Grey found himself tumbling into a body of water.
The cold hit him all at once, immediate and total, pulling him under before he could make sense of what had happened. He lashed about instinctively, arms and legs cutting through the water, clawing for a surface that kept moving further away no matter how hard he reached for it.
Then the tentacles found him.
They started at his torso. Wrapped once, twice, tightening with the patient efficiency of something that had done this before and knew exactly how it ended.
They moved to his legs next, then his arms, coiling methodically until he couldn't kick and couldn't pull and couldn't do anything except watch the surface above him grow smaller and more distant with every passing second.
He fought. He pulled against the coils with everything his spirit form had, which turned out to be considerably less than he needed. The tentacles held without effort, without strain, with the particular indifference of something that didn't need to try.
Then they reached his face.
They covered his eyes first. Then his nose, his mouth, every opening, until the darkness was complete and absolute and there was nothing left to do and nowhere left to go.
He sank.
The strange thing was, after a while, he stopped fighting it.
The tentacles were warm. That was the part that should have alarmed him more than it did.
They were warm and the water around him was quiet and the surface was a very long way above him and he was—he realised with distant surprise—genuinely tired.
Not the tiredness that came from running or walking or absorbing spirit energy while doing both. Something deeper than that.
A fatigue that had been accumulating for years in the place he kept everything sealed away, and had apparently decided that now, wrapped in bubble tentacles at the bottom of a spirit realm ocean, was the appropriate time to make itself known.
He could sleep here.
The thought crept in slowly and stayed. He could stay here.
Let the tentacles hold him.
Let the despair do what it was clearly trying to do.
Nobody was waiting for him anywhere. The Chief's promise would keep waiting. Lysa would be fine. The village would carry on without him the way it always had, comfortably, without needing to make room for a boy nobody quite knew what to do with.
He could just stop.
'Do you really want to sleep right now?'
The voice came from somewhere above the water. Muffled, distant, reaching him through layers of cold and quiet and the comfortable weight pressing down on him from everywhere at once.
He didn't particularly want to answer.
'Just a little longer,' he thought back.
'Wake up right now!'
The sharpness of it cut through the warmth like something cold and precise.
Grey jolted, awareness rushing back in a sudden unpleasant flood, and with it came everything he had been drifting away from.
He was underwater.
He couldn't breathe.
He couldn't move.
He couldn't see.
The surface was somewhere far above him and the tentacles were thorough.
He had seconds, possibly less, before the last of his consciousness followed the rest of him into whatever the Ghosts of Despair had been building toward.
He struggled.
He pulled against the coils with everything he had and then past everything he had, reaching for something deeper, and found nothing. The tentacles held. Patient, warm, completely unbothered by his objections.
Was he going to die here? How many times had he gone through such situations since he entered the Heartlands.
'I genuinely might have annoyed the Grim Reaper in a past life,' he thought, with the distant clarity of someone running out of options. 'There is no other explanation for today.'
He heard a familiar chuckle. "What a strange human you are."
It was Kaz. Directly in his ear, close and clear and entirely unbothered by the fact that Grey was currently wrapped from head to toe in despair tentacles at the bottom of a supernatural ocean.
There was no sign of the Divine Bat anywhere in the water. Not that Grey could see anything at this point.
"You do know I can hear your thoughts," Kaz said. "I'll have you know that you cannot die unless I permit it. I am what your kind refers to as the Grim Reaper. Death rests at the tip of my claws."
Grey would have responded to that if he had a mouth available.
Then the energy came without warning.
It surged through him from no direction he could identify, flooding his spirit form to its absolute limit and past it, filling every part of him until he felt less like a translucent boy and more like something that had briefly become very difficult to contain.
The warmth of the tentacles meant nothing against it. He stretched himself outward, pushing against the coils from every direction at once, and they came apart.
Not slowly. Not with effort. Like tearing paper.
The bubbles scattered. The darkness split. He was free and moving, cutting upward through the water at a speed that surprised him, the force Kaz had pushed into him carrying him toward the surface faster than he could have managed on his own.
He finally broke through.
The world dissolved around him for a moment, a brief blankness of transition, and then he was lying on his back on solid ground with the aurora sky above him and the fog drifting slowly across his field of vision
He was currently feeling the peculiar sensation of relief that comes after something has tried very hard to kill you and not quite managed it.
He lay there for a while. His spirit form had no lungs but he breathed anyway, long and slow, because the motion of it was familiar and familiar was what he needed right now.
He had made it through.
"Did you enjoy your nap?" Kaz asked, directly in his ear.
Grey stared at the aurora sky for another few seconds.
"That," he said flatly, "was the worst nap of my life."
He sat up and pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. "What the hell happened?"
"Ghosts of Despair happened. A tribe of humanoids from the Great Titan era, wiped out during the war and bound here afterward. They feed on despair that drifts in from other parts of the Heartlands. Any creature of lesser rank that wanders into their territory is subjected to it and slowly drained."
Grey looked at the stunted forest behind him. Dark and completely still, the white glow of the Ghosts nowhere to be seen.
"So a depressed orphan with unresolved emotional baggage walks straight into the middle of them."
"You were the finest meal they had encountered in millennia."
"Fantastic." He began absorbing spirit energy from the air around him, pulling it in steadily to replace what the Ghosts had taken.
"And you didn't warn me because?"
"Anticipation would have made you more susceptible. The despair grows fastest in prepared ground. Forewarning would have been counterproductive."
Grey opened his mouth, closed it, and accepted that arguing with an immortal Titan about the logic of not telling him he was about to get emotionally ambushed by spirit ghosts was probably not a productive use of his remaining time in the Heartlands.
He stood up, stretched, and turned forward.
Then he stopped.
A few metres ahead, the ground ended.
Not sloped. Not tapered. Simply ended, a clean edge beyond which there was nothing, the earth cutting off as though something enormous had removed a piece of the world and left the gap open. He walked to the lip carefully and looked down.
He could not see the bottom.
What he could see, far below, was weather. Actual clouds, white and slow, drifting a full kilometre beneath his feet across a basin of light and shadow so vast that it registered as its own sky viewed from above.
The opposite rim was visible only as a thin wavering line of blue-grey through the atmospheric distortion, shimmering and unstable, the distance between them impossible to properly comprehend from where he stood.
He stared at it for a long time.
"Is that a whole new world?" he asked.
"That is the entrance to the Heart of the Heartlands," Kaz replied. "Where you need to go."
"You expect me to jump into that."
"I expect you to go into that, yes. And before you object, I promise it is completely safe."
Grey looked down at the clouds drifting a kilometre below his feet. He thought about everything that had already happened today and decided that arguing with Kaz about safety was a conversation that had never once produced useful results.
He had come this far. It would be the stupidest possible decision to stop now.
He walked to the very edge and looked down one final time. His spirit flames burned steadily inside him, white and gold, bright and ready. He checked them the way he might check a weapon before using it, making sure they were there, making sure they were enough.
They were.
"See you on the other side, Kaz."
He took a breath. Closed his eyes.
And stepped off the edge, falling rapidly into the cold and embracing darkness below.