Pain.
It wasn't sharp or sudden.
It was slow.
"Haah... haaah... Haah!" A young mam panted...
….sharply.
The young man, Lenn, rolled as he woke up, eyes squinting against a faint crimson glow that bathed the surroundings in an unnatural light. The ground beneath him… wasn't ground at all.
"What the hell…?"
His voice sounded distant.
Hollow.
Like it echoed through more than just the space around him.
The sky—or what passed for one—was a swirling canvas of ink-black smoke.
Lenn scrambled to his feet. His hands came away sticky with a viscous, dark fluid. Not quite blood. Not quite anything he'd ever seen.
He didn't understand what was happening.
He shouldn't be here.
Or was this...
...the mystic world?
A low groan echoed nearby.
Lenn spun around.
And froze.
It was a person.
A twisted husk, bent backward at the spine in a way no human should bend. Its face was frozen in an eternal scream, and its limbs twitched like puppet strings had been yanked loose. Eyes—if they could still be called that—swiveled in his direction, milky white and unblinking.
"Nope. Nope nope nope—"
He ran.
Didn't think.
Just ran.
Everywhere he turned, the world seemed to shift around him.
Things.
Crawling around, their bodies made of stitched flesh.
This wasn't a real.
At least that's what he told himself.
So...
He ran even more.
But he didn't get far.
He tripped.
Scraped his hand on the jagged ridges of what he hoped was a rock.
And then…
He saw her.
A girl, maybe sixteen, standing in the center of a clearing.
She was humming.
Completely untouched. Unbothered.
Lenn stared, breath caught.
"Hey! You—what is this place?! Do you know where we are?!"
She turned.
Her eyes… weren't human.
She smiled.
Then the ground split open behind her.
And hands—dozens of them—reached out.