alone in the dark, already slipping into something that felt dangerously close to being forgotten.

The thought should have hurt more than it did. Maybe it would have, if I still had a heart to feel it properly. As it was, it just sat there, dull and unchanging, another part of the nothing pressing in around me.

At some point, I stopped resisting entirely.

There didn’t seem to be any reason to keep fighting when there was nothing to fight against. I let whatever passed for me drift, if drifting was even the right word. There was no direction, no destination, just a quiet surrender to the stillness.

I don’t know how long I stayed like that.

Long enough that my thoughts began to blur at the edges. Long enough that the memory of who I had been started to feel distant, like something that belonged to someone else.

And then, without warning, something changed.

At first, I thought I had imagined it. A flicker at the edge of awareness, so faint it barely registered. I held onto it anyway, clinging to the possibility that it was something more than the endless silence I had grown used to.

It came again.

Not a sound, not exactly, but close enough that my mind tried to shape it into one. A disturbance in the void, a ripple that didn’t belong.

I focused on it, gathering what little of myself I could still feel and turning it toward that point. The effort felt strange, like trying to move a limb that had long since gone numb, but this time something answered.

The ripple grew stronger.

It started to take on form, shifting from something abstract into something I could almost recognize. Voices. Distant at first, warped in a way that made them hard to grasp, like they were being pulled apart and stitched back together as they reached me.

I strained toward them, desperate in a way I hadn’t been since the panic first set in.

They grew clearer.

Closer.

There was a rhythm to them, something deliberate in the way they rose and fell. Not quite speech, not quite song, but something in between that set my nerves on edge, if I could still call them that. It felt wrong in a way I couldn’t explain, like it didn’t belong in any world I understood.

Then the words broke through.

“Fresh soul.”

They hit me sharp, cutting through the haze that had settled over my thoughts.

“Way out.”

The second phrase followed, just as clear.

Before I could make sense of it, more voices joined in. They layered over each other, different tones and textures blending into something that filled the space around me, if space even existed here.

“Fresh soul. Way out.”

The chant repeated, steady and unrelenting. Each cycle seemed to pull them closer, the distortion fading until I could hear them with unsettling clarity.

“Fresh soul. Way out. Fresh soul. Way out.”

The words circled me, coming from every direction at once, pressing in the same way the darkness had, but with intent this time. Awareness. Hunger, maybe.

I tried to pull back, but I had nowhere to go.

The voices didn’t stop.

If anything, they grew louder, the rhythm tightening, the meaning sinking deeper with each repetition. It felt like they were reaching for me, like they could see me in a way the void never had.

And then, slowly, something began to take shape within the dark.

At first, it was nothing more than a shift, a subtle change in the endless black that I might have missed if I hadn’t been watching so closely. But it grew, gathering into something denser, something that stood apart from the emptiness around it.

I stared, if staring was even possible anymore.

And then I saw them.

Shapes materialized in the darkness. Ghoul-like creatures that swam through the void as if it were an ocean. Their forms twisted and wrong. Too many limbs. Faces that shifted and melted. Bodies that seemed to be made of the same darkness that surrounded us, but somehow denser. More present.

They moved toward me fast.

Their mouths worked in that same strange cadence. Forming the words without sound now. Just the movement of lips and jaws and things that should not be able to speak.

The only sentence they seemed to be able to make was: Fresh soul. Way out.

I tried to move away. I tried to flee from whatever these things were.

My consciousness jerked backward. Sluggish and uncoordinated. Like moving through mud.

They closed the distance anyway.

The first one reached me before I could react. Its hand, if the twisted appendage could be called that, plunged into what passed for my chest.

Pain exploded through me.

Real pain. The first sensation I had felt since arriving in this place. It tore through my being with teeth and claws and burning agony.

The creature pulled something out of me.

I saw it clutched in its grotesque fingers. Something bright, white, and glowing. What I could only describe as a piece of myself ripped free and exposed.

It brought the light to its mouth and then consumed it.

The other creatures swarmed.

They tore into me from all sides. Their hands plunged into my form and ripped out more of that white light. More pieces of whatever I was made of now.

I screamed. The sound had no voice, but I felt it rip through me anyway.

They did not stop.

I watched my body change. The parts they tore from me left holes that filled with the same dense darkness they were made of. My limbs began to twist. To elongate and multiply. My form shifted into something that resembled theirs more and more with each piece they took.

I fought back and tried to tear at them the way they tore at me. I tried to hurt them in hopes of stopping them… Anything to make it end.

But there were too many.

For every one I pushed away, three more took its place. They pressed in closer. Their mouths working in that horrible cadence. Their hands ripping, tearing and consuming.

I saw some of them change as they fed. The ones that had taken the most from me began to shift. Their twisted forms smoothed out. They became more human-like, more solid and defined.

They grew stronger by eating what I lost.

The realization sent fresh terror through me.

I tried to run. I pushed myself through the darkness with desperate speed. My changing form propelled me forward in a clumsy, lurching motion.

They followed.

They did not tire. Nor did they slow down. They pursued with single-minded hunger, their chant echoing through the void.

Fresh soul. Way out. Fresh soul. Way out.

“Do you know who I am?”

The words burst from me, shaped by desperation and the last shreds of my pride.

“I am Aldric Donlon of Skollrend. I am a fucking Alpha who controlled councils. Who made even monsters bend the knee.”

They did not care.

They swarmed over me again and proceeded to pull me down. Their hands plunged deeper, tore faster, and consumed more greedily.

More of the white light disappeared into their mouths.

More of my form twisted and changed.

“Help!”

The word ripped from me without thought. Pure instinct overriding everything else.

“Help! Help! Help!”

I screamed it into the void. Over and over. Begging for salvation I knew would not come.

They tore into me faster now. Frenzied by my desperation. Driven by whatever hunger possessed them.

I felt my mind start to slip.

Thoughts became harder to form. Memories blurred together. The sharp edges of my reasoning dulled and frayed.

I tried to hold onto myself and tried to remember who I was. What I had been.

But each piece they took carried away more than just light.

It felt like they were consuming my consciousness itself.

My ability to think. To understand. To know that I had once been something more than this twisted thing fleeing through endless dark.

The last piece of white light burned bright in whatever remained of my core.

I felt them converge on it. Felt their hands close around that final fragment of who I had been.

“No…”

The word came out weak and barely formed.

They pulled and the light tore free. Then the darkness rushed in to fill the space it left behind.

And then there was nothing.

No thoughts.

No memories.

No understanding of what I had been or why I was here.

All that really remained at the end was hunger and the endless dark to swim through.

Well… There was also the distant sensation of other bright things calling to be consumed.

I opened my mouth and let the strange cadence shape itself around what remained of my voice.

“Fresh… soul…”

“Waaayy ouuut.”

“Fresh soul.”

“Way out.”