For countless millennia, it lay imprisoned.

In the belly of a dead world, sealed behind rings of ancient sigils, in a false reality called home, the being existed: a creature of staggering size, with feathers like silvered dusk and branching antlers. It had no name anymore, why would it matter ? It was only the prisoner.

It did not remember the day it was sealed. Not with clarity. Only fragments floated in its mind like splinters of a dream: the end of a moon once lush with life, their home, their sanctuary. The desperate exodus aboard a ship that folded space like paper. The voyage to the Eye of the Universe — a thing their kind had believed to be salvation.

But it was not.

The Eye was a wound, a screaming singularity stitched into reality, a beacon not of hope but of unraveling. When they drew near, they heard its call. Death, inevitable demise.

In terror, the surviving kin of its species turned on the Eye, weaving a vast seal to contain its influence. But the prisoner had broken the barrier for a moment, convinced they could not tame the Eye. The seal wavered. Their kin, forced to act quickly, completed the lock — and with it, sealed the prisoner away too, deep in a vault where no light reached, a punishment, perhaps, for leading the universe to its end.

And still, the prisoner endured, trapped within an eternal dream — a simulated world stitched by ancient machines. There, under an endless black sky, they sat, a simple torch burning at their side. It was not a fire of this world — it was feeding on memory and sorrow, preserving the prisoner long past when they should have withered into dust with the others.

Time passed without meaning.

Until you came.

You were the first to breach the vault, your touch clumsy on broken technology, your voice carrying the shiver of a language the prisoner had never heard. They spoke in feelings and images pressed in your mind — and slowly, you learned to listen.

You spoke to them in fragments, offering small truths: the world had changed. Their kin were gone. The stars themselves were dimmer. This was the end.

In time, they answered.

"The end comes," they said one evening, staring across the rippling waters of the simulation. "It is stitched into the marrow of existence."

You argued, spoke of survival, of fighting fate. The prisoner only listened, their gaze like the dying sun.

"Hope... is beautiful. It builds towers against the tide. But we do not halt the ocean by building walls."

You sat together in silence. The torch hissed quietly beside you, its flame flickering blue. At last, the prisoner shifted, dipping a taloned wingtip into the water, stirring the illusionary stars reflected there. Their voice was almost soft.

"We must not fear the darkness. We must greet it as an old friend, and walk with it into the quiet."

A peace found only by those who had seen the end and chose to sing anyway. And before the world ended, the least they could do was stay with you, and wait until you were ready.