Jacob flinched at the echoing slam of the door sealing shut behind him, the sound reverberating through the void like a final judgment passed. An involuntary shiver ran down his spine as he instinctively turned toward the source, but there was nothing, no outline of a door, no trace of light, no sense of direction or boundary.

The world around him was utterly black, not the kind of darkness that eventually yielded to shapes with time, but a suffocating absence of light that seemed to press in on all sides.

He stood still for a moment, trying to orient himself, straining his ears for any noise, any rustle of air or faint vibration underfoot, but there was only silence, pure, unbroken, and absolute. He could smell nothing, see nothing, hear nothing. It was as though he had been submerged in some vast ocean of emptiness, where even the idea of the senses had been suspended.

Tentatively, he lifted a foot and stepped forward, and immediately recoiled, stumbling back with his arms flailing, heart racing. There had been no resistance, no solid ground beneath his foot, just an uncanny weightlessness that felt too precise to be a dream. It was as if he had stepped off a cliff without knowing it, and yet he hadn't fallen. He hadn't moved at all.

A faint unease had been brewing in his chest since he entered, but now it bloomed into something more tangible, a cold, creeping dread that wrapped itself around his thoughts like a second skin.

This wasn't the cavern he had imagined, the one his mind had conjured in anticipation: an ancient, moss-covered chamber bathed in slow-drifting light, the mana-rich air humming with energy, great roots winding through the stone like veins through flesh. There was no luminous pond, no twisting wood, no flickering glow of life.

There was nothing.

And somehow, that absence felt more dangerous than any monster, spell, or blade he had encountered before.

Driven by that deep, inexplicable fear, Jacob broke into a run, not toward anything in particular, but away from the dread, hoping that movement alone might relieve the tension growing in his chest.

His steps found no friction, yet he did not fall. He ran blind into the dark, guided only by instinct, propelled by a desperate urge to find something, anything, to remind him he still existed.

Time slipped away from him in that sprint, as did reason. The nothingness didn't change, didn't ripple or shift or respond. He felt as though he were moving forward, yet he arrived nowhere. His breath soon grew ragged, his limbs heavy with fatigue that shouldn't have been possible in a place so utterly divorced from reality. He doubled over, gasping, though the sound of his breath did not reach his ears.

"Why… why is there nothing here?" he cried out, or thought he did. No echo came back, no vibration in his throat. There was no sound. There was no proof he had even spoken.

Looking down, he could no longer see his own body. His arms, his legs, his chest, all gone, consumed by the same black that surrounded him. He waved his hands in front of his face, but they didn't respond. Or perhaps they had never moved at all. And then it hit him, not with force, but with a slow, crawling realization that made the breath freeze in his lungs.

Was he dead?

Had the tree simply killed him the moment he entered? Was this what awaited beyond the veil of life, a void without shape or thought, without memory, without the mercy of end or beginning?

He remembered the debates, the unanswered questions that even necromancy couldn't resolve. Mages who summoned the dead, but the dead never had memories of what lay beyond. No witness had ever reported what lay beyond death.

Maybe this was it. Maybe this was what they had refused to remember. Not punishment, not paradise. Just… erasure. Silence.

A void.

As Jacob found himself spiraling deeper into the quiet dread of a world without light, sound, or even the comfort of gravity beneath his feet, his frantic running gave way to stillness, or rather, what he assumed was stillness, for in a place so utterly divorced from sensation, even movement had become a vague concept.

The fear hadn't disappeared, nor had the suffocating sense of isolation that gnawed at the edges of his mind, but he made a deliberate effort to push those feelings aside, not by overcoming them, but by refusing to engage with them, at least for now.

He turned inward, not with purpose, not out of bravery or strategy, but as a way to endure. He began to sift through memories, drawing up the words and ideas from every book he had ever read, letting their contents fill the silence like distant echoes in a void.

It wasn't for escape or survival, he doubted there was anything he could do to claw his way out of a place like this. He had no illusions about his capabilities. He wasn't the sort of person who would keep searching endlessly with hope burning in his chest, nor was he one of those rare, driven individuals who could break the laws of reality through sheer force of will or strength. He wasn't brave, and he wasn't strong.

And though he was clever his intellect alone couldn't conjure solutions out of a vacuum. He knew too little about where he was, knew nothing about what forces governed this place or even what rules, if any, it followed.

Without context, without understanding, even his best thinking was a broken compass. So instead of trying to solve the impossible, he sought comfort in the familiar. He let his mind wander over the old theories and tales he'd once devoured during long nights, alone in quiet rooms.

He thought about runes, not for their usefulness, for they would never answered to him, but for the elegance of their forms, the way their meanings curved and interlocked like puzzle pieces crafted by the gods.

