He crawled forward.
Not with purpose. Not with strength.
But with refusal.
Each movement was a defiance, each twitch of his fingers a whisper of war against the weight dragging him down. His arms felt like they were filled with gravel, his spine a cracked rod barely keeping shape. But he moved. Inch by inch. Breath by breath.
The voices didn't stop.
They shifted.
"You don't deserve this power," one said, smooth like oil. "You don't even understand it."
"He'll break again," another echoed. "He always breaks."
"Zerev'ta… os kel vethar…" — the tongues twisted, overlapped, then translated themselves, until he wasn't sure what was his own memory, what was a foreign tongue, and what was invention.
A nurse's voice, from years ago, whispered through the static: "It's spreading faster than we thought."
A friend, faceless now: "I stopped visiting. He made it too hard."
Victoria: "Stop acting like it's everyone else's fault."
