Dama's chest tightened and fluttered as he looked upon everyone he loved, everyone who'd steadied him.

But still, he knew one face was missing.

It was a gnawing sensation that ate at him, a hole that pulled at him harder than any other. His eyes darted around, weaving through the warm light and even warmer faces, trying to find something he himself couldn't think of at that moment...

Until, that is, he reached the seam where brightness and night met behind him.

There she was, a small figure hunched on the ground, back turned. The cloth she wore was the same drab green that had clung to her when he first found her by the river—ragged at the edges, threadbare in places.

It was Giona.

What tore at Dama was how she sat: shoulders rising and falling in quick sobs, the air around her pooling into an inky shadow that stopped where Dama's light began. Between them the two worlds bled into each other, joining in an unholy mixture where the air itself couldn't decide which or what to be.

Despite that, Dama stepped over the border without a second's hesitation. He felt the cold close around his ankles. The shadows had weight, an almost liquid chill that tried to creep under his skin.

He didn't care. He stood before her and gently, as if reaching for an injured bird, put his hand on her shoulder.

Giona's sobs cut off with a yelp, her body jumping as if she would jump right out of her own skin, then went still. She turned slowly.

The face that met Dama's was the one he'd carried in fiercely guarded memories: gaunt, afraid, eyes wide as if startled by light itself. She looked as she had the first day she woke in his cabin: a person who had spent too many nights listening for footsteps through a door. The terror in her eyes didn't hide, it sat out in the open.

Dama crouched until their eyes were level. Everything else—the bright faces, the light, the cold—fell away into background noise. He spoke quietly, words coming naturally without a single thought. "Giona, it's me. You're safe here."

The only response he got was Giona's eyes trembling with both fear and confusion. Dama forced a smile onto his face in response and held it like a promise. "Here," he said, reaching out the same way he had a year ago when he'd first offered help, "take my hand."

Just like before, Giona studied his hand for a moment before her fingers closed on his. She was colder than he expected, the shadows of trauma wrapping around her like a cloak.

Dama didn't care. He drew her up with gentle strength as he stood up, making sure she could rely on him entirely for the motion, for the leverage, for balance.

As she rose, her form shifted. It was subtle at first—a warmth returning to the hollow of her cheeks, the slack around her eyes smoothing.

Then the change flowed further: the skin that had been paper-thin filled with color. Her eyes, once shadows themselves, brightened to a clear, honest blue. Her hair, previously lank and unkempt, seemed to find its own order and fall in a single, smooth braid that swung down to her waist. Her posture straightened, curves rounding back into the body of a growing girl no longer starved of food nor light.

Giona blinked at him, cheeks flushed a tender pink. She said his name—a soft, awed syllable full of gratitude. "Dama..." The word slipped out like a small prayer.

From her view, everything rearranged itself around him. The light that stood behind Dama made it look as if the glow came from him; she saw him framed by radiance, like a sunrise breaking over a black horizon. In that instant—bright, stunning, perfect—Dama was a sun.

For a blink, Dama stayed suspended in the sweetness of Giona's smile. The way her eyes caught the light, the sudden, warm ache that unfurled in his chest like something alive, it made his shoulders ease and his insides to melt. It was then he realized he really did feel something special for Giona, whether he liked it or not.

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Then, something at the edge of his vision ripped the moment apart.

Behind Giona, in the abyss of shadows, a face swirled into existence: those two white, empty circles for eyes, the crescent grin that belonged to nightmares—The Curse of Hatred. It was as if the world inhaled and showed him, in a single cold glance, exactly what he feared most after showing him what he dreamed of daily.

Before he could even shout a warning, before he could even squeeze her hand, the darkness seized her. It wasn't a hand he could hit or a voice he could bargain with, it was an invisible force that clawed at Giona and pulled.

She was ripped from his hold with a brutality; her braid whipped like a flag as she was dragged backward into the inky abyss of the void.

Her fingers reached out, white and desperate, and she screamed—no longer the soft, grateful sound he'd cherished but a raw, keening cry that cut clean through him. Terror replaced the smile on her face in an instant; the blue of her eyes turned wide as coin, obscene with fright.

