One heartbeat, Henry was tasting the copper-thick air of the infirmary wall and feeling the jagged heat of a skull fracture; the next, the world had been hollowed out.
There was no cold stone against his back. Just a heavy, pressurized blackness that seemed to press against his eyeballs. He reached out, his muscles moving with a phantom lightness that felt wrong—unburdened by the baggy borrowed armor or the shredded skin of his palms.
"HELLO!! Can anybody hear me!!!"
The utter silence and lack of sight left Henry with a terror that not even the trolls' roars could compare to; the isolation felt like a punishment from the heavens.
'If this is the afterlife for failures, then I must be the worst,' he thought as he slowly turned around, hoping to find anything that could save him from the darkness surrounding him.
Every direction he turned in was just more black; he was being drowned in it, but as he finally completed a 180-degree turn, he saw what looked like a dull speck of green in the far distance.
The speck was so small it could have been a trick, a hallucination born of sensory deprivation. But as Henry stared, his vision tunneling on that single point of color, he became sure that he wasn't imagining it. The light in the distance was an unknown, but Henry was sure it wasn't worse than the unknown he was currently dealing with in the never-ending void.
Making up his mind, he made his way towards the light. Every moment he rushed towards it, he could see its green ball-shaped form with increased clarity. When he was within what felt like thirty feet of the dull, sickly looking green light, he saw that under the light was an oak and iron door. To the right, four other door frames stood in a perfect, haunting line, each one rooted into the nothingness by invisible foundations. No walls, no ceiling, no floor—just five exits with only the first door being seemingly awake as the green light washed over the door's wavy-grained wood.
Henry finally reached the doors and realized that the light was guiding him to the right one. However, he didn't want to simply follow the light without considering all his options. His small act of rebellion was quickly quelled as he stepped aside from the first door and confidently placed his palms on the second, trying to push it open to no avail.
He then tried the third, fourth, and fifth doors to the same utter rejection.
As he stared up the row of doors from the fifth door, he resigned himself to the fact that he couldn't get around whatever was guiding him.
'I guess I have no choice in the matter,' he thought as he made his way back to the first door.
With a deep breath, he pushed the door with all his might, which suddenly opened, letting him stumble into a familiar sight.
He found himself back at the beginning of the tragic events of the mountainside gate massacre that had taken place at the Sinclair Mountain border garrison. As he watched everything unfold in the same way as the first time he had experienced it, only this time he was observing it from a third-person perspective outside his body. Henry watched as the Troll leader destroyed the gate and tried to go back through the door that had brought him to his own personal hell, but the door was gone, and he couldn't move; he tried to look up into the sky, but his gaze was magnetically locked to the center of what would quickly become a slaughter. His eyelids felt like they were pinned open by invisible needles.
Henry was forced to watch and hear the horrendous incident from beginning to end.
He felt... utterly inadequate, whether it was the first time or this third-person view he had sat and watched as everyone died, too weak to have any real effect, too scared to try. Adar's orders to "stay back" had been a shield, a convenient excuse that he had clung to like a drowning man to a lead weight. But he now knew the truth, even if Adar had commanded him to charge, his legs would have turned to water. His heart would have seized.
"Weak," he whispered. The word didn't float away; it sank into his very psyche.
It wasn't just the lack of muscle and power. It was the rot in his spirit. He had spent his life taking advantage of the safety of the Sinclair name.
The moment the fake Henry's heart gave its final, pathetic stutter against the stone, the theater of his failure dissolved. The invisible pins holding his eyes open snapped, and the paralysis that had forced him to witness his own inadequacy vanished. But there was no relief—only a violent, predatory tug.
The door that had disappeared had suddenly appeared in front of him, already wide open, as it pulled him back into the void.
The door slammed shut behind him with a sound that wasn't wood hitting wood, but the heavy, final clack of a tomb being sealed.
At the sound, Henry quickly turned around and found that where there had been five doors, there were now four. The door he had passed through was gone. The green ball-shaped light over what was the second door, which is now the first, was noticeably brighter.
The first exit had been a lesson: a journey into his own cowardice. And now that the lesson was learned, the void had burned the door behind him.
Henry stared at the remaining row of doors. None of them held anything good—he was sure of it. But the only way out was through. If he wanted to reach the end of this nightmare, he'd have to endure whatever rot lay behind the next handle.
Henry figured that whatever was behind the next door couldn't be worse than watching his own death. With this thought in mind, he confidently walked in through the second doorway.
Through the second doorway, his old room in the Sinclair castle materialized, the scent of wet cardboard from ale he had let become stale invading his nostrils. There he was, sprawled across the bed in a deep, rhythmic sleep. This was a memory; it had to be. The first door had established the rules of this twisted gallery, but as he searched his sleeping face, a wave of confusion formed. He didn't recognize a single thing about this night.
As he watched himself sleep in third person, the heavy oak door of his bedchamber—not a portal of the void, but the real, polished wood of his youth—burst open.
"Young Master! Wake up! Oh, heavens, please wake up!"
It was Mia. She looked exactly as he remembered: her maid's uniform that seemed a size too small, the fabric straining across her wide hips and the heave of her chest as she gasped for air, desperate to get him moving. Her eyes were wide with that familiar, frantic caring energy. She reached out, her hands gripping his shoulders and shaking him with a desperation that felt more real than any ghost.
"It's Lord Arnold's birthday banquet! The guests are already arriving in the courtyard! If you aren't at the table when the first toast is poured, your father will... oh, I don't even want to think about it! Please, Henry!"
Henry sat bolt upright, shoving Mia away forcefully, his vision swimming with the dregs of that morning's expensive wine and ale. His head felt like it was being squeezed by a pipe vice, and his skin was slick with a cold, sickly sweat.
"I don't care whose birthday it is!" he roared, his voice cracking with a jagged, unearned authority. "Don't you ever—ever—wake me like that again!"
Below him, Mia lay on the floor, her maid's uniform hitched up slightly from the fall, revealing the pale curve of her thigh against the dark rug. Her chest heaved, the fabric of her bodice straining as she took quick, shallow breaths of shock. She didn't cry out again; instead, she looked up at him with eyes wide with terror.
He stared at his younger, drunken self with a mounting, cold fury.
"I didn't remember," he whispered into the void-tinted air of the bedroom. "I was so far gone I didn't even record the sin."
To him, Mia had always been the angel of the Sinclair estate—the one who brought him warm broth when he was sick, the one who hummed while she mended his tunics, the one whose soft curves and wide hips were a constant, comforting presence in the background of his privileged life. She was only a few years older than Henry, but she always treated him with a maternal instinct similar to that of his mother.
The fact that he could treat Mia that way truly broke his heart. Mia, who had been too shocked to even speak again, calmly composed herself without saying another word. She left the room as the real Henry was once again sucked out of the memory and brought back to the void. Where there had been four doors, there were now only three. The second door—the one that had just forced him to witness his own cruelty toward Mia—had simply dissolved into the dark.
The math of his soul was getting simpler and deadlier.
The green ball-shaped light had hopped to the third door, but it was no longer a mere guide. It was incandescent. It wasn't just a light anymore; it was a battery, gorged on the shame and the raw, jagged truth of his memories.