POV: The Void

“The child does not echo; he answers.”

I understood that truth the instant he entered me.

Lyra arrived with fire, she came wrapped in defiance and grief, carrying centuries of keeper instinct in her blood. She screamed when the boundary closed around her, and she fought the pressure, she named me monster, prison, hunger, abyss. Every thought she hurled at me was shaped like resistance.

She believed resistance was strength.

It always is, at first.

The child did not scream, he ...