The world inside the cabin inverted with a violent lurch.
The red glow of the dashboard smeared into darkness as the car rolled mid-air.
Then came the first hit.
A shelf of granite slammed the front bumper with a deafening, metallic shriek.
The reinforced windshield didn't shatter, but a massive web of fractures instantly splintered Alaric's view.
The impact threw him sideways, his head cracking against the door panel. He scrambled frantically, clawing at the dashboard, his throat raw as he screamed into the roaring chaos.
"Open! Open the door!"
The car bounced off the cliff face again, clipping a frozen pine tree that snapped like a gunshot.
The vehicle spun horizontally, throwing Alaric across the interior. His shoulder slammed into the steering column, and his knees smashed into the lower console.
The crimson runes beneath the glass flickered violently before dying out.
Outside, the darkness was a blur of rushing shale and mountain mist. The car rolled completely upside down, the roof denting inward with a sickening crunch as it scraped against the rock wall.
Sparks rained past the windows.
Alaric's stomach dropped.
He was suspended in the void, blind, his vision blurring from a cut on his forehead.
He squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself, clutching his changing index finger to his chest.
The car plunged through the last layer of frost, straight down toward the rocky valley floor.
The final impact was a deafening, bone-shattering crunch that brought the violent spinning to an abrupt halt.
Silence rushed back into the valley, broken only by the hiss of boiling fluids.
White, acrid smoke began to billow from the crumpled hood and the fractured obsidian dashboard, quickly filling the cabin. Alaric choked, his lungs burning as the thick smoke blinded him.
A minute passed. Then another.
The shattered obsidian glass of the dashboard began to leak crushed blue coal the highly volatile powder mixing with the sparks from the dying runes.
A sudden, violent flash of blue heat ignited the powder. The blast tore the vehicle apart from the inside out, sending a shockwave of arcane fire ripping through the frame.
The sheer force of the explosion severed Alaric's arm, tossing the detached limb cleanly out of the wreckage, where it landed in the dirt a few feet away.
Alaric was thrown clear of the burning chassis, hitting the cold ground hard. The pain didn't hit him immediately his body was numb with shock.
Coughing violently, he dragged his eyes open.
He could see his arm lying a short distance away, completely separated from his body.
Ignoring the empty space where his limb used to be, he planted his remaining hand the one with the changing index finger into the dirt and shale.
Gritting his teeth against the agony, he began to crawl forward, dragging his broken body away from the burning wreckage.
He crawled, crawled, and crawled as far as he could before another soft blast echoed inside the burning wreckage.
His body was completely covered in dust.
He finally stopped crawling after reaching what felt like a safe distance.
Then, the pain registered. His other half was burning.
He screamed ,screamed until he lost his voice.
The rocks, the earth, even a pebble just in front of his nose became a blur.
Blood slowly dripped onto the stone.
He wanted to scream, he wanted to run, he wanted to be free of the pain, but it was no longer possible.
It was then that something clicked in Alaric's mind.
He remembered something Volt had said while driving him to the police station
"You will beg for paradise."
The phantom heat of the blast faded, leaving behind the cold reality of the Vath Hills.
Alaric stared at the single, blood-slicked pebble in front of his nose. He couldn't scream anymore; his throat was a raw, dry desert.
But his mind was loud a chaotic storm of breaking pieces.
Why? The word repeated in his head, a frantic, looping question without an answer. Why me? Why the cathedral? Why did Volt do this? Volt was one of the richest men in the Western Sector. He had authority. He had leverage.
But as Alaric lay face-down in the dirt, the brutal realization crushed him: to the aristocracy, he was nothing.
He was just a merchant. A pig.
A body to be discarded in a ditch.
Despair settled into his chest, heavy and suffocating.
The distance between who he was an hour ago and the shattered, one armed creature crawling through the shale was too vast to comprehend.
He tried to pull away from the burning agony on his left side, but his remaining hand the one with the shifting, unsolid index finger slid uselessly against the stones.
Then came the bargaining. It was a pathetic, silent plea to whatever powers were listening. Let me wake up.
Let this be the nightmare. I'll give up the wealth. I'll give up the ledgers, the house, the Western Sector. Just give me back my arm. Stop the burning.
But the smoke in his lungs was real. The dirt in his mouth was real.
The confusion twisted into absolute terror as he looked at his remaining hand. The index finger was still changing, morphing into something that defied logic a grotesque reminder of the void he had touched in his study. He was losing his humanity on one side and his flesh on the other.
He was trapped between a monstrous transformation and a brutal, mundane death.
Finally, the pieces clicked together. Volt's calm face.
The poetic warnings about the moon. The cold, mechanical precision of the trap.
Volt hadn't just been interrogating him; he had been executing a sentence.
The words echoed through the hollow spaces of Alaric's breaking mind, sharper and more painful than the fire on his skin
"The only thing you will cry for will be Paradise."
He understood now. This wasn't an interrogation room or a negotiation. This was the place where Volt broke things that thought they were important.
Staring into the blurry gray dirt, Alaric realized he wasn't just fighting for his life anymore.
He was exactly where Volt wanted him to be begging for an end that wasn't going to come.
No, he was never fighting for his life, or even fighting at all.
He was simply fulfilling the destiny Volt had orchestrated for him.
His mind had reached its limit; he was physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausted.
It was then that his index finger suddenly vanished.
Then, one by one, all five of his fingers were gone.
And before he could open his eyes or realize what was happening, someone called out to him.
"What do you desire?"
It was a familiar voice. No it was his own voice.
The thought of his own voice did not bring comfort; it tore through the final, fragile threads of his sanity.
Alaric's eyelids, heavy as slabs of lead and smeared with ash, slowly pried themselves open.
The blood-slicked pebble was gone. The jagged shale of the Vath Hills, the burning wreckage of the teal car, the acrid smoke all of it had vanished as if wiped away by a giant, indifferent hand.
There was no earth beneath his chest. He was no longer crawling. Instead, he was suspended, weightless, in an endless stretch of absolute void.
It was a vast, terrifying nothingness that extended infinitely in every direction. There was no horizon, no sky, no stars, and no floor.
The darkness here wasn't like the night outside his study it was a hollow, dead vacuum that seemed to actively swallow light and sound alike.
He instinctively tried to look down at his hands to check the stumps of his missing fingers, but he couldn't even see his own body.
In this place, the concept of form felt meaningless. There was nothing to look at, nothing to touch, and nothing to measure himself against.
The searing agony of his burning flesh had completely stopped, replaced by a numbing, hollow silence that was infinitely more terrifying.
He was entirely alone, floating in a cosmic graveyard of nothing, trapped inside the quiet center of his own broken mind.