Chapter 43 - Fractured Perception

  The world flickered in and out, a disjointed series of impressions that refused to coalesce. Darius’s consciousness clung tenuously to the edges of awareness, his head pounding in time with the distant roar of the fleeing vans. Something wet slid down the side of his face, warm, sticky. It smelled faintly metallic. His arm throbbed with a distant, muted ache, but the pain felt… far away. Like it belonged to someone else.

  His vision swam, the scene ahead indistinct. Concrete blurred with streaks of light as his body jolted, though whether he was moving or the world was, he couldn’t tell. A sharp pang erupted somewhere in his skull, deep and reverberating. The sensation wasn’t pain so much as pressure, a sense of something shifting inside his head. His thoughts scattered at the recognition—this was bad. He couldn’t hold onto why, couldn’t pin down the logic, but the sense clung to him, a faint, nagging warning.

  The edges of his awareness folded in on themselves. Blackness.

  – – –

  Heat pressed against his side, firm but steady. He was moving, no—he was being moved. He could feel his body swaying, cradled by arms stronger than he’d expected. Through the haze of his disorientation, his thoughts latched onto an old memory. His father’s arms, rough from years in the shipyards, lifting him from the couch after he’d fallen asleep there as a boy. The soft murmur of reassurance, his father’s familiar scent of grease and stale smoke.

  The warmth of the memory carried him for a moment. Then it shattered. The sensation of being carried grew jarring, uneven. The warm strength of his father’s arms was replaced by harsh, jostling movements and the bite of cold air. His consciousness slipped away again, ripped into nothing.

  – – –

  The black void stretched endlessly around him. A ripple of energy coiled through the vast emptiness, alien and incomprehensible. His senses screamed, unprepared for the raw power threading through the fabric of space itself. He felt his mind bending under the weight of the unknowable force. He wasn’t supposed to be here. Couldn’t be here.

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  This wasn’t his memory.

  The realisation slipped through his fragmented awareness, a shard of clarity that made no sense. He’d never felt this before, never seen the universe this way—impossibly infinite, a weave of energy and space bending, folding. A void jump. He was caught in the middle of it, the pulse of the jump’s energy singing through his very being. Then it tore him apart.

  He felt himself scatter. Darkness swallowed him whole.

  – – –

  He was floating, and for a moment, it was peaceful. Then the sensations began: the cold caress of void against his hull, the hum of systems far too advanced to be anything he should recognise. Heat lanced through him, the boiling radiation of a nearby dwarf star barely mitigated by his shields. The energy surged, a sharp contrast to the cold. It made sense in a way that had no words, only sensation.

  Something hit—no, impacted. He felt it in a way that shouldn’t have been possible. The shimmering of shields struggling to hold, energy diffusing across their surface. He braced, though he had no body to do so, the instinct to endure deeply ingrained.

  The shields faltered. Failed.

  The next impact tore through, lancing into his hull with vicious precision. Systems overloaded, the surge of damage spreading like wildfire. Fear—no, not fear. A loss of cohesion, a failure of control. The void reached for him, ready to claim him piece by piece.

  And then it was gone.

  – – –

  When awareness returned, it was muted and fractured, a barely there echo of himself. His chest felt heavy, but when he tried to draw in a deeper breath, his lungs wouldn’t comply. He wasn’t sure if his body was still his own—there was no certainty, no anchor. He felt pieces of himself slipping away, the fragments of his identity eroding like sand under waves.

  Something pressed against his chest, sharp and unyielding, followed by the metallic tang of blood thick in his mouth. He wasn’t sure if it was real or another borrowed sensation. He tried to move, to ground himself in the present, but his limbs wouldn’t obey. Instead, the pressure in his skull grew, a crescendo of wrongness.

  The world folded again, taking him with it.

  – – –

  Sound returned before sensation. The low rumble of an engine thrummed through the darkness, mingling with the scrape of something heavy shifting beside him. He wasn’t sure if the sound was distant or if it vibrated against his very bones. He tried to lift his head, but the effort sent a cascade of searing light behind his eyes. The pain flickered briefly into clarity, sharp and jagged, before dulling again into a distant throb.

  For a moment, he hovered on the brink of consciousness, teetering between the here and the now. Then he was dragged back under, his thoughts tumbling into blackness.

  – – –

  He was whole and not whole. He was present and not. The boundaries of his body, his mind, blurred and re-formed, like shadows on water. The sensations came in staccato bursts—a jolt of cold, the metallic bite of blood, the faint echo of far-off voices. They flickered through him, flashes of understanding that dissolved before he could grasp them.

  In the silence between those moments, something stirred within him. Not thought. Not memory. Something deeper, coiled and waiting.

  An Echo of something… vast. Important.

  And then he was gone again.