Empty.
I am empty. I am falling through the endless black, drowning in a sea of nothingness. Shadows claw at me; not just my own, but also the ones that I have stolen. Their talons sink into my tender flesh, ripping me to shreds as I watch, helplessly, through the mirror.
They are faceless, in that they are ever changing. Their mouths elongate, then drip from their faces, then reform, shifting from gleeful to distraught to mocking. Their eyes grow, then shrink, then devolve into blank voids in their skulls, an emptiness that piercing blue eyes can peer through to see me here, naked and weaponless, in my basest form.
Fear grips me, piercing me like a cold blade that hollows out my stomach and steals away everything that I am. Heart, lungs, stomachâall of it. So I am left with nothing but fear, a feeling as cold as the dead of winter that threatens to freeze me to death. I can no longer feel the world around me; the only sensation that remains is that of fear.
Until a voice calls my name, a name that I have almost forgotten. This silvery voice beckons to me relentlessly, firm in its insistence that I must answer. It tethers me to some distant idea of warmth, something that I have been chasing for so long that I have almost forgotten what it feels like.
Nyx Madden, it says, come home to me.