The Hollow Dirge
The dead do not whisper. They do not grieve. They do not forgive.
They scream.
Noor walks where no living thing dares to tread, where the air is thick with the breath of something ancient, something forgotten. Shadows slither at the edges of sight, watching, waiting, hungry. The sky above her is wrong—too dark, too deep, a void that stretches beyond sight, beyond sanity.
She does not fear it.
Because it fears her.
The ground beneath her feet pulses like something alive, something buried but never at rest. She knows its language. She has spoken it in blood, written it in scars, carried it in her bones. The past is not dead. It has never been dead. It rots, it writhes, it watches.
And now, it remembers.
They buried her in forgotten names, in shadows, in silence. The whispers have begun again, curling through the walls of time, clawing their way back into the world. "Did you think you could erase me? Did you think I would stay buried?"
A laugh echoes through the void, hollow, broken, wrong. Noor does not speak. The abyss speaks for her, through her.
"The dead have no mercy. Neither do I."
Something stirs beneath her, deep below the surface—something vast, something awake.It calls to her.
She steps forward, unafraid.
And the world begins to scream.
Something stirs beneath her, deep below the surface—something vast, something awake. It knows her. It calls to her.
A breath of cold air slithers up her spine, not a wind, not a voice, but a memory given form. It has claws. It reaches for her with fingers of ice, desperate to drag her back.
But Noor does not yield.
She has walked the corridors of oblivion and returned untouched.
And that is the thing abyss cannot understand.
"Why won't you fall? Why won't you scream?"
She tilts her head, eyes like twin voids swallowing the night. A cruel smile ghosts over her lips.
"Because I am the abyss."