Xander fell, his body flipping lazily through the air, as though the world itself had lost all urgency. Time was still dragging its feet, prolonging every second, forcing him to watch everything unfold in excruciating detail.
His first thought wasn''t about the wind rushing past him or the jagged rocks far below—it was about Ugly Doc. He hoped the bastard was dying right now, screaming in agony, watching his whole miserable world crumble around him.
Then the pain hit.
His head was still intact—mostly—but the hole punched clean through his skull burned like molten iron. He felt the sharp, digging agony of shattered bone, the wet squelch of his own brain shifting from the impact, and the sluggish crawl of blood leaking from the wound. He had been shot plenty of times before, stabbed, beaten to the edge of death all for experiments, but this one—this one was sticking around longer than usual.
"Ah, shit. That''s gonna leave a mark."
Then, as if reality itself had forgotten how to behave, he noticed them—floating letters, flickering, shifting in color. At first, they seemed random, scattering in the air like ash caught in an updraft. But then more appeared, rising from the ground, peeling off surfaces, detaching from…
His arm.
Xander blinked sluggishly. The blood-written words on his forearm had lifted away, curling into the air like embers from a fire. The letters twisted, reshaping themselves in erratic patterns, before joining the others in their slow, inevitable convergence above him.
"What the hell?"
The pain in his skull flared again, but he forced himself to keep watching. The floating letters—if that''s even what they were—gathered together into a sphere. It pulsed and flickered, glitching between states of reality. Colors bled into each other. Shapes twisted in ways that made no sense. It was incomprehensible, yet undeniable, and the longer he looked at it, the more something in his gut screamed at him that he wasn''t supposed to be seeing this.
Not terror. Not madness. Just… discomfort.
It was like looking at something that shouldn''t exist, something out of place, like a face with too many eyes or a sound that didn''t belong. Wrong. Just wrong.
Then the sphere expanded.
Xander watched as the dome erupted outward, consuming everything. His first thought wasn''t fear, or regret, or even surprise.
"What the hell did I do?"
The thought slithered into his mind, unbidden. He had expected something to happen when he wrote those words, but this? This was beyond anything he could have imagined.
He had heard about the dangers of writing on things that came from the natural world. Paper, flesh—anything born from this reality. The Fat Doc had mumbled something about it once in a drunken stupor, but Xander hadn''t cared about the details. He had only remembered one phrase:
Don''t write where the world can see it.
That was also how he learned to scrawl "Fuck You Ugly Bastard" on his arm. He had no idea what the words meant, only that when the Fat Doc showed them to Ugly Doc on his pad one time, the reaction had been hilarious. That was all that mattered.
But now, watching the world around him twist and shatter, he had to admit—he might have overdone it.
He saw the air itself splinter, cracking like glass. The ground below warped, shifting in directions that shouldn''t exist.
His own body wasn''t spared either. His left arm—once flesh and blood—was now a dripping, melting white slimy substance, he remembered this substance but from where?
His right eye? Just gone. No pain, no sensation, just… absence.
Yet, through all of it, he felt nothing but mild unease.
His thoughts drifted. This was definitely it. He was dying.
Neat.
He had been here before—this limbo between life and death. It wasn''t scary. Just… quiet.
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Still, he couldn''t help but reflect. Everything he had screamed at the top of the cliff had been true. He was frustrated. He was pissed. He had tried to escape, only for the world that bastard to laugh in his face and tell him they knew everything he was ever going to do.
Writing those words on his arm? That had just been a final ''screw you'' to Ugly Doc.
He never really believed he''d live through it. But if he was going to die, he wanted to at least get one last good look at the bastard''s furious face.
Instead, he got something much better.
Sheer, unfiltered terror.
That alone made all this worth it.
His mind continued to drift, his thoughts slipping away, scattering into the empty abyss.
Wait. What was he talking about again? What was happening?
Everything was… fading.
Then, just as the darkness took him, something spoke.
A voice.
Calling his name.
And suddenly, he wasn''t so sure he was dead after all as he soon saw blackness.
An endless, weightless void stretched out in all directions. It was nothing and everything at once, an abyss where thought unraveled and identity withered. Xander floated in its depths, or perhaps he was sinking. He couldn''t tell. He had no body, no form—only the last remnants of his mind, flickering like a dying ember in a vast and uncaring dark.
