Page 68 of Monsters in Love: Lost in the Stars

Eryxxus

I had no concept of time in that place. Days, weeks, centuries—none of it mattered in this manipulated fabric of space meant to hold a being such as me. In the blackness, there was no cycle of light and dark to mark the passing of moments. There was only the void, an unyielding expanse where my senses were stripped away, and I was reduced to nothing but the rawest fragment of my former self.

Cast into this prison after the galactic destruction left in my wake, the memory still sent spikes of morbid satisfaction through me. An image burned into the depths of my black soul like a brand—when I had momentarily brought the universe to its knees.

I never foresaw the other pitiful races banding together to form a defense strong enough to bring me down—until it happened. And now, the only thought that consumed me was retribution. Their betrayal would be paid for in blood.

The galaxies still trembled at the sound of my name, whispered in the corners of dying worlds, but I was slowly being forgotten now. A relic of power, bound in a place so far beyond mortal comprehension that even my own dark essence felt like a pale shadow of what it once was.

I had been thrown into the core of a black hole, abandoned and discarded by those who feared me. Designed to strip me of my senses, my will, it slowly peeled away everything that made me me . It was supposed to break me, and for a time, I had thought it might. The suffocating nothingness gnawed at the edges of my mind like parasitic insects. The pressing silence threatened to crush my skull like an iron weight with every breath I could no longer feel.

The lack of sensation was maddening. I would scream, but there was no echo, no response. My mouth never moved, my body never reacted. I couldn’t feel myself—nothing to mark the passage of time, nothing to tell me that I still existed. I sank into the abyss of my own mind, slipping further into madness with each passing eternity. I was nothing but thought, endless, spiraling thought, swirling into oblivion.

But then… something changed.

It was faint at first, like the whisper of wind brushing against my ears. Then the sound—so delicate, so foreign —took form. I couldn’t even describe it as a voice, not at first. It was music. Soft, pure, melodic. It vibrated through the very marrow of my bones, and for the first time in what felt like millennia, I heard something. I felt it, like a ripple in the stillness of my prison, breaking through the layers of emptiness.

The sound pulled at me. Unseen, but felt—like the faintest touch of light breaking through a veil of darkness. A voice. It was angelic, yet otherworldly, reverberating in the deepest corners of my mind. It felt as though the voice itself was woven from the very fabric of the universe, touching places I thought had long since been lost to me.

It was her voice. The one I had been waiting for, though I didn’t know it then.

I focused on it. I had to. The more I listened, the more it became clearer. The more I heard, the more I began to see . No, not see—not yet—but there were colors now. Colors in the pitch black. Colors in the void. The music, the voice, was no longer just sound. It manifested in my mind’s eye, bending reality around me, transforming the darkness into shapes and hues I could never have imagined.

Her words, her songs , took form in ways I couldn’t fully understand. But I knew , as if the song itself took on a life forming an instant download into my mind. Each note tugged at the shredded remains of my sanity, pulling me back from the edge of madness. The owner of the voice was real . And I was… alive .

I reached out—my soul pulsing with a yearning that astounded even myself, a creature that thrived on nothing but destruction and wrath. She was light, the very opposite of all that I was, all I had been created to be.

But that did not stop me from craving her.

The voice faltered as if aware of my movements. It slipped away, retreating into the dark corners of my prison, leaving me clawing at the nothingness like a starved rabid beast that had just lost its prey. For a moment, I wondered if I had imagined it. Had it been a trick of my fading mind? I shook my hand and ran my claws down my face, scoring the skin to ground myself. I knew what I had heard.

I wasn’t alone. Not anymore.

When the silence returned, it felt different. There was a crack in my blackened prison—small, almost imperceptible, but there. And through it, I felt her presence. Her voice was gone, but the faintest trace of light lingered, like the last remnants of a dying star.

And that was enough.

I had been broken before, bent to the will of those who thought they could trap me. But this—this was different. There was something about her being, something in her words, in the way the universe bent around her music, that told me this was not a mistake.

I would destroy everything that stood in my way to reach her.

Even if it meant I had to tear the fabric of space itself apart.

I would make her mine.

The descent into madness was just the beginning.