Reed cried out as he lost his balance on the surface of small dark-gray pebbles, sliding down the mound which he had been traversing overtop to rest in a heap at the bottom. He had been walking for hours through the desert-like landscape of gravel, every minute of which his injured leg grew more painful and his body lost more blood. For a while now he had been making his way towards a mound in the distance that towered over its surroundings. It was still too far away for him to be sure, but it looked like there were structures on and surrounding the mound as well.

Reed picked himself up from the ground before doing likewise to the bone sword that had fallen to the ground as well. He had attempted earlier to holster the sword in his belt, however, after just a slight movement on his part the blade had sliced clean through it. He had therefore taken to carrying it with him, loathed to part with the only thing that he may be capable of using to protect himself.

Reed set off again, limping towards a destination which he knew was probably just as bad as the city from which he was fleeing. He contemplated laying down and letting the rolling hills of gravel take him, but some instinctual sense of self-preservation drove him onwards. He wanted to live so badly, and for that he had to hold out some measure of hope. Reed continued walking, the colored haze of a sky showing no signs of brightening or dimming.

As he grew nearer to the mound of gravel, Reed realized that the mound was much larger than he had originally suspected, the size resembling something more along the lines of a mountain. Surrounding the mountain on all sides was a barrier of dull white spikes embedded into the ground. Reed could see an opening in the barrier and decided to approach it to determine if it was safe enough to enter. He got close enough to peer inside and was met with the sight of more corpses, strewn about all over the place. They had the same long features and gray skin as those he had seen before, leading Reed to believe that they may be the inhabitants of this place, or had been.

He crept through the entrance, sword gripped with both hands and at the ready, as his eyes darted back and forth scanning for any sign of a threat. There were no such things, only more bodies, although within the mass of corpses he spotted several mutated creatures like those he had encountered back in the city. They were of varying sizes and proportions although all vaguely anthropomorphic in form. Each body was distorted in its own way. He saw one covered in tendrils with protruding bones and another with a comically oversized head and neck, its mouth a cavern filled with spiraling needles.

Reed waded through the field of corpses, careful to avoid those of the deformed monsters, towards the opening that led into the mountain. He entered the solid stone hallway that was dimly illuminated by the orange-red glow that trickled in from outside. As he walked through the hallway his grip on the sword intensified, a sense of unease growing to phenomenal heights within him. The illumination from outside began to fade until he was walking in near darkness, but at the end of the tunnel came a glow the same color as that which he was walking away from.

The end of the tunnel opened up into a massive room made entirely of dull white material. Columns throughout the room rose high up into the ceiling and in the middle sat a large opening in the floor, from which the orange-red light emerged. At the other end of the room was located a slightly raised platform, and on it stood the closest thing to a living person Reed had seen in this nightmare of a world. They were around seven feet tall and wore loose robes of dark gray accented with white. Covering their head was a strip of crimson fabric, wrapped tightly around to cover its head entirely. There were no openings in the headwrap, not even for the eyes, although the necessity for such a thing was doubtful going by the array of eyes that floated behind it.

The moment he saw the thing Reed immediately turned on his heel, planning to make a break for it back down the hallway. Partway through his u-turn, however, he saw the robed figure raise its hand in his direction. Reed trusted his gut and aborted his attempt to flee, leaping to the side as tendrils of flesh shot imperceptibly fast towards the hallway entrance where he had been standing. Some shot into the hallway, others hit the walls, ceiling, and floor of the bone-white room. The dull white material that up till now had seemed ungodly sharp and indestructible exploded and crumbled just like regular stone, crashing down along with part of the hallway to block Reed’s exit. He looked up from where he had thrown himself onto the floor to see the tendrils extricate themselves from the pile of debris they had created and whip sideways towards him at blinding speed. Helpless on the ground, Reed did the only thing he could think of and held his sword in front of himself, the edge of the blade facing the oncoming appendages. As they made contact with the blade, each tendril was severed in two. The ends flew right by him, carried forward by the force of their swing, but the remainder that was attached to the robed figure hit him directly in the shoulder. A sickening crunch rang out before the tendrils crashed into the wall beside him.

With survival instinct Reed had never known he possessed, he hurried to his feet using his remaining left arm. He didn’t even bother looking to see what the tendrils of flesh were doing, focusing every ounce of energy and millisecond of time he had into reaching the large opening in the floor. He charged towards it, the pain in his leg now a mere discomfort compared to the indescribable pain that plagued the right side of his torso. Within just a few bounds he was in front of the opening and without so much as a thought plunged straight into it.

Time seemed to slow as Reed hurtled down the incredibly deep chasm. The tendrils pursued him into the depths of the pit, but he had gotten enough of a lead on them that now with the help of gravity they would not reach him. At least not before he reached the bottom of the chasm. It was far deeper than he could have imagined, at least several thousand feet down. As he was falling, Reed couldn’t take his eyes away from what lay at the bottom of the chasm. The source of the orange-red light that had flooded into the room above. An enormous chaotic mass of flesh and bone occupied the floor.

His attempts at making sense of the entity he was seeing yielded few results, but from the little he could comprehend, he saw vaguely familiar appendages that put the things he had seen in this world to shame. He saw what may have been mouths, eyes, and other common bodily features, perhaps not fully formed but certainly belonging to nothing he could imagine. The rest of the entity’s form evaded his perception, possibly discarded by his mind in an effort to preserve his mental faculties, or wholly incapable of perceiving in the first place. Regardless, as he gazed at the creature in his descent Reed felt something stirring within himself, intangible and unlike anything he had felt before. He felt a sense of awareness and connection to himself, to his body, to life itself. And before he knew what to do with it, Reed at last made contact with the ground and met his end… again.