A slow inhale.
The scent of chemicals—faintly acidic, medicinal, rotting. Like the ghost of bleach clinging to a corpse.
A faint hum. The lab's old machinery whispered, like dying lungs in their final breath.
Kamanuzzaman lay on the cold laboratory floor, staring upward.
The ceiling's cracks were unchanged—but he was not.
His heart beat strangely. Not faster. Just... foreign.
This wasn't reincarnation. It was occupation.
Or perhaps, reunion.
Above him loomed a ceiling he knew too well—yellowed with time, fissured with hairline cracks like veins crawling through decay. It had seen too many sleepless nights. Too many failures, prayers, and whispered bargains.
He was not supposed to be here.
And yet, he was.
Panic flirted with his reason. Did I hallucinate it all? The screaming, the fire, the silence after death? Was it a dream stitched together by madness?
No.
A shiver gripped him. Cold and crawling, like a centipede down the spine.
"I made it back."
The thought clawed into his skull. He had done the impossible. He had torn through the fabric of time with blood and will and madness.
A hollow laugh escaped his throat—but it sounded like someone else had laughed with him. Beneath him. Inside him.
He tried to rise.
But the body betrayed him.
Not weakness. Not fatigue.
Something else.
Something's wrong.
His limbs lay as if filled with liquid iron. His muscles twitched, like puppets resisting their strings. There was something inside him—twisting, watching, not entirely human.
His limbs convulsed. Not with fear. Not with pain.
But with the collision of selves.
Consciousness — it is a mirror. A smooth surface where identity stares into its own echo and mistakes it for truth. But when two reflections clash, they do not merge —
They shatter.
And in those shards, madness is born.
His mind was no longer his own. It had become a battleground — thought against thought, memory against memory, identity twisting into something unrecognizable.
The younger self thrashed, raw and animal, howling within.
"WHO ARE YOU?! WHAT ARE YOU?! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!"
The scream wasn't a sound. It was a tearing—like flesh ripping from soul.
And then came the terror:
He realized he couldn't scream back.
The body flailed. Hands reached toward nothing.
And then —
A voice.
Calm. Cold. Timeless.
It did not echo. It invaded.
"Ah... you're fighting. How precious."
A pause.
Then:
"Tell me, boy... do you love her enough to become a monster?"
That line — it didn't land in his ears. It sank straight into the marrow.
The younger self stopped. Breath caught. Rage staggered.
The images came.
— A pale hospital bed.
— A smile too weak to hold.
— A girl, too young to carry the weight of death, whispering his name like it was the only word left in her world.
The younger self collapsed, not from defeat but from recognition.
And as silence swallowed him, the mirror cracked further.
The body stiffened. Then relaxed.
And for a fleeting moment —
He felt what it was like to be a haunted house.
Where the ghost was himself
And the war began.
It wasn't a metaphor. It wasn't mind against memory.
It was violence made internal.
His consciousness was invaded by itself, like a wound turning against the body. Thoughts were knives. Emotions became storms. The younger self lashed out blindly, desperate, treating him as a parasite, a disease, an infection from the void.
The body convulsed.
If this kept going, the younger Kamanuzzaman would scream for help. Security. Doctors. Containment.
That couldn't be allowed.
Then came the voice—not loud, but honed like a scalpel.
"Lad. Don't be a fool. Do you want to save your sister or not?"
Everything stopped.
Not outside—but deep, deep inside.
Like a bell tolling in the marrow.
And then came the vision. Not shown—imposed. A torrent of flame. Ash falling like snow. A city swallowing itself. A voice — her voice — screaming his name into a red sky.
Pain.
Real pain. The kind that doesn't scream, but just... eats.
The younger Kamanuzzaman buckled. His breath hitched. A final flicker of resistance died.
The body stilled.
And in that moment, he was pulled inward.
Into the void.
The body stilled.
But stillness was not peace.
Something peeled. Not flesh. Not thought. Something deeper.
As if the soul—no, the idea of self—was being unscrewed from the bolt of reality.
He didn't move. He was moved.
Dragged not through space, but through the seams of existence—through the scar tissue of time itself.
Then the world broke.
Not shattered like glass—but peeled back like rotting wallpaper, revealing something older, darker, truer beneath.
He was falling.
But there was no down.
