"Clara? Is it really you?"

Izan stared at his friend in disbelief.

The girl looked exactly as she had moments before she died.

Her brown hair was tied in a ponytail that rested over her shoulder. Her dark eyes shone with the characteristic spark of life they had always held.

She smiled at him and spun around in place, spreading her arms as if she were dancing.

The movement made the long lilac dress catch the air and open like a flower beneath the sun.

Breaking up the delicate fabric of the dress, she wore leather pieces over her chest and arms that matched her boots.

"I don't really understand what's happening," she replied, "but somehow, it seems like I'm not dead."

"Then you remember everything that happened?"

Izan stepped deeper into the Dark Palace, gazing at the place with admiration, awe, and fear all at once.

He wanted to run over and hug her, to feel whether she was really there, but his friend seemed strangely calm, and that unsettled him.

"Yes, I remember... Even... the pain I felt."

Clara brought one of her hands to her abdomen, remembering the piercing wound that had gone through her.

"I don't know what's happening, but I'm so happy to see you again," Izan admitted, holding back his tears. "Were you with me all these days?"

"Days?"

"Yes. I'm not sure how long I was in that pit, but I think at least a week must have passed."

"Pit? I don't know what you're talking about," she said, frowning. "The last thing I remember is that we were attacked by surprise."

The girl touched her abdomen again.

"I was stabbed through the stomach with a weapon... and I fell."

"Yes, we were together at that moment," Izan nodded. "But in the chaos, we got separated. I saw you being attacked. I tried to reach you, but the horses of one of the carriages got out of control."

He swallowed as he reconstructed the entire scene in his mind.

"The horses ran me over, and then I felt the wheels of the carriage pass over my legs. After that, I woke up in the pit."

"And you say you were there for days?"

"That's right, surrounded by everyone's bodies. No one else survived," he sighed. "I don't know if they didn't realize I was still alive, or if, seeing the state I was in, they threw me into the pit so I would die slowly."

Izan looked at his legs. They were completely intact, as if nothing had ever happened to him.

"With my legs destroyed, I was never going to be able to get out of there."

Clara approached him and gave him a tight hug.

The warmth of the contact was strange. Although it felt like real contact, both of them experienced a sense of distance, as if everything were unreal.

"I know very well that I died that day," she whispered into his ear. "The pain was horrible. I couldn't even think about healing myself, and then, all of a sudden, the world went dark, and everything ended, but..."

"But..."

"But I appeared here, in this place. I heard your voice and answered you."

She pulled away from the embrace but kept her hands on her friend's shoulders.

"And you answered me too... None of this makes sense, I know, but I think that... somehow, I'm still alive here because of you."

Izan smiled at her with tearful eyes.

"Why are you always so positive?"

"Because one of us has to be."

The boy nodded, responded with a grimace, and then asked:

"Then what is this place supposed to be?"

"I don't know, but it's incredible."

The two of them gazed at the great hall of the Dark Palace.

The white-tiled floor had small gray veins that all seemed to point in the same direction, like the imperfect strands of a spiderweb. They all converged at a grand staircase that split into two paths, one on each side, leading to a mezzanine that surrounded the entire hall.

Although there was no visible source of light in the building, they were illuminated wherever they looked, as if the black windows themselves emitted light.

Along some of the sides of the great hall were dark brown wooden doors adorned with iron reinforcements. Although they were interior doors, they were all reinforced and had large bolts.

«It's not enough...»

"What did you say?" Izan asked.

"I didn't say anything."

«It's not enough. Come back when you've consumed more.»

"What?" Izan looked around confused. "Don't you hear that voice?"

Clara looked at her friend, confused and a little frightened.

"No... I didn't hear anything."

«Eat... consume death, and I will see you when you return,» the voice said inside Izan's mind.

The boy didn't know what else to think about the whole situation. Everything that happened only made it all more confusing and strange.

"Iza! Iza!" she called out, shouting. "You're disappearing!"

The boy immediately looked at his hands and body to see if it was true, but as far as he could tell, nothing had changed.

When he looked up at his friend, he saw that both she and the palace seemed to be fading into a dense mist.

"Izan!"

He heard her before Clara disappeared completely.

When he blinked, the fog was gone, and he found himself sitting once again in the stagnant waters of the pit of corpses.

Everything was just as desolate as before.

"Cler, are you still there?" he called out to his friend, but there was no answer.

Cler was a nickname Izan used affectionately for Clara. He came up with it one day during a Spanish class, when he learned that the Spanish word "clara" could mean "clear" in English. From then on, he occasionally called her that.

He looked at his friend's corpse again and sighed.

"So I really was crazy."

He let himself fall backward into the mud, his hand touching the leg of another nearby corpse, and gazed thoughtfully at the sky.

He felt weak. The nauseating smell no longer bothered him; his sense of smell seemed to have been completely ruined. His parched mouth still carried the aftertaste of the flesh he had eaten.

What had it tasted like? Although he had swallowed his friend's flesh, he had never stopped to think about its taste.

The mere fact that he had resorted to cannibalism horrified him, and he didn't want to think about it.

"Maybe I should just die," he said aloud.

The imperfect circle formed by the earthen walls of the pit was hypnotic.

What would the landscape outside that pit look like?

He had seen it before being thrown in there, but his mind held no images of the outside world. It felt as though he had spent his entire life living there.

His own memories were confused, but some remained fresh. Clara's memories.

He turned his head to the side and faced his friend's body.

"Am I really crazy, or were we actually talking a little while ago?"

He stared at her in silence, thinking about the words that voice had spoken inside his mind. "Consume death," it had told him.

"Consume death," he repeated aloud. "Did you mean that I should keep eating?"

His words sounded cold, as if desperation and his loss of reason were stripping away his emotions and morality.

His stomach cramped, and his entire body urged him toward the logical answer.

Whether he was insane or not didn't matter.

"I need to eat to live... I promised..." he began to justify himself. "And if by doing this I can talk to her again... if I can see her again..."

He swallowed as he looked at Clara's corpse. He saw her arm, now yellowish, where he had cut off the piece of flesh, and for the first time, his body was desperately begging him to eat. His parched mouth began to salivate, and he could no longer hold himself back.

"I need it," he told himself once more and lunged at his friend's arm.

At that moment, he felt nothing. He thought nothing. There was no horror. No humanity, either.

He was an animal desperate to eat. He sank his teeth into flesh, tearing through skin and muscle and swallowing without tasting.

He forgot who he was, what he was doing, where he was, everything... only one phrase returned like a distant echo:

"Consume death."

He ate and ate until another dream caught up with him, carrying him beyond his own life, carrying him once again into the life of his friend.