...Hollow.
That was the only adjective Vergil’s muddled mind could conjure to describe his condition. Surrounded by infinite black and screaming silence – he was nowhere and he was nothing. A fathomless thing in a maddening abyss filled with emptiness. The realm around him was void of anything, and he was the void. He was falling... drifting...or flying – he couldn’t distinguish the sensation.
Something slashed through the endless dark; a blast of white-hot gold was upon him before he could think to react. It blinded him and burned him, and slammed him onto an unyielding, smooth marble floor.
The pain throbbed through his skull on impact, and every nerve ending in his body blazed with agonising awareness...
His body.
His eyes snapped open, and slowly he propped himself up to stare at his hands. He had a body – and not just any body. These were his arms, his long slim fingers that were spreading out to brush the air. He studied his hands for another flustered moment before he curled his fingers into his palm, clutching them in tight fists until his knuckles turned white.
What the hell was going on?
Confusion triggered his fury. Only then did he take in his environment. Gold and white marble walls. His back was against a black iron gate. Before him towered a ridiculously tall statue with its face blown off. He blinked up at it, and his gaze wandered further, his head dropping back on his shoulders. A lofty ceiling with an intricate glass dome - with a gaping hole in it - depicted a rather stormy sky overhead. It seemed he was back in the human world, but the emptiness of the abyss seemed to have followed him here.
He grabbed onto the gate behind him when the sound of angered voices echoed off the walls, and Vergil hauled himself to his feet. He turned around, and rigidly observed the occupants scattered in the centre of the room. His gaze roamed over them, measuring them with calculated purpose - a disturbing old geazer with wild hair, a young man with a sinister smirk and a glaring sword, and a boy with flaxen hair.
Vergil instinctively took a step further into the shadows, and silently watched the pointless bickering continue for another moment. The emptiness didn't waver from his core - it was a pestering kind of emptiness, a feeling that something was missing.
A female voice addressed him directly, and he looked toward the source. Eva. Her appearance struck him like a heated iron rod right between the eyes. Her long hair shimmered like gold silk in the dim light, and her eyes were as deep and endless as the arctic - but they lacked her fire. It wasn't Eva - it was demon.
The sound of his name had bounced off the walls and had begun to fade. Vergil was about to melt into the shadows to make a discreet and graceful exit, when reality heralded the reason for the nagging hollowness. Something was missing. Yamato. With blazing eyes narrowed, Vergil emerged from the shadows with the stealth of a predator out to kill.
