4338.206 · July 25, 2018 AD
If the Darkness Can Conjure Her
Morning arrives with burns Paul doesn't remember earning and a voice he swears was real. Jamie says the blackness does that — makes the mind invent what it needs most. But if Paul's sanity is already bending, if the void can conjure his daughter's voice so perfectly he'd run through fire to reach her, then the question isn't whether he's losing his mind. The question is how to bring her here before it happens again.
Paul wakes to a world of amber light and searing pain. His feet are a ruin of angry red, evidence of coals he stepped on whilst chasing a voice that couldn't have been there. Couldn't. And yet he heard her — Rose, calling for him, as clear as the river that now soothes his burns while Jamie explains what happened.
Pure blackness, Jamie says. It makes the mind go crazy. Conjures what you need most and dangles it just out of reach.
The explanation should be comforting. A rational answer to an irrational night. But Paul can't accept it — not fully. Because if his mind is capable of such perfect deception, if the darkness can reach inside his skull and extract his daughter's voice with such devastating accuracy, then something fundamental has shifted. Either he's already losing his grip on reality, or this world is crueller than he imagined.
Either way, the answer crystallises with unexpected clarity: if he's trapped here forever, if the darkness will keep using his children against him, then he needs them here. Not as phantoms conjured by his breaking mind. Here. Real. Safe beside him.
