She walked on, her pace steady, her senses recording every shift. The sky above was no longer a tapestry of deep space. The vibrant violets and cobalts had sickened into a uniform, oppressive scarlet, a bruised and bright-less red that seemed to absorb light. The ground underfoot was no longer soft earth, but a hard-baked, cracked mud, dark and stained. Soon, there were no trees at all.
The pools became unavoidable. Her next step landed not on ground, but in a shallow body of blood. The liquid was cool and clung to her skin with a stubborn viscosity. With each subsequent step, a new layer coated her feet, the older ones drying into a tight, cracking film.
Then came the others.
At first, it was just fragments. A pale, coiled length of intestine, dull in the bleak light. A cluster of fly-less, unrotting eyeballs staring. A hand, severed neatly at the wrist, fingers curled in a final, futile grasp. They were scattered like gruesome trail markers.
Further on, the fragments became pieces. An arm, still sheathed in the tattered remains of a leather vambrace. A torso, ripped open from collar to hip. They were not fresh. The flesh had a desiccated, leathery quality, as if mummified by the strange air or frozen at the moment of death.
'... Where the hell am I?' The corpses and blood seemed to defy the rules of time.
A dark shape resolved on the horizon, a mound against the scarlet sky. As she drew closer, its details sharpened. It was a body, propped awkwardly against a jutting rock. It was missing everything from the waist down. The skin was pulled taut over the bone, gray and waxy. The face—locked in a silent scream, lips shriveled back from yellowed teeth. It had been here for a long, long time. And it was not alone. Looking past it, she saw others. Dozens, then hundreds, littering the barren plain as far as she could see. A field of the dead.
A cold knot tightened in her stomach. This was wrong in a way that went beyond the merely grotesque. She scanned the landscape, her mind flipping through the immense catalog of places she knew from his life. Battlegrounds, massacres, scenes of magical annihilation. Nothing matched this.
This was... off the map. The silence here was necrotic.
She felt a pang of something—not terror, but a deep, weary sorrow for this vast, anonymous suffering. But sorrow was a luxury that wouldn't help her understand. She pushed it down, forcing her mind to observe.
'Why am I here?'
She kept walking, her sticky feet leaving faint prints in the grime of solidified gore. The nature of the corpses began to tell a more specific story. It wasn't just death; it was deliberate, systematic dismantling. A head, lolling to the side, its mouth a cavernous, toothless hole. A body with its arms and legs twisted into impossible, mangled configurations. Another that was just a trunk and a head, as if unscrewed. The scale of the violence was methodical, almost artistic in its cruelty.
Then, structures began to rise from the plain. At first, they were just taller mounds. But their shapes were too geometric, too deliberate. A wall, six feet high, composed of interlocked bodies, their limbs woven together like grisly basketwork. Further on, a pyramid the size of a small building, its foundation a compressed layer of torsos—its peak a single, staring figure impaled on a spike of bone.
Her breath hitched. The air felt solid in her lungs. Her stomach, which had known no sensation but neutrality for years, began to churn.
'... Perhaps this body is supposed to be the vessel.'
Her eyes swept over a particular archway formed by spines fused at the top. From it hung a body, swaying slightly in a wind she could not feel. He was bald, and his skin, from his scalp to down his neck, was covered in intricate, sharp tattoos of a style she did not recognize. They were faded, but stark against his gray flesh.
A jolt—white-hot and entirely visceral, slammed into her. It wasn't a memory, not an image or a sound. It was a raw, neurological alarm, a siren blaring in the core of her brain. Her body reacted before her mind could. A violent, wrenching convulsion seized her middle, and she doubled over, vomiting a thin, clear fluid onto the bloody ground. Her body was trying to expel a horror it recognized on a level deeper than consciousness.
The message was screaming through every nerve: Leave. Now.
There was no more hesitant analysis—only the imperative to flee.
She turned and ran.
She did not jog or sprint. She unleashed the full, unnatural capacity of her body. The grim landscape became a scarlet-and-gray smear. The wind whipped the dried crust from her lower half. She did not look back. She focused only on the rhythm of her own movement, the hammer of her heart, the burn of air in her lungs—anything to drown out the silent scream of that place and the echoing alarm in her skull. She ran, and she did not stop.
.
.
.