Where the radiant heat of the Golden Desert faded, an infinite road of monochrome stretched far ahead.

  The soft sand that had covered his feet with every dune he crossed had now turned into a path of hard-pressed earth.

  Behind him, the dark night—once tinged with a flicker of blue—had scattered into a faint, lingering mist.

  Above the sky, settled into shades of ash, a few crows circled in low, heavy loops.

  Their sharp cries sliced through the stagnant air at intervals, but even those sounds quickly sank beneath the thick fog.

  Crunch, crunch...

  Adin walked and walked.

  The color of the sky was shifting. It was not the rising of the sun, nor the tilting of the moon.

  The boundaries of light and shadow collapsed as the world was dyed in a deepening gray.

  This eerie suspension of time, where the distinction between day and night vanished, was a familiar signal to Adin.

  It meant he was nearing Ebony.

  As the air of Ebony drew closer, Adin felt as though he were approaching the version of himself that had left this place long ago.

  The weight of the many faces he had encountered and the stranger he had discovered within himself added a new burden to every step.

  Who am I?

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  Where...

  Where am I going?

  He thought of the sins and the evil gathered in the depths of his being.

  It was a journey started for the sake of the abused Auri, Sori, and his younger, lonely self.

  Yet, the endless anger and longing he faced on that road had driven him to overturn the forbidden hourglass.

  He had committed what should never have been done, but he did not regret it.

  Instead, a desire to possess more deeply, more completely, had taken firm root somewhere deep within his heart.

  At the gateway to Ebony in the distance, the mouth of a shadowed tunnel appeared.

  He stared into that dark crevice and came to a halt.

  An intuition seized his ankles: once he passed through, there would be no returning to his former self.

  It was not a mere change of location.

  It was a restless internal conflict—the fear that the past he had cherished would be buried forever, painted over by a somewhat stranger, present self.

  Controllable fear and the courage to suppress it crossed paths so violently he felt he might lose consciousness.

  The tears rolling down his cheeks were the last remnants of his boyhood.

  Standing on the boundary between the strange and the familiar, Adin endured those lonely growing pains entirely on his own.

  Adin gripped the Solet tucked deep in his pocket.

  A cold, smooth sensation dug into his palm.

  At this moment, the Solet was not a tool for anyone else, nor a means to prove some grand cause.

  It was his singular comfort, meant only to sustain himself.

  He desperately wanted to be a solid subject, capable of bearing his own weight in the silence, rather than a being swept away by the currents.

  Following Adin’s pulse, the Solet emitted a tiny, blue, vein-like light.

  Instead of a loud resonance, it soaked his palm with a secret, cold warmth that only its master could feel.

  The tension left Adin’s shoulders as his posture became low and firm.

  In his damp eyes, a deep stillness gathered—a silence that even the fog could not reach.

  His very existence was shifting the density of the air.

  To become an adult is to learn the power of suppressing pain beneath silence, even while enduring the sensation of being torn apart.

  Adin did not wipe his tears.

  Instead, he fixed his gaze on the darkness beyond the tunnel.

  As he lightly loosened his grip on the Solet, all the hesitation that had held him back scattered into the gray mist.

  Leaving his younger self behind, Adin stepped forward—a man who had chosen his own desires and the responsibilities that came with them.

  The cold silence inside the tunnel swallowed his shadow.

  Adin was no longer afraid.

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