Dex stood alone on the platform, in yet another new hell. Three figures at the far end of the bridge. Too far to read their faces.
“Fuck, I can’t catch a break.”
Please be friendlies, please be friendlies.
He stepped forward onto the bridge. Surely the universe wouldn’t try to mug him twice in one day.
Right?
The elevator bridge stretched ahead like something from a post-apocalyptic movie, all twisted metal and questionable engineering decisions. Dex had seen enough urban decay to recognize infrastructure held together by stubbornness and prayer. The framework disappeared into darkness that reminded him of subway tunnels at 3 AM. Those amber lights embedded in the cavern walls had the same sickly quality as emergency lighting in a failing office building, casting everything in that particular shade of “something’s definitely wrong here.”
The cold air bit at exposed skin. Every shadow felt like it was paying attention.
The void pressed against the back of his mind like a migraine waiting to happen. For now, mercifully still.
As he approached, the three figures resolved. The largest stepped forward. Arms like structural columns, face carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who’d survived the Duskwarrens long enough to stop caring about niceties. His companions flanked him with the practiced ease of people who had done this before.
“Look what crawled in,” the leader said, his voice carrying the rough accent of dive bars and bus stations. “Another fresh-faced exile, stumbling around like he owns the place.”
“Come on man, I just got here. You think I’d be kicked down here if I actually had money?”
“This is our bridge,” the man continued, taking another step closer. “Our territory. You want to cross, you pay the toll.”
Dex spread his hands. “Man, I literally just told you. There’s nothing on me.”
The leader’s expression darkened, jaw tightening. “Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?” He gestured to his companions, who began to spread out. “You think because you’re new, you get a free pass?”
“That’s not how it works down here, surface boy,” the wiry man on the right snarled, his yellowed teeth catching the amber light. “Everyone pays. New, old, doesn’t matter.”
The third thug, a scarred woman with dead eyes, simply cracked her knuckles. The sound echoed off the cavern walls.
“Last chance,” the leader said, his voice dropping. “Pay up, or we take it out of your hide.”
Fuck, fuck... fuck.
“Look, guys... and girl. I really have NOTHING. Less than nothing.” He trailed off.
Reaching for something he wasn’t sure was still there. Pleading with the void to respond, however it could.
The leader’s patience snapped. “That’s it. Boys, teach this surface rat some manners.”
The three closed in. The wiry man lunged first, rusted knife gleaming, and Dex tried to dodge. Tried. The blade caught his forearm and drew a line of fire through his flesh.
He stumbled backward, blood seeping through torn sleeve. The scarred woman moved in from his left. Her fist caught his ribs and the air left his lungs in a single brutal expulsion.
Come on, come on. Desperation clawing at the inside of his chest, reaching for anything that might matter. The void had been there before, in the alley, raw and terrifying and real. So where was it now?
The leader grabbed Dex by the collar and hauled him upright. “See? This is what happens.” His fist drew back.
That’s when Dex felt it.
Not a sensation from outside. More like a change in internal pressure. The cold certainty of something vast waking up in the room behind his thoughts. Something that had been waiting with the patient indifference of deep water.
It was feeding on his desperation.
How am I supposed to control this?
The world went wrong at the edges.
Temperature dropped. Not cold, but the absence of warmth, as if the air had decided to stop participating. The amber rune-stones flickered and dimmed in ways that had nothing to do with power fluctuation. The bridge geometry shifted: impossible angles at the railings, shadows landing wrong, the far wall of the cavern acquiring a depth that didn’t match the space it occupied. Dex’s eyes kept trying to find a surface to land on and kept sliding off.
The leader’s grip on his collar went slack. “What the hell...”
Dex’s voice came out wrong. He felt it before he heard it, harmonics resonating at a frequency below the floor of normal sound. “Let me go.”
The scarred woman’s dead eyes found something to feel. Fear.
The bridge shuddered. Metal groaning under a force that had nothing to do with weight.
Dex, unable to pull himself free, screamed at them. “Run! I can’t control it!” He swung with what was left.
FUCK.
His fist connected with the leader’s jaw. Where his knuckles landed, there was a sound like silence collapsing, the sudden absence of something that should have been there. He looked at his hand afterward and couldn’t make sense of what he saw. His eyes kept trying to process it and kept finding nothing.
The leader stumbled back, one hand pressed to his face, expression wild. “What are you?!”
The wiry man had given a step, knees unlocked, voice cracking. “This ain’t natural, boss! We gotta get out of here!”
But panic made the wrong choice. The leader, face still wrong in that way Dex couldn’t look at directly, snarled through his terror. “Kill him! Kill him before he kills us all!”
The wiry man flinched at the command, then lunged anyway.
The blade went into Dex’s side.
For a moment, just the impact. Then the void finished deciding.
The man with the knife was there. Then in the space between one heartbeat and the next, he wasn’t.