"Giona!" Dama shouted as he lunged, reflex first, heart like a drum.

Dama ran. Every muscle fired up, he sprinted into the darkness after her, arm stretched until his fingers ached to close around hers again. He shouted until his voice was a ragged thing in his throat, "Giona! Hold on! I'm coming—" but the sound thinned and broke.

With each stride he saw her being swallowed: a footstep closer and she was a little smaller, a little further down some black corridor where light refused to go. Her screams of his name faded into a desperate echo, then to a thread of sound, then nothing at all.

He chased the last place he'd seen her until his lungs burned. When he finally stumbled and came to a wild, gasping halt, both lungs clawing for air, he spun in a slow, vertiginous circle. The crowd of warm faces—his parents, Tsubasa, Owain, Koul, Liam, every cheerful pair of eyes that had filled the sunlit place—had vanished as though they'd been painted on water and then wiped away. The bright ring of safety, the grassy shore of his peace, were gone; where they had been there was only an endless, malevolent gray that swallowed sound and shape.

"Mumu!" he panted, voice thin and jagged. "Nini! Mumu, where are you—?"

No answer. His shout knifed into the void and came back dead.

"Granny Tsubasa! Owain!" He called them like anchors, like ropes to clutch, voice rising, fraying. Nothing answered—not the warm, calm tones he'd trusted, not even the faintest echo of their presence.

He called every name he could think of—Koul, Liam, Jaden, Moa, Alexandra, Kina—until his throat rasped raw. He even bellowed Saa'ir's name, a last hope tugging at his chest because Saa'ir had seemed to step from nowhere before and turn impossible things right. Silence met each call. Cold, absolute silence.

Panic, low and spreading, began to gnaw. He pressed both hands to his ribs as if to feel his heart beating under the press of fear; the side of his stomach stung where his fractured ribs protested with every ragged inhale. He rubbed at it, trying to force the pain into something he could name and manage, but his movements grew frantic—head whipping left and right, pupils blown wide, breath coming short and hard like a trapped animal's.

There was no spatial logic here, no comforting landmarks—only that blank, infinite dark and the knowledge that Giona had been taken and that everyone else had been erased like chalk from a slate. The realization clawed at him, and with each textureless second his panic amplified into a raw, tidal terror that shook his limbs. He was utterly, terrifyingly alone.

The shout rips out of him—raw, ragged—an animal sound in the void. "ANYONE!?" It bounces off nothing, swallowed by the black, and for a terrifying instant Dama waits for the silence he's come to expect.

Then the answer comes. Not across the air, but inside him, like someone speaking straight to the hollow of his skull.

"All alone…"

The words are lacquered with venom. They slither under his skin, a flavor of iron and cold. Dama's stomach flips; bile rises hot and sour. The voice isn't heard so much as imposed—pressed into his head with the soft, undeniable force of someone filling a room by standing still. Every hair on his arms stands up.

He turns without thinking, the motion clumsy and frantic, eyes scanning the empty grey. There—standing where, a heartbeat ago, there was only more shadow—is a boy. His posture, the green of his sweater, the scar where the right arm should be: everything mirrors Dama exactly. For a breath Dama's chest loosens—Nini, the trickster, had mimicked him before. Maybe this is another one of those safe, silly things.

The second heartbeat after that first relief, rationality and dread slam together and the world snaps into a terrible clarity. The duplicate's face is wrong. Not merely pale or masked—wrong in the way a hole is wrong: an absence that eats the light around it. Where Dama's freckles and green eyes should be is a smooth, absolute black, like a bit of night worn as a face. The two white circles for eyes hang there, and the crescent grin beneath them is a cut of moonlight—too wide, too knowing.

Recognition is a cold, clinical thing. It arrives like a verdict. Dama knows that grin. He knows those void-eyes. The gasp that tears out of him isn't fear for himself alone anymore; it is an animal's, sharp and helpless, because what stands before him is not a copy at all.

It is the Curse of Hatred.

Next: (Chapter 91) Soul Inflicted Promise

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