CHAPTER 92: WHY, WHY, WHY, WHY, WHY, WHY, WHY, WHY...

Darkness.

Cold, empty, swallowing darkness.

I couldn’t see.

I couldn’t move.

I couldn’t even breathe.

The air was heavy, thick—like I was buried alive in it. Everything hurt, yet I couldn’t even tell what part of me was hurting. It was all just pain, all just nothing.

I was cold.

I was scared.

Why was I scared?

What was happening to me?

My thoughts stuttered, repeated, spun in circles like broken glass.

Why couldn’t I remember?

Why couldn’t I remember?

Why couldn’t I remember?

Why, why, why, why, why—

I tried to scream, but no sound came out. My mouth opened, but the dark swallowed everything. Not even the echo of my voice existed there.

There was... something wrong with me.

Something missing.

I could feel it. A hollow ache in my chest, twisting tighter and tighter until I wanted to rip myself apart just to make it stop. It was grief—pure, endless grief.

But what was grief?

Why was I feeling grief?

Who was I grieving?

My heart felt like it was splitting open, my mind spinning out of control.

I heard a voice, it sounded like Belle... but...

Who was Belle?

Who was I?

Where was I?

What was happening to me?

What was happening, what was happening, what was happening, what was happening...

My thoughts started screaming over each other until they became nothing but noise, until it felt like my mind might shatter under the weight of it all.

The darkness crushed closer, pressing against me like it wanted to pull me apart, swallow me whole. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t—

And then—

It appeared.

A faint, flickering light in the void, pale and cold, forming into a window in front of me.

The moment it appeared, everything inside me went still.

My thoughts froze mid-scream. My breath caught. My heart skipped.

I went silent.

Completely silent.

Like someone had ripped every emotion out of me and replaced it with static.

The change was so fast, it was wrong.

One moment I was shaking, terrified, lost in grief and rage and the next, I was empty.

Completely, disturbingly empty.

It was creepy.

Even I could feel it.

Like I had just become someone else entirely.

But why was it creepy?

The dark pressed in from every side.

Heavy. Cold. Suffocating.

My breath shuddered out, barely audible in the void. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t feel. Only that crawling numbness spreading through my limbs like frost beneath the skin.

And then—light.

A faint, flickering glow, cutting through the dark like a dying candle.

Didn’t I just say this?

A black screen burned with white text.

[Negative emotional spike detected.]

[Level of insanity climbing: 35% → Level 2 threshold approaching.]

The words pierced straight through my skull, each one echoing like a hammer against bone.

[First lock: Bloodline weakening.]

[Progression 1% → 3%.]

And then the screen faded, gone before I could even process what I’d read.

Silence again.

Just the void. Just me.

...Or what was left of me.

My thoughts scattered like shards of glass.

Negative emotions?

Insanity?

Bloodline?

What the hell did that even mean?

I tried to think, but my mind refused to obey. It was like trying to grab water with my bare hands; every thought slipped away before I could hold it.

No control. No anchor. No sense of self.

My heart slammed against my ribs too fast, too loud, too alive for a body that didn’t feel real anymore. The darkness felt alive now, pulsing with every frantic heartbeat, closing in with every breath I took.

Why couldn’t I remember?

Why couldn’t I remember?

Why—why—why—why—why—

I didn’t even know what I was screaming for anymore.

Who was I?

What was happening to me?

Why was I feeling like this?

This grief was choking me.

This hatred, it wasn’t mine, it couldn’t be. But it felt like mine. It burned in my chest, festered, twisted into something unholy.

Wait, grief?

What was grief?

Who was I grieving?

My chest ached like something had been ripped out of me, like I was mourning someone I didn’t even remember losing. My mind reeled, drowning under the weight of emotions that weren’t supposed to exist without a reason.

Everything was breaking.

The darkness, the silence, my own mind splintering apart, piece by piece.

What’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening.

I couldn’t stop it.

It was too much.