Not fell. Not fled. A subtraction. The bridge where he’d been standing looked wrong in the aftermath, the corroded surface like an eye that had lost focus, like a word whose meaning had been removed while leaving the shape intact. Dex’s gaze slid off it. His mind refused to assemble what it was seeing.
Something wrong happened at the edge of his vision. The scarred woman. Sound stopping somewhere it shouldn’t. He didn’t look. He couldn’t.
“I’m sorry!” Dex gasped, blood spreading warm and fast beneath his shirt. “I’m sorry, I can’t—”
The void kept going. Feeding on the pain now instead of the desperation, indifferent to the distinction.
The last thing he saw before consciousness left: the leader stumbling backward into the dark of the Duskwarrens, one hand still pressed to his face.
“I’m sorry...” Dex whispered to no one.
The void dream didn’t come as sleep. It came as an interruption, a gap in the sequence where Dex should have been, and wasn’t.
He was standing in absence. Not darkness, because darkness still implies space. This was the negative impression of a place, the outline left by something removed.
Something was present. It didn’t speak. It watched with the specific quality of attention a thing uses when it has been cataloguing you for longer than you’ve known it existed.
What are you? he tried to ask. The words dissolved before they formed, like trying to speak underwater in a language made of sound that had already happened.
The answer, when it came, was not language. A shape pressed against the inside of his awareness. A key turning in a lock he hadn’t known was locked, in a door he hadn’t known was in him.
No, he wanted to say. I didn’t agree to this.
The void didn’t ask.
A weight settled into his right hand. Not given. Not offered. Logged. Like a registry entry being updated somewhere he’d never have access to.
It was gone before he could look at it.
Consciousness returned with the taste of copper and the sensation of warmth spreading under him where it shouldn’t.
[Void Affinity: Threshold Breached] Catalytic event recorded. Emotional collapse utilized as ignition mechanism. The next will not be a choice either.
[Unclassified Manifestation: Logged] Object cohesion: temporary. Origin: unresolved. Previous occurrences: [data unavailable].
The notifications flickered in his vision like a glitch in reality, and for a moment he could have sworn he heard something, not quite laughter, not quite signal decay, echoing from somewhere very far away.
He looked at his hand. Something had been there for less than a heartbeat. Edges that didn’t obey the geometry they should have. When he tried to focus on it, actually look at it, it dissolved like smoke, leaving only the memory of a shape and the specific lingering sensation of being observed by something that had now updated its records and moved on.
The bridge around him told the story he couldn’t.
Corroded metal, twisted and blackened in ways that had nothing to do with rust. Two outcomes on a platform meant for none.
His eyes found them whether he wanted them to or not.
Where the wiry man had stood there was only the wrongness. A patch of bridge his gaze kept sliding off, the corroded surface still shaped around an absence.
The scarred woman was worse.
She was still mostly there. Crumpled against the railing in a posture his mind kept trying to correct, the edges of her unfocused, refusing to settle into a shape his eyes could hold. He didn’t know what the void had taken. He could only tell that something fundamental was missing, and that whatever remained was waiting for him to look this time.
“Oh god.” The words were barely sound. “Oh god, I killed them.”
The analytical part of his mind made its case: they’d attacked first, they would have killed him without hesitation, it was self-defense. Two people who had been alive minutes ago and now weren’t. Because of him.
He’d screamed at them to run. He’d tried.
Dex doubled over, retching, though his empty stomach had nothing to give. The void stirred restlessly at his distress and he forced himself to breathe, pushed down the horror before it triggered something else. The last thing he needed was to lose control again.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the corpses. Knowing the words were nothing.
The knife wound in his side throbbed with each ragged breath, warm and insistent, though the pain felt strange, distant, as if the void experience had left him partially detached from his own edges. The metallic taste wasn’t just void residue. He was bleeding badly.
Footsteps in the shadow beyond the bridge. Slow. Cautious. Approaching.
Dex tried to push himself up. Fresh fire from his side. Whatever was coming, he wasn’t sure he had the strength to face it.
“He..lp.” The word came out corroded.
The footsteps stopped. A long moment. Then resumed, more cautious, as if the person on the other end was running a cost-benefit analysis that was genuinely too close to call.
“Well, well,” came a voice from the darkness. Female. Weathered by years of exile. The voice of someone who had seen enough to stop being surprised but hadn’t stopped being interested. “What do we have here?”
A figure emerged from the shadows. Older woman, gray hair in practical braids, clothes that had outlasted several better decades. Her eyes were milky white with cataracts, but she moved through the dark with the confidence of someone who’d long ago stopped needing to see it.
She paused several feet away. Tilted her head the way you do when you’re listening to something the other person can’t hear.
“There’s a hole in the magic here,” she said slowly. “Like someone tore a piece out of reality itself.” A pause. Then, before Dex could respond: “You’re bleeding out, boy. I can smell it.”
