3 Vows From The Void (Evelyn Roda)

"I told you, she wouldn't last through the first swing," a voice sneers, vibrating against the frozen earth beneath me as I drift in the infinite, hollow expanse of the afterlife.

My consciousness is a jagged piece of glass floating in a sea of absolute, suffocating silence. There is no pain here. There is only the crushing weight of everything I never did. The memory of the executioner’s blade is a sharp, persistent phantom pressure on my throat, a reminder of the exact moment I stopped being human and started being a headline. My mind plays the scene on a loop. I see Clara smiling, I see Jayson turning away, I see the light fading from the red moon above. It is not just death. It is an erasure of everything I was supposed to become.

"She was always a waste of space, wasn't she?" another voice ripples through the dark, belonging to one of the professors who testified against me.

I try to move, but I have no limbs, no breath, no pulse to steady. I am just a lingering thought, a dying ember refusing to stop burning in the snow. I recall the way Simon looked at me, with that vacant, predatory hunger, like I was already meat on a platter. I remember the way Rafael watched, his silence weighing more than the insults thrown by the entire student body. I didn't hate them then. I was too busy trying to survive the next shift, the next beating, the next cruel whim of the Alpha heirs.

"Get rid of the body before the morning training starts," a third voice commands, its tone bored and clinical, the sound of a janitor checking a trash bin.

That is the breaking point. The sheer, unadulterated disrespect of it. I gave them three years of my life. I scrubbed their floors. I served their meals. I kept my head down until my neck ached. And they treat me like a piece of refuse to be hauled away before breakfast? A white hot fury ignites in the center of what used to be my chest. It is not a soft, romanticized rage. It is a calculated, cold, and razor sharp blade of intent.

"I am not trash," I think, and the thought ripples through the void like a stone dropped into a still, black lake.

I reach out, not with hands, but with an iron, unrelenting will. I grab onto the frayed edges of my own fading existence and I pull. I pull until the darkness tears. I remember the sensation of the silver chains. I remember the sting of the betrayal. I use the pain as a compass. If the world is a game designed to kill me, then I am going to change the rules of the board until the pieces break.

"What is that?" the janitor’s voice asks, suddenly thick with panic, as if he sees something flickering in the air where I used to lie.

I don't look for an answer. I don't care about their confusion. I am focusing on the feeling of my own skin, the hypothetical sensation of heat returning to my veins. I am envisioning a life where I don't wait for permission to stand up. I see the three heirs, not as gods or masters, but as fragile, spoiled boys who think they own the future. I am going to tear their world apart from the inside. I will be the nightmare they never saw coming.

"I vow that I will never be the weak Omega they murdered," I scream into the silence, and the void finally shatters.

The sensation is violent, like being pulled through the eye of a needle. Everything turns into a blinding, white cacophony of sound and light. I feel the sudden, jarring shock of gravity returning to my body. I feel the cold, hard surface of a bed beneath my back. I feel the texture of cotton sheets rubbing against my palms. My heart, which had been silent for an eternity, slams against my ribs with the force of a wrecking ball. I gasp, my chest heaving as I draw in the first, painful lungful of oxygen. It smells like cheap cleaning supplies and old, dusty textbooks.

"Is this a joke?" I choke out, my voice sounding like gravel being crushed under a boot.

I scramble backward, my feet hitting the floor with a dull thud. I am in the dorm. My dorm. The walls are covered in the same peeling, faded wallpaper I remember from the night before my life went to hell. The calendar on the wall is not red with blood. It is fresh. It is clean. I stare at the date, and my vision blurs with a mixture of terror and intoxicating, weaponized hope. Three years. They gave me three whole years back.

"I am going to destroy every single one of you," I whisper to the empty room, my voice trembling not with fear, but with a dark, intoxicating hunger for what comes next.

I stand up, my legs feeling shaky but steady, the phantom weight of the chains finally gone from my wrists. I walk to the mirror on the vanity. The girl staring back at me is the same one who died in the arena, but her eyes are different. The soft, apologetic gaze is gone, replaced by a cold, calculating intensity that could cut through steel. I am not the sheep anymore. I am the predator wearing the skin of the prey, and the hunt begins right now.

"You have no idea what you just invited back into your lives, do you?"