A throb, small, harmless. Almost ignorable.
Then it grows. Expands like a hungry star.
Flares through the bone and coils down my spine like molten wire.
I feel it now - again.
A nub of radiation lodged somewhere deep.
Not a tumor. Not mechanical.
Worse.
Something born from inside me.
I try not to scream.
The pain is surgical.
Precise.
It cooks my nerves without leaving marks.
Is it punishment?
Have the ghosts filed complaints to the void?
Do their ashes gather in corners and whisper judgment?
Did one of those millions - some broken little priest, some grieving mother, some child I ripped from flesh
did one slip past my filters?
And now they sit behind my eye,
clawing for justice
one neuron at a time.
Or is it decline?
Is this what rot feels like, when it's too proud to show itself in the mirror?
I used to be more than this.
I remember joy. Not happiness - no, that was never mine.
But joy, yes.
The joy of flame.
The chorus of screams in orbit.
The last blink of a planet going dark under my heel.
Why does none of it feel real now?
Why do I sit in this cell
and feel nothing but the weight?
Why am I still here,
head pulsing, nerves twitching,
soul dry?
I killed so many. So many.
They begged. They prayed. They bled.
I laughed.
And now I sit alone and wait for the pain to start again.
Where is the relish?
Where is the fire?
Where did I go?
(Encoded in the neuroloop cadence- “burn / sink / repeat” - is a decay-permission vector. It allows access to a sealed introspection chamber within Amatrix’s consciousness, bypassing her rage firewall. This moment of raw despair is not a broadcast, but a leak - uncontrolled, accidental, bleeding into the Active Void. It will never leave this prison.)