The undoing

Kieran didn't hit the ground.

Because there was no ground left to hit.

The world had dissolved into something else—something vast, something wrong. A churning abyss of shifting flesh and unblinking eyes, all staring, all waiting. The hunger had taken root, stretching its fingers into the cracks of reality, peeling it apart like old, rotting skin.

And through it all, Kieran was still there.

Somewhere.

He could feel the weight of himself—or what remained of him—pressed between the folds of something larger. A consciousness that wasn't his own. That had never been his own.

But he was remembering now.

Not just his life, but the spaces between. The moments that had never belonged to time, the echoes of things he had done but had never lived. The whispers of a thousand voices calling out in languages older than the stars, voices that had waited, dormant, inside his ribs, buried beneath his skin.

The angel had tried to stop this.

Tried to stop him.

But it was too late.

And now, Kieran could feel something shifting—stirring in the places beyond places, dragging itself closer. Something that recognized him. Something that had been waiting for him to wake up.

A shape loomed in the abyss, its edges jagged, unfinished, as though it had been forgotten halfway through its creation. It had no face. No mouth. But it spoke in a voice that scraped against the inside of Kieran's skull.

"You are not yet complete."

The words weren't spoken. They simply were, pressing into him, filling the empty spaces where his thoughts should have been.

Kieran tried to move. He wasn't sure if he even had a body anymore, but he felt himself shift, the hunger stretching, twisting, reforming. The abyss answered in kind, mouths curling into smiles, eyes blinking open in places they shouldn't exist.

Complete?

He didn't need to be complete.

He needed to feed.

The hunger rippled through him, a living thing, a force older than anything that had ever drawn breath. It curled around him like a lover, whispering in languages made of ruin and dust, begging to be let loose, to consume, to devour.

Kieran opened his mouth—his real mouth, or the idea of one—and the abyss shuddered in response.

And then, the shape spoke again.

"No."

The hunger stopped.

Not by choice. Not by hesitation. But by something deeper, something woven into the fabric of what Kieran had become.

For the first time, he felt resistance.

Something holding him back.

Something stronger.

And then—

Pain.

A jagged, splitting sensation, ripping through him like he was being peeled apart.

Kieran screamed.

The abyss screamed with him.

Because whatever was holding him back?

It wasn't just stopping him.

It was undoing him.