✓ | 𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗿𝘂𝘀 𝗳𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘀, luke castellan

ꜱᴇᴠᴇɴᴛʏ-ᴇɪɢʜᴛ

Voidbound.

🌃

    Rory didn't know how long she had been in the Big House’s basement. Time had lost all meaning down here. Hours, days—did it even matter?

Chris had been let out as soon as Mr. D had returned and fixed his madness, snapping his fingers like it was nothing, like undoing months of torment was as simple as clearing a smudge from his wine glass. Rory hadn’t even reacted when they took him away. She had just watched, or maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she had just existed, unseeing, unfeeling, as the door shut behind them with a final, resounding click.

Now, she was alone.

They kept the door locked. Not that she would’ve tried to leave. She wasn’t sure she could muster the energy to care even if they had flung it open and invited her to walk free. They wanted her in complete darkness, cut off from everything, from the world, from the sun.

She supposed it should have bothered her. The lack of sunlight, the way it weakened her. She could feel it, somewhere deep inside her bones—a dull, creeping hollowness, the slow drain of strength, the absence of warmth. It was like a vital part of her had been severed, leaving only an empty shell behind.

And yet… she didn’t care.

What was the point?

    She had no desire to see anything anymore. The darkness wasn’t a prison—it was a relief. A cocoon of nothingness that matched the void inside her.

It reminded her of when Kronos had abandoned her, leaving her to rot in her stepmother’s house, forgotten and unwanted. Floating through an endless void. Trapped in a silence that stretched forever. Or maybe it reminded her of those early dreams—the ones Kronos used to send her as punishment, as a threat. She would fall, endlessly, down, down, down, deeper into the abyss. Tartarus.

She had woken up screaming from those dreams.

Now, she couldn’t even scream.

Because this time, she had fallen.

This time, she had hit the ground.

    The impact had shattered her, broken every bone, every part of her soul. She had spent her whole life falling, waiting, bracing for the moment she would finally hit something.

And now she had.

There was nothing left of her but broken fragments, scattered too far apart to ever be put back together.

    Once more, Kronos didn’t visit her in her dreams.

Perhaps he had lost that power now that he had his mortal body, bound to flesh and bone instead of the swirling, golden presence that had once haunted her nights. Or perhaps he simply didn’t care to anymore. She was nothing to him now. A failed pawn. A broken tool. Not even worth his wrath.

It didn’t matter.

In the suffocating void of this basement, dreams and reality blurred into one indistinct haze. She could no longer tell when she was awake or asleep, if she had slept at all. There was no light to signal morning, no voices above to mark the passing of hours. Just the endless blackness pressing in from all sides.

And yet, despite everything, she was still here.

Why couldn’t this darkness just *take* her? Let it swallow her whole, let it press against her chest until her heart stopped beating. Let it snuff her out like a dying ember, let her go.

But it didn’t.

And she hated it.

Hated the fact that her body still breathed, that her heart still beat, that she still existed when he did not.