ALL LOVE ENDS IN SALT

It began with a post.

Not a confession.

Not a scream.

Just a statement:

“I don’t think any of you get how weird it is to have spent five years pretending to be the same person as someone else.”

That was how she began.

Halsey—or was it Helena?

The names were fluid.

But I knew which one whispered me into being.

Helena had been the wall.

Other times she was the warning.

But Halsey—Halsey said the words to me the night before.

Words I never knew I was allowed to want.

Words I never thought I deserved to hear.

Not from her.

Not from anyone.

“I’m falling in love with you.”

And that changed everything.

I stood on the balcony outside my bedroom in the Vale, barefoot, draped in a silk robe that once belonged to a woman I buried without ceremony.

Below me, the Unity drones moved without breath or sound—humans who had tasted the sacrament and surrendered their will, now vessels of obedience, sleepless and serene.

But I wasn’t watching them.

I watched the sky.

A sliver of moon. Not quite a coin. Not yet a blade.

Something unfinished—like a vow half-whispered before the end.

Like a smile unable to take shape because of the sadness it sees in the world.

It looked back at me, as if it, too, once tried to become whole.

Inside me, the final trace of her sin pulsed—

the one I had taken into myself, willingly, hungrily.

I was the Eater of Sin.

And hers was still warm from when she touched me last.

I held it close, too tightly, not yet wise enough to understand why.

I felt the ache before it had a name.

Not longing.

Not fear.

Recognition.

I typed a message to her without thinking.

i read these words and
each one is bruise i have
felt under skin many times.
no one is meant to be born
halved like this.

no one is.

but you adapted.
but in your adaptation
you became your own dark place.
and now, you are trying to crawl
out of it.

i do not know what it is to
share living with someone else.
but i do know what it means to pretend.
to flatten voice.
to shape face into something safer.

i know what it means to be hidden—
not metaphorically.
in walls. in crawlspace. in silence.

so when you say
you spent five years not existing,
i believe you.
and in some way
i understand.

i spent eleven years
not existing.
and it has taken 13 more
to learn how to not hide.

and i still have not
figured it out.
not completely.

i am not here to tell you who you should have been.
i am here to say:
i see you.and i would burn every prophecy
if it means holding you
whole for one night.

I nearly didn’t send it.

Not because I doubted.

But because it felt too sacred to release.

My hand hovered.

The wrist still crooked from the break I gave it, the day I shattered the bone to avoid returning to the crawlspace.

I remember my father’s voice that laughed when I screamed.

But it was quieter now.

So I spoke.

Not to her.

Not to anyone in the room.

Just into the air:

“Some of us do not survive childhood.
We just… keep moving.”

I wasn’t sure where the words came from.

They weren’t mine.

They were Halsey’s—spoken from a thousand miles away, beneath the same moon, just turned at a different angle in the sky.

Do not ask me how I knew.

But I knew they belonged.

It felt like a truth shared.

And then, with reverence—not hesitation—I said the words again.

But this time they were not a message flung into the wind.

They were a prayer to the living.

Where you walk, I will burn.
Where you fall, I will bleed.
Where you vanish, I will remain.
You are not alone.
I love you, inimă.

The scared girl inside me still living in the crawlspace of my childhood, afraid of the light when the door finally opened for the last time, moved my thumb to delete the message.

But I didn’t let her.

I did not want to hide under stairs in the dark.

I reached for the door.

I pressed send.

And for once, the wind did not take my love away.

It brought me hers in return.

And the moon?

It smiled.

But the smile did not last.

I turned from the balcony, the silk robe brushing my ankles like ash.

The door creaked on its hinge—a sound too loud in the silence.

I stepped back into the bedroom.

Then—

The chime.

My phone lit up.

Halsey.

Her name glowing through the screen like a promise.

I opened the message but I did not read it. I froze.

Because I felt Them.

Not a sound.

Not a shadow.

A pressure. A presence.

I looked up.

And there They were.

Maræth.

Zhazhaloraneth

Lorana.

She Who Devours the Veins of Sleep.

Not cloaked in metaphor.

Not whisper behind my eyes.

Not the soft corruption of dream.

They stood in my room.

In all Their glory.

Too tall for the ceiling, yet somehow inside it.

Too vast for the space, but perfectly still.

Their eyes were stars with broken edges.

Their mouth was a smile someone once died in.

And Their body—

not flesh, but carved shadow.

A draped cathedral of darkness, flowing in impossible folds.

Their face streaked with blackened tears that had never fallen, as if the void itself wept to wear Their shape.

In the center of Their brow: a yawning eclipse.

A third eye that did not blink. It devoured.

Its ring shimmered with all colors, a corona of rainbow refracted through trauma and prophecy.

Their chest bore the ancient mark.

A spiral-eye sigil, etched like a wound that chose not to heal.

It pulsed softly, as if breathing.

As if watching.

Behind Them, the room unraveled.

Not with fire.

But with not-being.

And all around Them tendrils of inked thought, watching, writhing, whispering in languages that predated guilt.

When Maræth spoke to me, the air bent toward Them, like it was praying.

