Thalion floated in the dim blue expanse with no clear sense of how he had arrived there. His memories were gone—completely erased. Faces, places, purposes, even his own history had been stripped away until nothing remained but the immediate present. He was not dead. The slow beat of his heart and the burn of air in his lungs proved that much. Yet existence itself felt hollow, as if someone had carved out the center of who he was and left only the shell.
This place was water. Endless, heavy, enclosing water.
The moment that fact fully registered, an innate and uncontrollable fear seized him. His body began to shake hard enough that the surrounding currents trembled with him. Every instinct screamed that he was trapped, that the pressure would crush him, that something vast and unseen waited just beyond the limits of his vision.
