Raze opened his eyes slowly, the motion requiring more effort than it should have. His limbs felt as though they'd been filled with wet sand, each muscle protesting the simple act of consciousness. Honestly, he had expected to see forests stretching endless into the horizon, or perhaps churning oceans, or any of the elemental terrains the holographic display had described. But reality, he was learning, cared nothing for expectations.
A gentle wind found him first—not warm, not cool, but something that existed in the terrible space between. It carried a bone-chilling quality that seemed to bypass his skin entirely, sinking fangs into the marrow beneath. And with it came sounds. Whispers, perhaps. Or screams, stretched so thin across distance and time that they had lost all meaning save one: suffering. The wind carried the cries of souls, and it blew coldly past him, insistent, causing him to shiver despite his best efforts to remain still.
He managed to pull himself together slowly, vertebrae clicking into place like the chambers of a rusted lock. Looking around, he found his expectations shattered completely.
What met him was endless jet-black expanse.
Pure darkness stretched in every direction, a void so complete it seemed to have weight, to press against his eyeballs with physical force. The ground beneath him was barren and black, cracked in patterns that suggested something vast had once dried here and never recovered. Above, the sky hung equally empty—black as pitch, filled with grey clouds that seemed less to float than to writhe. Whatever light might have existed elsewhere was absorbed instantly by the surrounding darkness, devoured before it could offer even the faintest illumination.
But within this darkened sky, things moved.
Colossal shadows passed above the clouds—shadows so huge that Raze could make no sense of their shapes. They moved silently, impossibly, their forms suggesting limbs and wings and things for which no words existed. He watched them for what felt like hours, tracking their slow procession across the bruised heavens, and gradually came to a conclusion that offered small comfort: they couldn't leave the darkened cloudy sky. Whatever they were, whatever hunger drove them, they were bound to that realm above.
Having seen enough to understand his predicament, Raze turned his attention to the ground. He would need to move, to find shelter, to understand where—
The tremor began faintly, a vibration so subtle he thought it might be his own heartbeat amplified by fear. Then it grew. Aggressive shaking rattled his teeth, traveled up his legs, made the black ground beneath him dance and shudder. Raze stumbled, arms windmilling for balance that didn't exist, and in that moment of chaos, a sound reached him.
Not from the trembling earth. From behind.
Raze turned.
Twenty meters of grey-white horror was running toward him.
The creature's form was humanoid only in the loosest sense—two arms, two legs, a head. But its proportions were wrong in ways that made Raze's eyes water trying to process them. Slender to the point of emaciation, its arms hung almost to its knees, swinging in terrible rhythm with its gait. And its head... its uncanny head bore a wide, blood-red maw that stretched ear to ear, a smile made of tearing and consumption. Above that nightmare grin sat two hollow, empty sockets—not eyes, but the absence of them, bleeding shadows instead of tears.
A horror one shouldn't even see in dreams was now running toward him. Though it was still miles away, its size made it visible, made it inevitable.
Fuck, Raze thought, the word barely forming through the static of terror flooding his mind. How can faith be so blind?
His eyes, wide with primal horror, didn't wait for his mind to catch up. Before conscious thought could intervene, his body acted—turning, pumping legs that felt wooden, sprinting into the void with no destination, no plan, only the absolute certainty that remaining meant death.
No matter how fast he ran, the abomination closed the distance. Fast. Too fast.
Raze's lungs burned. His legs screamed. The black ground seemed to reach up with each step, trying to claim his feet, to slow him down, to deliver him to the thing behind. Panic clawed at the edges of his consciousness, promising sweet oblivion if he would only surrender to it, only stop running, only accept—
A small part of his mind, some stubborn fragment of who he had been before this place, managed to preserve its rationality. It stood against the tide of primal fear, a single candle in a hurricane, not allowing his self to slip entirely into panic. Think, it whispered. Observe. Survive.
But there was nothing to observe except darkness, nothing to think except run, and survival seemed less likely with each thundering step behind him.
Then, before the unknown colossal giant could reach him, a hollow cry split the empty black sky.
The sound didn't echo—it simply existed, filling the space between clouds and ground with its presence. Raze's head snapped up, neck craning, and he saw it.
A gigantic bird.
It had no feathers—only tattered membranes of something once sacred, now rotting, dripping phosphorescent mist that made the ground hiss and melt wherever it fell. The stench reached him even from hundreds of meters above, chemical and wrong, the smell of sanctity corrupted beyond redemption. Its wings spanned impossible distances, membranes torn in patterns that almost looked like writing, like warnings in a language that predated speech.
But its eyes were the worst.
Not blind. Not missing. But scooped out—two perfect hollows that somehow saw, that tracked movement not with vision but with the absence of it, with the hunger of empty space wanting to be filled. Raze felt that gaze pass over him like a physical weight, felt it measure him, find him wanting, and move on.
It dove.
The speed was terrifying, impossible, making the air itself tremble and scream. The bird fell like a spear cast by a vengeful god, like judgment given form and appetite. The gigantic humanoid creature running toward Raze had no time to react—perhaps no time even to understand that it had become prey instead of predator.
Talons the size of tree trunks closed around grey-white flesh. The bird's hollow cry sounded again, triumphant, hungry, and it took to the sky with its prize. The humanoid creature struggled, its terrible maw opening to scream, but the sound was lost in the wind of the bird's ascent. It thrashed, desperate, powerful enough to crack mountains, but all in vain.
The bird climbed higher, higher, until both shapes were swallowed by the dark clouds and the shadows that waited there.
A few seconds later, everywhere returned to calm, as though nothing had happened. The ground still smoked where phosphorescent mist had fallen. The tremors had ceased. And above, the colossal shadows continued their silent procession across the sky, perhaps slightly larger now, perhaps slightly more numerous.
Raze stood frozen, his mind struggling to process what his eyes had witnessed.
So it wasn't trying to eat me, he whispered to the darkness, the words barely audible over his own ragged breathing. It was trying to run from something more terrifying than itself.
He looked up at the sky again, at the shadows that moved above the clouds, and understood with terrible clarity: they could come down. They simply chose when. They simply chose who.
The void was not empty. It was full of hunger, layered in hierarchies of terror, and he was at the bottom of a food chain he hadn't known existed.
Raze began to walk, placing each step with careful precision, moving not away from anything but toward nothing he could name. Behind him, the ground hissed where sacred rot had fallen. Above him, things watched with eyes that weren't there.
And somewhere in the darkness ahead, other creatures were running. Other horrors were fleeing. The question was no longer how to survive this place.
The question was: what could possibly be terrible enough to make them afraid ?