The grief ate at me from one side, hatred from the other. And somewhere between them, fear curled around my heart, whispering that maybe this was all I was now, a hollow vessel filled with broken emotions.

Then, out of nowhere, light again.

That glowing black window blazed to life once more, white text searing across the dark, and for just a moment, all the noise stopped.

My mind froze. My body stilled.

Everything inside me—screeched to a halt.

I stared blankly at the message, unblinking, unthinking.

And the emotions changed.

Too fast. Too sudden. Too wrong.

The grief faded. The rage died. The fear turned into something quiet—something empty.

My heart slowed.

There was no sound. No feeling.

Just a hollow kind of calm that was somehow even worse than the chaos.

Like something inside me had snapped clean in two.

Like I’d crossed a line I could never return from.

[First lock: Bloodline weakening.][Progression 3% → 6%.]

Each word felt like a nail driven straight into my mind. The world trembled. The void rippled around me, thin cracks of light spiderwebbing through the black.

My head throbbed. My breath caught.

And then—

A voice.

Soft. Shaken. Familiar in a way that made my chest ache.

"Sebastian!"

...Belle.

That name.

Belle.

Why did it sound like it meant something?

Who was Belle?

Who was I?

The thoughts spiraled again, dragging me down that same endless whirlpool of confusion and pain. My mind clawed at the edges, searching for something to hold onto, something real, something that made sense—

But then.

Crack.

A sharp sting bloomed across my cheek.

It wasn’t much, just a single instant of contact, but it burned.

It burned so vividly it felt alive.

I didn’t even understand what had just happened. My head snapped to the side, my body jerked like I’d been yanked out of a nightmare I didn’t know I was trapped in.

The darkness wavered. My mind went blank.

It felt like someone had slapped me.

That stinging warmth on my face, the faint echo of her voice, the chaos still crawling under my skin.

They all blurred together, colliding into something incomprehensible.

My thoughts crumbled.

My body felt weightless.

And then—

Nothing.

---

Everything was still black, like the endless void of space. It was heavy, it was suffocating.

But this time... I could feel.

The suffocating nothingness wasn’t gone, but it had changed. It wasn’t absolute anymore. The void pressed against my skin, cold and shapeless, yet my body existed within it.

My limbs ached. My chest rose and fell with shallow, uneven breaths. The faintest tug of gravity pulled at me, reminding me that I still had weight... that I was real.

Something wet touched my face.

A drop. Then another. Then another.

Each one fell softly against my skin before sliding down, tracing the line of my jaw, dripping somewhere below.

I could feel them.

Every single one.

I blinked, or at least, I thought I did, but the world remained pitch black. My body was sluggish, my thoughts still fogged, but the faint sting on my cheek burned quietly against the cold, like the echo of something that had pulled me back.

The chaos in my head had quieted, though not vanished. My mind still teetered on that fragile edge between clarity and madness, one breath away from falling back into the screaming void again.

But for now... I was stable. Barely.

Somewhere beyond the dark, I heard it.

A sound soft, trembling, broken.

Someone was crying.

The voice cracked with pain, muffled and small, but it reached me like a thread of light through the dark. My chest tightened. I wanted to speak, to reach out but my lips barely moved.

The crying grew closer.

Then warmth.

Two hands, trembling slightly, pressed gently against my cheeks.

And through the haze, my eyes fluttered open.

The darkness fractured into shards of dim light. I couldn’t see the world clearly, just a blur, but in that fragment of vision, I saw them.

Two eyes.

Pink and purple, blending together like dawn bleeding into dusk.

They glowed softly, trembling, filled with tears.

And in that moment, everything else my confusion, my fear, the fragments of my broken mind fell silent.

Because those eyes... they were the only thing that mattered, because I started remembering everything.

Who I was.

Where I was.

And most importantly, who those eyes belonged to.

The wetness on my face wasn’t mine.

The sting on my cheek wasn’t a dream.

And the voice that had called my name through the dark...

It belonged to her.

Belle.