She approached with each step deliberate, hands slightly extended, not reaching for him, just reading the space. “Question is, are you going to die here, or are you going to let me help you? Because I’ve got healing potions, but I’m not getting any closer to whatever that... absence... is around you.”
Please.
“Alright, boy. Listen carefully.” She pulled a small vial from her belt, its contents glowing with faint blue light. “This will help with the bleeding. But I can’t get close enough to hand it to you. That thing around you, it’s making my skin crawl just being this near.”
She studied the space between them with her blind eyes, somehow still conveying calculation. “I’m going to roll this to you. Can you manage to drink it yourself?”
Without waiting for an answer, she placed the vial carefully on the corroded bridge and gave it a gentle push. It rolled across the twisted metal and came to rest just within Dex’s reach.
“There.” She stepped back. “Drink it all. And while you do, you’re going to tell me exactly what happened here, because I’ve been in the Duskwarrens for twenty-three years and I’ve never seen anything like this mess.”
Dex barely gripped it. Bit the cork loose and let the contents pour into his mouth.
Copper and mint, burning slightly going down. Warmth spread through his chest and into the wound. The bleeding slowed to a trickle. The pain didn’t disappear, but it became manageable enough to think clearly.
“Better?” she asked, as if she already knew.
He sat up without the world spinning. “I...” He stopped. How to explain something he didn’t understand? “I don’t know what I am. They tried to rob me, and I got scared. Then everything went dark.”
“Scared doesn’t usually turn people into walking holes in reality, boy. Try again.”
“Listen, lady. I just learned magic was a thing today. You may know more than I do.” He let out a breath. “In the last few hours I’ve lost my dog, been dropped into a new world, almost mugged, detained, and nearly died. At this point I just want to go home.”
The woman went quiet. Her blind eyes drifted somewhere past him.
“A dog,” she murmured. The word landed differently in her mouth, not dismissal but something closer to recognition, as if she were filing it in a place she’d return to later. “You lost a dog.”
She was still for a moment. “Boy, I don’t think you understand what you’ve stumbled into.” She gestured at the carnage around them. “This isn’t just magic gone wrong. This is something that shouldn’t exist. And if you’re telling the truth about being from somewhere else...” She trailed off, shook her head. “That explains why you’re a walking impossibility.”
A cautious step closer, still maintaining her distance from the residual void. “What’s your name? And where exactly is this home you want to get back to?”
“I’m Dex. And I’m definitely not from anywhere around here.” He paused. “Hey, do you have somewhere safe we can go? I need to process what’s happening. I’m more than happy to trade stories if you can help me understand what’s going on.”
She studied him for a long moment. Something settled in her expression. A decision reached. “Smart boy. This bridge isn’t safe, not after what happened here. Others will come to investigate, and trust me, you don’t want to be here when they do.”
She gestured toward the shadows. “I’ve got a place. Not much, but it’s hidden and warded. Can you walk?” A pause. “And more importantly, can you keep that absence of yours from eating through my walls?”
“I can’t make any promises.” Dex struggled to his feet. Pain flared from his side and he chuckled, which made it worse. “Lead the way.”
Lyra hadn’t moved. She was waiting, as if she knew the deflection wasn’t the whole thing.
“Thank you,” he said. “Really.”
He glanced back one final time at the bridge before following her.
The twisted metal. The corroded stone. The darker shapes sprawled across the platform.
I did that. The thought landed like something physical. Those were real people with real lives, and now they’re just gone. Because of me.
The rational voice made its case again. Self-defense. Survival. They’d attacked him first. All technically true. All completely inadequate against the simple fact of having crossed a line that didn’t uncross. He was not the same person who had woken up this morning. That version of himself had never taken a life, had never felt the specific weight of ending someone else’s existence.
He turned away from the bridge and focused on Lyra’s retreating form.
He carried those shapes with him anyway. Burned into memory like afterimages on the retina.
“Name’s Lyra,” she said without turning. “Though most folks down here call me the Crone.” A beat, and then, almost to herself: “Never had a reason to correct them.” She navigated a narrow passage with the ease of long familiarity. “I’ve been studying magic for longer than you’ve been alive, and I’ve never seen anything like what you just did. But maybe that’s exactly why we need to talk.”
They moved slowly through the twisting passages of the Duskwarrens, Dex’s hand trailing the rough stone wall for support. The amber rune-light grew dimmer as they went deeper, that familiar urban anxiety of walking into increasingly poorly lit territory where the smart move would be to turn around. The air thickened with the scent of old magic and older decisions.
“That absence around you is settling,” Lyra observed. “Whatever that thing was inside you, it’s not gone. Just sleeping.” She didn’t look back. “We’ll need to be careful about waking it up again.”
Dex said nothing. He was still carrying the bridge behind him.
For the first time since losing Mira, something that might have been hope moved through him, fragile, unconvincing, and entirely unwelcome.
He followed it anyway.