Shadow of the Returned Chapter 10 (Part 1)

The mouth in the sky inhaled, and the world leaned with it.

Ashen’s knees locked. Every instinct begged him to fall flat and let the wind take him, but pride or terror—he couldn’t tell which—held him upright. The air roared past, full of whispers that had no direction. His clothes flapped against his skin; his bones vibrated like tuning forks.

He planted a foot forward, then another. Each step was an argument against gravity’s betrayal. The curtain in front of him shivered with the rhythm of the breath above, drawn taut, trembling toward him and away again.

He lifted his hand, but the pull caught him first. His palm slapped against the surface before he could change his mind. It was soft, warm, and infinitely deep. The world stilled.

The next heartbeat was not his.

A tide surged through his arm, up into his shoulder, into his skull. He saw nothing, but behind his eyes shapes rose and fell like fish under black water. Thought lost the ability to end in words. He tried to remember his own name, but it was just noise, one more vibration added to the storm.

The mouth inhaled again.

Something inside him answered.

He felt the shadow beneath his feet twitch like an animal trapped in a shrinking cage. He tried to tear free, but the curtain held him—not with force, but with memory. It knew what he feared most and offered it back, polished, complete.

For an instant he was standing in a familiar street: cobblestones slick with rain, the smell of bread and smoke from the old quarter, the market bell ringing somewhere behind him. People moved past, their faces half-lit by the weak sun. Every color, every sound, precise and perfect.

He had dreamed this street a thousand times after leaving it, always half-erased by the nightmare. Now it was clean again, exactly as it had been the morning he’d gone to fight the war that would unmake the world.

The curtain spoke—not with voice, but with presence.

You are remembered.

He walked forward, dizzy. The ground didn’t move beneath his feet; it remembered moving. He passed a window. Inside, a woman set down a cup of tea and smiled without surprise.

He froze. “Mira?”

The woman shook her head. Her face blurred, reshaped, became someone else—a teacher he had once had, a friend long dead, his mother. Each version smiled the same soft smile.

We can return you, the presence said. You have only to let go of the line that holds you to yourself.

Ashen backed away. The world rippled around him like paper held too close to fire. “This isn’t real.”

All things are real when enough believe them.

The street began to shine. The light came from beneath the stones, from the soil, from the spaces between moments. The people around him stopped walking. They turned in unison, faces bright, eyes hollow.

Stay, the presence whispered. Be still. The storm ends here.

He clenched his hands until his nails cut into his palms. The pain steadied him. He focused on the sensation, the physical certainty of blood, of skin. “No.”

The street cracked. The light beneath the stones flared, and the illusion shattered like glass.

He was back before the curtain. The world had gone quiet again, but not empty—more like a beast waiting to see what its prey would do next.

Ashen’s hand still rested against the surface. The warmth there changed, cooling slowly, as if disappointed.

He forced a breath into his lungs. It felt foreign, borrowed from another world. “You almost had me.”

We did not want you. We wanted the silence that follows you.

The words, if they were words, crawled through his thoughts like vines searching for cracks. He could feel them testing his resolve, searching for that single unguarded memory that would let them root.

He closed his eyes. Beneath the roar of the wind and the hum of the world, he found a smaller rhythm—his own heart. Fragile, imperfect, real.

“You can’t have me,” he whispered. “I’m not yours to end.”

The mouth in the sky stopped breathing. The silence that followed was immense.

Then the curtain spoke again, and this time it was not temptation. It was instruction.

Then know what you are.

Light speared through the clouds. Not sunlight—something older, colder. It struck the ground before him, spreading in veins that reached under his feet, through the plain, into the horizon. The light burned without heat, illuminating shapes hidden in the skin of the world. Towers, thousands of them, some upright, others inverted, stretching into the void like reflections on broken glass. Each pulsed faintly, breathing the same rhythm.

He realized then that the mist had never been a prison. It was a lung, and he was standing in the mouth of one. The air he breathed was the exhale of the thing that slept beneath creation.

And every breath he took in return kept it alive.

The revelation hit him not as thought but as nausea. His stomach turned; his skin crawled with the sense of infinite scale compressed into something intimate. The world was a body. The sky was its eye. And the fear of mankind—the endless dreaming, the nightmares they made—was its blood.

The mist had not invaded. It had simply woken up.

And Ashen… he was its voice.