CHAINS OF CELESTRIA
chapter one
elysia
Death is a fickle thing.
It shows no pattern or mercy. It doesn’t care for the lives it destroys, nor the hearts it shatters. I used to be terrified of it once, of the silence after, of what—if anything, waited for me.
That was until my heart stopped.
Now darkness surrounds me. Heavy, suffocating darkness.
Or it would be if I still had lungs to be suffocated.
But I don’t.
I can feel my body, but I can’t see it. I’m looking out of eyes that aren’t there. I wonder if I truly still have eyes at all. Because what surrounds me isn’t the static of closed lids, or the familiar black of a night-shrouded room.
It’s just nothing.
Empty and vast and endless nothing.
And yet… I’m moving.
I can feel the sensation of walking, of placing one foot in front of the other, but I can’t see my legs or the ground beneath them… because there is no ground. Just the strange certainty that I am still going somewhere, even if there is nowhere to go.
Is this where Sirena is, too?
Walking through the same endless expanse, feeling herself move without knowing how, without seeing where she’s going or if she’s going anywhere at all.
No light. No sound. No one to answer if she calls out.
No way to call Thane’s name. No way to hear hers said back to her.
What if Sirena is here instead… alone in the nothing, wandering an endless hollow where time doesn’t move, and hope has nowhere to root. What if she’s trying to call for him and there is no sound to carry her voice, no sky to echo it back?
The thought hurts more than dying ever did.
She was supposed to be waiting for him.
The gods promised that, promised The Veil, where love was not torn apart but waiting for you, where souls found one another again. Sirena believed that with her whole heart, believed she’d be there in her white dress, teasing him for being late and stealing cinnamon buns.
She was supposed to have her wedding.
Her forever.
If this is all there truly is after death, if promises don’t follow us, if souls can be stranded and forgotten—
Then death isn’t peace.
It’s being torn from the one you love and left to walk forever in the dark, knowing the life you were meant to have will never come.
There has to be something more than this.
There has to be.
Because if the Veil isn’t real, if there is no crossing or gathering of souls or a place where love is allowed to endure, then what is this pull inside my chest? A steady and insistent pressure, coaxing me and urging me forward like a hand at my back.
I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know if I’m meant to arrive anywhere at all.
And yet I keep walking.
Something warm begins to wrap around my soul, settling over me like a cosy blanket pulled up to my chin. It doesn’t chase the emptiness away but softens it, dulling the sharpest edges of my terror.
For the first time since my heart stopped, I don’t feel entirely alone. Fragile hope begins to take root… because emptiness doesn’t do this. Nothingness doesn’t care.
And this… whatever this is, feels like care.
Time stretches until it loses all meaning. It could be minutes, it could be weeks, it could be centuries. The vastness doesn’t change and the nothing doesn’t thin, but the warmth stays, patient and growing warmer with each step, as if it’s waiting for me to find its source.
Then a scent drifts through the void, and something stumbles where my heart used to be.
Because vastness doesn’t smell like home, and nothing doesn’t have memory.
But this scent carries both.