I woke up choking.
The air tore into my lungs, dry and bitter, scraping down my throat like sandpaper, and I rolled onto my side coughing so hard my chest hurt and my eyes watered. Every breath felt wrong, too hot, too thick. Ash. That was the smell. Burnt wood, burnt earth, and underneath it something older, metallic, rotten.
My hands clawed at the ground as panic surged. The soil under my palms was warm and brittle, crumbling to dust at a touch. When I pushed myself up my muscles screamed, weak and trembling, like I'd run for days without rest.
"Okay, okay," I muttered, and my own voice sounded wrong, swallowed by the air before it could travel anywhere.
I forced my eyes open, and froze.
A forest stood in front of me, if it could still be called that. Black pillars rose out of the dark, each one wide as a tower, climbing endlessly toward an ashen sky I could barely see. They weren't trees anymore, they were corpses. The broken trunks of giants that had burned long ago and never finished falling. Time hadn't reclaimed them. Fire hadn't erased them. It had only stopped them mid-death.
There was no ground, not really. Beneath my feet stretched a tangled mass of shattered wood, piled and twisted into a choking maze hundreds of meters deep. Massive trunks lay at impossible angles, stacked on one another into a false floor that creaked softly under my weight, and between them yawned gaps of absolute darkness, deep and narrow, the kind of space something could live inside without ever being seen. The air smelled of ash and old smoke, dry and lifeless, yet heavy enough to press against my lungs. Sound behaved strangely here, swallowed, bent, returned in shapes it hadn't left in. A careless step could echo like a scream, or vanish entirely.
And the light, there was also something deeply unnatural about it. It wasn't day, yet it wasn't night either. The sky glowed with a dull, ashen haze that cast no real shadows, making distance impossible to judge. Everything seemed both close enough to touch and impossibly far away. I stared for a long moment, waiting for the sun to appear through the smoke or for darkness to finally settle. Neither happened. The world simply remained suspended in this lifeless twilight, as though time itself had forgotten how to move forward. A chill crawled across my skin despite the dry heat lingering in the air.
I didn't look up. Somewhere above me, something shifted. Far too large. Far too slow.
The forest didn't feel hostile. It felt indifferent, like it had already outlived countless lives just like mine and wouldn't even notice claiming one more. My heart started to race. Where, I turned slowly, every movement stiff with the fear of what I might see. The forest went on in every direction, an ocean of scorched wood and ash. No buildings. No roads. No lights. No sound of the city. No sound at all. The silence pressed in, heavy and absolute, never peaceful, no matter how still it looked.
I stood up too fast and the dizziness hit, my vision blurring, dark spots dancing at the edges. I staggered, nearly went down, and laughed, a nervous, useless sound. "This isn't real," I whispered. "This is, this is a dream. A bad one." A nightmare. The word felt wrong in my mouth the moment I said it.
I reached into my pocket without thinking. Empty. The coin was gone. A sharp, senseless unease went through my chest and my breathing picked up again. I checked every pocket, jacket, pants, nothing. "No, no, no…" my voice cracked. "I had it. I had it." I didn't know why that mattered so much. But the absence felt like standing on the edge of something vast and bottomless.
A sound. I froze instantly. Faint. A dry crack somewhere out in the dark. Wood shifting, or something stepping on bone. My eyes darted toward it. Shadows stretched long and uneven between the trunks, writhing under the dim, flickering light, and for one terrifying second I was sure they were moving on their own. Another sound, closer. My pulse thundered in my ears. Every instinct screamed at me to run, and my feet stayed rooted to the ground while my imagination filled the silence with breathing, whispers, the scrape of claws against bark.
I turned slowly. That's when I saw them. I froze.
Skeletons. Not one. Many. Scattered among the trees, half-buried in ash, tangled in roots, slumped against blackened trunks. Human shapes, unmistakable, some missing limbs, some with their skulls tilted up as though still mid-scream. My stomach twisted violently. "Oh god," I whispered. These weren't ancient. Some bones were darkened by fire, others cracked cleanly, and a few still had scraps of fabric clinging to them, cloth, leather, the remains of clothes that had once belonged to someone. People. They had been people.
A creak echoed behind me and I spun around so fast my neck protested, breath hitching, heart trying to tear its way out of my chest.
Nothing. Just trees. Just shadows. Just the forest, watching.
My mind started to come apart at the edges. Every shadow became a shape, every branch a reaching hand, every sound a predator stalking me. I imagined eyes everywhere, hidden just past the edge of my sight, patient, waiting for me to move or not move, whichever would kill me faster.
"I need to wake up," I said out loud, louder, desperate. "I need to wake up." I slapped my own face, hard. Pain exploded across my cheek. I gasped. Still here. The realization landed like a physical blow. This wasn't ending. My legs gave out and I went down into the ash, hands shaking, panic crashing through me in hot, suffocating waves, my thoughts scattering toward something dark and irreversible.
I was lost. Alone. Surrounded by the dead. And somewhere deep in that burned forest, something shifted, slow, deliberate, aware.
I didn't see it. But I felt it. And for the first time since waking up, I understood one simple, horrifying truth.
This was not a nightmare. Nightmares end. This was hell.