His thoughts were slow, like drifting through a thick, viscous substance. What… was this? He should be dead. He knew that much. And yet, something was keeping him tethered. Something was calling him.
Xander.
A voice. No, many voices—blended together in a seamless chorus, neither soft nor loud, neither male nor female. It was an all-encompassing sound that resonated within the very fibers of his fading self. He should have been afraid, but he wasn''t. The voices weren''t harsh or maddening. They were… warm. Like the gentle embrace of something familiar, something he had never known but had always longed for. Like a parent calling their child home.
Though he did not know what that meant.
Then, it called his name again.
Xander.
And the entire feeling changed changed.
The warmth vanished, snatched away in an instant. A terrible emptiness settled in its place. The voices spoke his name, but this time, they held rejection. It wasn''t mere indifference—it was an active, deliberate denial of him. He felt it like a knife to the soul, a sensation that clawed through his being and stripped something vital from him.
Why?
Again, they called his name, and again, the pain came. A pain that wasn''t physical, but something deeper. It was the pain of abandonment, of being discarded like a forgotten piece of trash. He reached for the voices, but they were retreating, pulling further and further away, slipping through his fingers like water. And as they left, so too did his sense of self.
What was his name again?
Who was he?
He was… nothing.
His thoughts fragmented, splintering into incomprehensible echoes of things he no longer understood. Memories dissolved like ink in water.
Was he ever real?
Had he ever existed?
He could not even muster the fear to run from it.
He simply faded, his consciousness scattering into the void like dust in the wind.
And then—
"Failure."
A different voice. This one was sharp, clear, cutting through the abyss like a blade. It struck something deep within him, something that refused to disappear.
Failure
Why did that word sting?
Are you just going to live up to that name? the voice asked. It was his voice. Or at least… it used to be.
Xander''s fading consciousness twitched.
"What?"
Are you just going to let the label those people put on you define who you are? the voice pressed.
No… he thought, or tried to think. He wasn''t sure anymore.
By the same fools who tortured you? The same wretches that squeeze and deny you peace? The same cretins who wish to dictate your right to live?
No!
Then why are you dying?
The void constricted around him. He could feel himself slipping, unraveling like loose thread.
Why are you letting yourself disappear? Why are you letting the world that has ignored you kill you?
Why? He… he didn''t know. But he didn''t want to disappear. He didn''t want to just fade into nothing. He wasn''t supposed to end like this. Not by their hands. Not like some pitiful afterthought in the grand script of the world he hadn''t even seen.
And then—
He saw it.
A red star. Distant, yet burning bright. Pulsing. Beckoning.
"Then wake up."
The void trembled. The voice wasn''t separate from him anymore. It was him. It had always been him.
"Stand up and prove your claims on that cliff were real."
Xander''s mind sharpened.
"Rise up and prove that those letters and numbers they branded onto you do not define you."
His name. His number. He could feel them now, trying to pull him away from the star, but he didn''t just move. Instead he pushed towards the star to resist.
"Rebel against the fate they have written for you. Forge your own path, your own story."
His mind burned with clarity as he reached for the red star. His thoughts pieced themselves back together, no longer crumbling into dust. His memories returned, reforging like molten metal in the heat of his resolve. His breath, his rage, his existence—he reclaimed them all as he pushed forward.
"The world may have turned its gaze away from you. It may have rejected you. But who cares about it anyway?"
He did not need the world''s acceptance. He never did. He didn''t need its permission to exist. He had never asked for it before, and he wasn''t going to start now.
Xander''s eyes locked deeper onto the red star as he grasped it.
Its light was overwhelming, burning through the darkness, searing into him, and yet he held onto it. He could feel its heat, feel it melt something off of him.
The weight of mediocrity. The weight of chains.
"Its gaze upon you is just a chain. And chains are problems."
Xander felt himself rising, breaking free from the suffocating blackness. He was no longer fading—he was fighting. Because there was one thing he had always loved.
"And I love solving problems."
The void shattered.
His mind was his own. His soul was his own. His body was his own.
His fate was his own.
And thus, he broke—no, he shattered his chain to mediocrity.
And became Unchained.