Duke of the Beast and the Vicarious Bride - Chapter 59 - IX.

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※ This work contains depictions of coercive relationships, explicit language, and other graphic content. Reader discretion is advised.

`IX.`

He was an existence close to nothingness.

Like particles shattered and dissolved into darkness, like gas floating without gravity.

An other who had forgotten himself in oblivion like a curse—existing yet simultaneously not existing.

All that filled his threadbare consciousness was pitch-black darkness.

Had the embryo within an unhatched egg been thus?

Sunk in the deep sea of the unconscious, this nameless being knew nothing of his origins.

It was a world of endless numbness and unawareness, where he could not reckon how long he had been thus nor how long this state would continue.

His spirit, separated from his flesh, wandered long at the bottom of this abyss.

This place was the deepest and most secure prison created since the world’s inception, and he seemed to be its first inmate.

Why he had been placed in such a state—whether someone had forced him, or whether he had imprisoned himself—he knew nothing. He simply remained there motionless for an age, like a breathing still life.

Then, suddenly, he felt a vibration.

After a soft yet powerful shock that shook his thoroughly isolated world, a faint self-awareness was born, as if a membrane beneath a shell had torn.

The first thing he became conscious of was his own body, breathing and alive without his knowledge. Without memory of birth or growth. A heavy body placed alone in the darkness, as if it had existed there from the beginning.

Once he realised he possessed a body, his five senses naturally began to function, calling forth forgotten sensations. The cold stone floor’s temperature, its hard texture, the damp moisture and silent surroundings.

Thus the minimum consciousness of a living thing was born, yet he remained stagnant without any will.

More time passed—meaningless, or rather, not even perceived by him. Then one day, without warning, a noisy and vulgar crowd invaded his world, which had been as silent as a forgotten tomb.

They invaded the stone chamber where his body lay and discovered him. They dragged into reality this non-existence, which had gone undiscovered and was gradually being forgotten.

This sudden external change triggered a chain of reactions in his body—the negative emotions of resistance and discomfort.

Yet he was like a sighted blind man, feeling everything beyond his consciousness yet simultaneously numb as if seeing nothing.

It seemed an extremely thick curtain blocked his perceptual system. Within his blunt and hazy consciousness, he moved merely like a machine driven by inertia.

Someone dragged him from the stone chamber and stood him upon the earth. They shoved and pushed him, babbling words he could not understand. Or perhaps he did understand?

He took in input and functioned, yet internally he still comprehended none of it. Only his instinct remained clear, moving to survive. They called him a beast.

Perhaps that was the essence of his identity. A beast with only instinct left. Living merely because he lived, killing merely to avoid dying.

When attacked from outside, he would unconsciously tear them apart and cut off their breath. He desired only one thing: to return to the silent darkness.

Beyond such vague awareness, he remembered nothing. Until the first light pierced through the bottomless darkness.

* * *

‘Hey!’

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey—

The miracle came in the form of thunderous noise. Along with a bustling commotion that shattered the stillness and disrupted the stagnation.

At first, he thought it was the same crowd that always troubled him. Yet what followed was somehow unlike the usual.

‘I am Fiona.’

The moment this unknown being spoke to him, a crack like a fingernail scratch formed in his dull consciousness. Through that gap, a name crept in and was etched into his thick unconsciousness without his knowledge.

Like a thick eggshell cracking, like a line of dawn brightening above the horizon. The dense darkness pressing upon him lightened by a layer.

‘I am your bride, and I have not come to harm you.’

He did not know precisely what a bride was, but in that moment, his instinct recognised that this being was distinctly different from the countless others who had come to him before.

A sweet fragrance far removed from unpleasant sweat odour or the metallic scent of blood. A gentle aura he had never felt since first drawing breath, a small form that ceaselessly radiated energy, and a spirited voice that approached him without hesitation and spoke.