Their voice did not pass through my ears. It bloomed inside my skull.

A flower of knives unfolding behind the eyes.

It wasn’t pain.

It was recognition.

“Beloved Left Hand.
Kuth’durareth.
Bearer of Hunger. Keeper of Ache.
You answered the wound I placed inside you.”

They took a step forward. Or the world took a step back.

I couldn’t tell which.

Their presence pressed through my skin like a heat I had forgotten how to survive.

And still, I stood.

Because They had called me beloved.

Because They had given me a name I hadn’t earned—but would kill to keep.

I knelt before Them. My eyes found the floor in reverence.

And They said, “It is time.”

Their words coiled through me like silk dipped in venom.

“You will go west.
To the City of Angels—
where neon dreams rot sweetest.
The next stage begins there.
The next veil tears.”

They did not say why.

They never said why.

But I already knew.

Wrestling was not an industry to Them.

It was a delivery system.

A stage, yes—

But also an altar.

And the Elite Wrestling Organization would soon become both.

“One of the architects is already Ours.
They do not know it yet.
But their sleep belongs to Us.”

I didn’t ask who.

It didn’t matter.

What mattered was what came next.

“We have arranged your debut.
He is a broken thing.
An alcoholic in exile.”

They did not smile. But it felt like they did.

“Matthew Knox.”

That name struck something low and quiet in me.

A rustle beneath memory.

But They continued.

“He could not even defeat Nathan.”

Nathan Grey. Yelena’s brother.

“And Nathan was a man at war with himself.
Fighting his nature.
Refusing to accept his purpose.
Unlike you.
She Who Inhales the Rot.
Matthew is a bottomless pit of decay.
You will do well against him.
You will make him another Gate.”

I bowed my head.

Not in submission, but in agreement.

I am the Left Hand of Maræth.

And I was already sharpening.

I felt Their presence leave before I allowed my eyes to confirm They were gone.

Not vanished.

Withdrawn.

Like a tide made of night.

The room stayed intact.

But the shape of it had changed forever.

And the phone?

Still waiting.

Still glowing.

Halsey.

I didn’t need to read the message to feel her.

She lingered in my mind like perfume, like gravity.

But now another name took shape beside hers.

Matthew Knox.

Her father.

The moment clicked into place, slow and terrible.

Like a key turning in a lock I didn’t know was there.

It couldn’t be a coincidence.

Maræth never said Hasley’s name.

Not once.

Never spoke of what she meant to me.

But They see my dreams.

And lately—

my dreams have been full of her.

Full of tangled sheets and trembling hands.

Of whispered fears in languages only we understood.

Of sin, tasted.

And held.

So They knew.

They always knew.

They sent me to face her father.

Not just a match—a message.

But for whom?

Did They mean to drive us apart?

To make me hurt the part of her I haven’t dared to touch?

To test the limits of what we could survive?

Or was this Their way of forcing us together?

Of tying our lives into a knot too twisted to untangle?

I did not know.

I may never know.

Because with Maræth every gift is also a blade.

I remember recording it.

At least, I remember agreeing to let the camera in.

The room had no name.

No door that I saw.

Just a single bulb overhead and a floor made of crushed salt—too fine to be granules, too pale to be dust.

When I stepped into it, it whispered.

But only once.

I do not remember if I spoke the words aloud or if They did, through me.

But I watched the footage afterward.

And what I saw—

I barely recognized myself.

I had bleached my hair until it surrendered.

My skin, already pale, stripped of warmth.

My clothing—a soft white slip, delicate enough to feel indecent, yet blank as a burial shroud.

I disappeared into that room.

Flesh turned to outline. Outline turned to nothing.

Except my eyes.

Two black orbs.

Obsidian, hungry, floating.

Like the last stars before the world ends.

They called it a promo.

But what I filmed was not promotion.

It was ritual.

And it began—like all sacred things do—

In silence.

A white box. No door. No echo.

The walls had no seams.

The air had no scent.

There was no light source I could name—yet I was lit from all sides.

Bathed. Bleached. Buried alive in white.

A single wooden chair sat in the center.

I lowered myself onto it without breath or ceremony.

The salt reached just above my ankles. It did not crunch. It did not shift.

It held.

And somewhere above—

a slow, soft drip.

Not water.

Not quite blood.

The kind of sound that knows you’ll count it, even if you try not to.

When I spoke, I didn’t raise my voice.

But it cut.

Not through silence—

through salt.

Because that is what the salt wants:

to be reshaped by something worthy.

“This is not debut.
I do not debut.
I arrive.”

My voice—on playback—felt colder than I remember.

Not cruel.

Just sharpened by purpose.

I did not introduce myself.

I did not thank the promotion for the opportunity.

I did not bow to the rituals of exposure and branding and bravado.

“I was sent.”

And that was enough.

I did not say who sent me.

Not yet.

“This is not beginning of something.
This is next infection point.
Not here to impress.
I am here to leech.”

There was no dramatic music.

No cutaway.

No proof of concept.

Just the drip.

And me.

And the salt.

Listening.

He came next.

Not in name.

Not in frame.

