Dimensional Descent

Leonel sat in silent meditation. Absolutely nothing was happening around him, and the same was true within him. His mind was completely clear, and his thoughts seemed to have entered a state of dormancy. He was truly doing nothing at all, simply waiting.

It was a novel sort of feeling. He hadn't been able to clear his mind like this for a long time, staring at the blank, dark space of his own eyelids. But it did nothing to change the negative emotions stirring within him.

He could feel it bubbling upward, that cold indifference toward everything, that look that gazed down upon the world itself as though nothing was important before his whims. It was the very same emotion that he had feared taking root in himself for so long, and yet he had inevitably reached this point despite his efforts... and the greatest shame of it all was that he simply didn't care.

He originally valued lives only because he couldn't think of a logical method to differentiate human lives, but there was another reason. It was because his father had instilled certain values within him, and if he ever reached a point where he simply stopped caring... the result on the other side wasn't something that he would want to see.

He had said himself many years ago that this was the case. He had avoided it, he had dodged to the best of his ability, running away from his own nature, and yet here he was...

He could feel that there was something inside him. That very same feeling his usual laziness stemmed from, the same feeling that encroached on disregard for all life, it was the kind of feeling that came from someone who already sat atop it all. He was lazy because nothing was worth his effort. He was indifferent because he had already seen it all. He didn't care about life because he had already seen too many people die, and maybe he was waiting for someone to finally kill him.

Too bad they were all too weak.

were accomplishing something when, in the end, they

him as though they were so much more knowing, so much more experienced, so much stronger, it took everything in him not

of habit, a muscle memory that extended beyond him, or maybe it was the muscle memory of a version of him

amusing, the woman he was doing it for he had hardly looked in the eye in the last several weeks. He could see

see something similar in his mother's

see the fluctuations of their souls. He couldn't read their thoughts, but it might as well have been the same. And maybe that was also part of where the indifference came. The fleshly nature of a

did it

the Void Palace, that place that he would raze to the ground soon enough. She wanted to support him, to

same way, or if it would be just like this. Maybe he would be able to love them as babies, but what about when their thoughts

handed it to them on a silver platter without even their effort being necessary, just what kind of person would that make them? How could they not end up like the current him, carrying that same indifference to

wolves, forcing him to fend for himself every step of the way. If he never reached the pinnacle