He remembered the structure of them, the flow of mana through lines etched into stone or skin, the dry academic dissection of their origin and mechanics, and the awed praise given to the mages who could wield them properly.

It was, to him, the most beautiful thing, ordered, deliberate, refined. More beautiful even than the World Tree itself, or the palaces that reached toward the sky, or the rivers of mana that lit the night like fallen stars.

There, in that place without time, without noise, without self, he lingered in those memories, not seeking an exit, but shelter.

Eventually, he ran out of theories to examine, diagrams to reconstruct in his mind, old papers and spells to recall. He had combed through everything he knew so many times that he began to forget which thought came first. He had no idea how much time had passed, days, minutes, weeks? The very idea of time had dissolved.

Still, he did not give in to panic again.

Instead, when the theories faded and the runes no longer held his interest, he turned toward the fragments of his own life, the fleeting memories that made up the short stretch of years he'd lived. Not all of them were pleasant, but they were his. And in the absence of everything else, they became a kind of anchor.

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He remembered the sound of pages turning beneath his fingers, the dim lamplight that had always kept him company, the rare moments of laughter that slipped through despite how distant he'd tried to be.

He remembered the faces of people who had passed through his life, some forgotten and others still sharp in his mind. And though he could not feel his body, though he could not tell if he was breathing, he clung to those moments, not for comfort, exactly, but because they were real. They had happened.

He was the fifth son of House Skydrid, now the fourth, and while he could pretend otherwise, he would be lying if he said the pressure didn't exist, and lying even more if he claimed it hadn't shaped him in ways both subtle and profound.

Expectations had followed him like a second shadow, not always spoken aloud but always present in the glances of his instructors, the nods of his father, the measured comparisons to his older siblings. And like the rest of them, he had been trained from a young age in the use of the sword.

He had a gift for it, that much was undeniable. It wasn't just flattery when his teachers praised him, nor a father's blind favoritism when Lord Skydrid muttered that his youngest son had a natural grasp of movement, of balance, of instinctive timing.

They said he possessed a kind of unteachable awareness, an affinity for combat that none of his brothers had shown at the same age. He remembered those early days clearly: wooden swords clashing in controlled drills, the sting of blunt strikes that left bruises but never broke the skin, the smell of dust and sweat, the quiet pride he felt at how quickly he improved.

But that was before they handed him a real sword.

They had done it too early, pushing him forward before he was ready, perhaps because they believed so strongly in his potential, or perhaps because they mistook his silence for confidence.

He remembered the moment vividly: the first time steel met skin, the sharp, burning pain of a deep cut that should have been forgettable, easily healed. But instead of fighting through it, he dropped his blade and ran.

Not out of cowardice, though many said so, but because something inside him shifted, some part of his mind recoiling from the pain. He had felt an instant aversion to it, one that shocked even him.

He had the talent, yes, but he lacked the will to wield it. He could not bring himself to hurt others, nor could he endure the thought of being hurt in return. And though he remained a quick learner, mastering forms and stances with ease, his heart had left the path long before his body gave up.

In truth, he had never wanted to be a knight. The idea of scholarship, quiet rooms, endless books, questions without bloodshed had always appealed to him more.

They tried to pull him back, of course. Told him he was wasting a gift, that genius like his came once in a generation and could not simply be abandoned. But the fear had already taken root. A quiet fear, one that others could not understand, not that he wanted them to.

And so he let it go. The sword, the drills, the training grounds, all of it faded from his life, until now he could hardly lift a blade, let alone swing it with precision. He had forgotten the stances, the drills, the flow of movement he once knew by heart. It was gone.

But the memory of it remained, and oddly, that was enough for him. The knowledge that he was talented, at swordsmanship, at magic, and at study was a strange sort of comfort, like a closed chapter that didn't need to be reopened. He no longer needed to be a knight. He had chosen instead to be a scholar.

His early life, outside the harsh rhythm of training, had been simple, laughing with his siblings in the courtyard, walking through the gardens with friends, learning under the guidance of tutors who encouraged his questions, and reading long into the night by candlelight, the quiet scratching of pages the only sound in the dark.

He missed those times more than he cared to admit, missed the ease, the innocence, the freedom from guilt or shame, before he began measuring himself against what others had wanted him to be, and found himself lacking.

But regret, he had learned, changed nothing. The past would not return, no matter how vividly he remembered it.

"I want to leave," he muttered, though the sound barely existed in this void, just a whisper that seemed to vanish before it could fully form.

His thoughts circled endlessly as he wandered through the fading corridors of memory, flickers of his room lit by the soft orange hue of candlelight, the familiar weight of books in his hands, the muted rustle of pages turning late into the night.