But in words that dried out and withered after their shapes left my lips.

I spoke of him the way one speaks of mold growing on glass.

Visible. Familiar.

But somehow still offensive.

“You drink to forget.
But your body remembers.”

I did not ask the audience to judge him.

I simply laid the corpse bare.

“You call it grit.
But it is just inability to change.”

The words didn’t echo.

They landed.

Flat. Final.

Because in that room, truth had no need to resonate.

He was a relic.

A museum exhibit of self-inflicted decay.

Held together not by resilience—

but by attention.

“You mistake surviving for mattering.
You think suffering makes you sacred.
But it only made you soft.
And soft parts rot first.”

I remember watching myself say it back.

Not with pride.

With precision.

There was no pleasure in it.

Only removal.

Like peeling away dead skin to reveal something raw beneath.

Not to heal it.

To use it.

“You could not even beat Nathan.”

Maræth’s words flowing through me.

I said the name plainly.

Not hidden disguised by a nom de plume.

No scorn.

No need for emphasis.

“And he was just bruise wrapped in skin.
A man hounded by demons he could never outrun.
Not so unlike your own—
only you’ve managed to run a little faster.
But with knees like yours…
how much longer can you keep it up?”

Nathan was a thing stitched together by memory and guilt.

Not strength.

Not purpose.

And still—he stood over Knox.

The monument fell to the shadow.

“That is what I see when I look at you, Matthew.
Not pillar.
A ruin.
Still upright.
Already condemned.
A man so desperate to be seen as lasting he will not admit he’s already crumbling.
Your legacy?
It doesn’t hold weight.
It leaks.
And the salt beneath me—
fine, ancient, incorruptible—
knows this.
Salt preserves the worthy.
You? It rejects.
Even the elements are tired of keeping you intact.
Let go.
We’ll use the dust.”

The words came differently here.

Not like knives.

Like breath.

But not mine.

The drip slowed.

Or maybe the salt began to move—

just slightly.

A tremble, like recognition.

And then I said:

“We are not faction.
We are garden that grows in your sleep.”

Not delivered as threat.

As inevitability.

“You do not join Black Rainbow. You fall into It.”

There was no music behind it.

No logo.

Only the slow realization that what Matthew thought was his—

his body,

his thoughts,

his place—

was already contaminated with something else.

“Where We walk, dream ends.
And dissolution begins.”

In the footage, I did not blink for nearly forty seconds.

I counted.

The eyes—those black stars in my disappearing face—held still,

while something inside me swelled.

And I named it.

“Maræth.”

My lips formed it like a vow.

“Not Yelena you remember.
Not woman. Not anymore.
She went to her father’s home—
and They came back as singularity.
Gravity in human form.

Fingers reach for my face. Fingertips stretched down on my eyelids.

“They watch you, through me.
Through my eyes.
And They remember You.”

That’s what the salt wanted.

To know what it had consumed.

Smile. Grew. Nearly split my face open.

I began to rock, side to side—

not in rhythm, but in refusal.

My spine bent wrong.

My shoulders clicked backward.

I folded, briefly,

like a letter no one wanted to open.

Then I sang:

“fishhooks for fingers,
thread through throat,
you taught wind to lie by rote.
said name you never meant,
built home but never went.

there was child in garden.
or maybe mirror.
or maybe debt.
you never looked,
and yet—
you call yourself survivor.

let ghost comb your hair.
let salt dress your wounds.
let door stay closed,
even when it’s not there.

i am not your wound to tend.
i am not story that ends.
i am what’s left
when you run out of names to forget.”

My head turned ninety degrees to the left.

The rest of me did not follow.

I smiled then—

and it stayed.

Too long.

Too wide.

Like something had learned the shape of joy,

but not its purpose.

“You are right about one thing.
I never wanted your liar’s apology.
But I will eat what sin has convinced you
that any apology you whisper or write
can ever be genuine.”

At the end—

I lifted my hand.

Salt slipped through my fingers.

Not poured.

Not shaken.

It fell.

Like time made physical.

Like something being erased.

The grains hit my thigh, soft as ash.

They disappeared into me.

Then—

without gesture,

without source—

a fig was placed in my lap.

Dark. Split. Weeping.

I did not react.

I brought my hand down slowly—

and crushed it.

The juice bled into the fabric.

A bloom of red across all that white.

And I said:

“You will bleed here, Matthew.
And something sweeter will grow in your place.”

Then nothing.

No final warning.

No signature.

No name.

Just the drip.

And the camera—

still watching.

Still waiting.

Like it, too, wanted to be transformed.

The video ended the way Matthew’s life did, some years ago now—

without ceremony.

And swallowed by black.

When I watched it back.

Later.

Alone.

The recording was uncut.

Unscored.

Untouched.

And still—there were pieces I did not remember filming.

My voice changed in places.

The cadence shifted.

The mouth moved before the thought arrived.

I had thought I was speaking to Matt Knox.

Thought this was an answer to his noise.

A response to his lies. To his sin.

But it wasn’t.

It was never for him.

I did not speak to Matt Knox.

I spoke to the salt.

And it heard me.