Only the sense of being forgotten by gravity.
The laws of nature began to blur.
Light flickered like a dying candle trying to remember what it meant to shine.
Colors forgot their names. Shapes lost their edges.
And sound became something you could bleed from.
He passed through what felt like memories that didn't belong to him—
– A dying child screaming beneath a broken sky.
– A man watching his own shadow whisper secrets he never told.
– A sage building a prison for itself, brick by brick, out of regret.
Then came the silence.
Not the absence of noise—
But the murder of sound.
A silence so absolute, it chewed through thought.
In that void, his sense of self tried to speak—but the tongue had no mouth, and the mind had no skin.
He wasn't human.
He was only the echo of something trying to remember being alive.
And then—
He arrived.
Not placed, not transported—but revealed, as if the world had always been this way and he had simply forgotten to notice.
A throne stood before him.
But it wasn't a throne.
It was an absence given form—a shape carved from shadow that breathed.
It pulsed like the lungs of a dying star.
Around it, the darkness coiled—not empty, but pregnant with meaningtoo terrible to name.
The air didn't exist, but he could feel it watching him.
Time hung like a slaughtered god—dripping, twitching, trying not to be noticed.
And seated upon the throne—
A figure.
Not cloaked in shadow.
Made of it.
It didn't look at him.
It recognized him.
Like a butcher recognizes meat.
Two eyes.
Not burning. Not glowing.
But devouring.
Twin abysses that didn't reflect light—they inhaled it.
Kamanuzzaman collapsed to his knees.
Not from reverence.
Not from fear.
But from the bone-deep knowledge that he was prey.
He tried to speak.
"Was it you who—?"
The voice came like a guillotine.
"Silence."
It was not loud.
But it commanded silence from the very atoms.
He couldn't breathe.
He couldn't blink.
He couldn't think.
There was no threat in the voice—only inevitability.
"For a man whose life is in my hands, "it murmured, "you talk too much."
Something in him cracked.
But he laughed. Weakly. Recklessly. Like a man trying to spit in the face of death.
"You could've killed me already," he said. "But you didn't. So you need me. Let's skip the theatrics."
A pause.
Then... a chuckle. Deep. Like the laughter of something that had once been human but forgot why.
"Hmm… sharper than I expected."
"Good. You'll need to be."
And then, pressure.
Crushing.
Like existence itself pressing down. His bones felt like glass. His breath snagged in his lungs.
He couldn't move.
He couldn't resist.
The figure leaned forward.
"In five years, this world will fall into chaos."
Not prophecy.
Not warning.
A sentence.
A memory stirred in Kamanuzzaman's heart. Cities are burning. Children wailing. His own hands soaked in blood not his own.
It wasn't the future. It was the past. Or maybe both.
Time curled in on itself like a snake devouring its tail.
"You're not… a god, are you?" he whispered.
The figure tilted its head.
"What difference does it make?"
No denial.
No truth.
Just a voice older than fear.
Then:
"I have no time to waste," it said. Then it leaned closer, voice cutting like a scalpel to the soul.
If you wish to preserve your beliefs—and everything you love—then obedience isn't a choice. It's the price.
No threat. No malice. Just certainty. The kind that doesn't need to prove itself.
The world trembled around them.
"Your first task: go to the forest of Ebonveil. I will guide you from there."
Then—
Oblivion.
Darkness swallowed him.
No warning. No comfort.
Only the sound of his own heartbeat trying to remember what it meant to be alive.
"You'll understand. In time. For now—wake up."
I gasped. The ceiling above me was the same—yellowed, cracked, lifeless.
The visions were gone. The sigil's whisper had faded.
But something had stayed.
I fell from eternity into a cage of bone and breath. And though the world hadn't changed, I had—irrevocably.
And somewhere, buried beneath my ribs, an unknown existence kept watching.
He gasped.
Back in the lab.
Lights above. Voices around him.
The stink of chemicals.
A hand held a cup to his lips. Water. Blurred voices. Questions. Fear.
But none of it mattered.
Because...
Inside his skull, the voice returned.
Soft.
Final.
"Do not tell a single soul what happened today."
His spine stiffened. His skin crawled.
And in that moment, for the first time since his return—
He felt completely in control.
And yet—
He had never felt more possessed.