He had come here chasing a theory, a hypothesis he had built with care and logic, hoping to observe something extraordinary, but there was nothing to observe. Not ambient mana, not even the faintest whisper of magical presence.

The space around him, and within him, held nothing. And in a strange, quiet way, it felt as though even he had become part of that nothing, stripped down to the barest form of awareness, a consciousness floating in absence.

"It's over, isn't it? I'm dead," he said, though the words rang flat and soundless in the emptiness. He felt his mouth move, the shape of the words still familiar even without the echo of his voice. "Why… why?" The question barely formed before it dissolved again.

Was he panicking? Of course he was, what sane person wouldn't, placed in such a circumstance? And yet even that fear, so deeply rooted and visceral, couldn't fully find its footing here. It flickered, faltered, throbbed like a heartbeat muffled beneath thick cloth.

Still, Jacob didn't scream. He didn't lash out or crumble to the ground in despair. He simply remained there, still, silent, doing nothing and perhaps because of that stillness, or perhaps by sheer coincidence, he noticed it: a flicker of color against the endless dark.

Tiny green lights, faint and flickering, began to drift across the space like pollen caught in a windless field. They did not illuminate the darkness, not truly, but they moved with purpose, weaving through the black in a single direction, unconcerned with his presence. Jacob's breath caught. For the first time in what felt like days, weeks, maybe, he felt something stir in him that wasn't fear or dread. Hope.

He began to run, his legs sluggish at first but quickly gaining momentum, driven by desperation. The lights were fast, far faster than him, gliding effortlessly through the void. But even so, he chased after them, pushing his tired body past its limits, driven by the vague, irrational conviction that if he just followed them long enough, something would change.

"Don't stop," he shouted, and this time the sound broke through, raw, dry, and fractured like he hadn't used his voice in ages. But it was there. He had heard himself. And somehow, that simple fact, that his voice still existed, that sound had returned galvanized him more than any surge of mana ever could.

"Keep going… don't stop, I'm close, I have to be close…" The words spilled from his mouth between gasps, barely coherent, but he didn't care. He could hear again. He could feel the floor again. He looked down and, for the first time in this place, saw the faint outline of his body, pale and hazy, but unmistakably his.

The lights were pulling away, too fast, still too far, but he couldn't stop now. Not with everything returning, not with the world reshaping itself around him.

"Wait…..wait for me!" he cried, and with the last fragments of strength he could muster, he reached into his pocket and gripped the artifact he had brought. Mana surged through him the moment he channeled into it, clearing the fog from his mind and numbing the ache in his limbs.

Focus returned. Speed returned. And for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, Jacob no longer felt like a fading thought in an empty void.

The darkness around him began to thin, not all at once, but gradually, like fog lifting from a stagnant field at dawn; and though he still couldn't see clearly, Jacob could feel the change before he could name it.

There was mana in the air, faint at first, like the low hum of a tuning fork just on the edge of perception, but then it grew steadily stronger, swelling with each step forward until it became undeniable, saturating the space around him in a way that was both foreign and deeply familiar.

And then, without warning, the moment he placed his foot down once more, BOOM.

It was not a sound so much as a presence detonating inside his head, like a pressure long held back had finally surged through a barrier.

For a single, blinding second, his vision was swallowed by pure white, searing and complete, and then, as his eyes slowly adjusted, the world around him began to take form, thick with magic so dense and charged it moved visibly through the air in shimmering currents, not unlike mist stirred by unseen winds.

He found himself standing on ground composed of coarse, warm brown sand, soft beneath his feet but solid enough to ground him. The floating green lights he had been chasing were still there, drifting through the air like fireflies, and above and around him, thick, gnarled roots twisted in intricate patterns, vast things, ancient in form and function, slowly shifting and curling as if still growing, as if watching.

With the tension draining from his body all at once, Jacob collapsed onto his knees, panting, the adrenaline finally giving way to exhaustion. The floor beneath him felt real, as did the ache in his lungs, but for a few long seconds he simply breathed, feeling the magic press down on him like a heavy cloak.

Then he heard his name.

"Jacob Skydrid."

His head snapped up, and the figure standing before him defied simple understanding. It was shaped like a man, tall, upright, familiar in silhouette, but the body was not made of flesh or bone.

It was composed entirely of translucent green light, not static but flowing, as though its very essence was being drawn from the mana that filled the space around them. The figure's features were vague, undefined, but its presence felt steady, anchored, and impossibly vast.

"Welcome, Jacob," it said, the voice quiet but carrying with perfect clarity, like a vibration in the air rather than a sound through the ears. "I am the World Tree. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

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