“Wake up, Gussy Gus.”

The voice was low and lilting; it was feminine and seeped in mirth and half-stifled laughter. It was as if the words were spoken during the discovery of some great delight, like a greeting between two friends long parted. I had the sense, however, that this amusement was born of malice rather than joy.

I tried to look around to find the speaker, but I couldn’t move. I was surrounded by something heavy that pressed down on me from every side. The weight shifted as I tried to move, causing the pressure to bear down on me all the harder. As my body struggled, my mind reeled at the smell of rot mixed with chalk that permeated my tomb. My eyes saw only black.

I was not truly blind, however. I could sense a thick cloud of energy, made of a combination of the familiar red-black eldritch and the strange death-flavored energy. It had sunk into everything around me. It hung over the battlefield like a heavy cloud, seeking to drown everything beneath it.

At the center of that cloud was a beacon of energy too radiant to look at directly. It was as beautiful and intense as the sun, but consumed life rather than sustained it. I could feel small, pulsing channels connecting it to every creature in the area, alive or dead.

I was no exception.

I pulled back, using my senses to map the contours of the objects closest to me. I seemed to have been buried beneath a large pile of rubble. It was made of small, brittle objects that had broken into irregularly sized pebbles and long, jagged shards. I searched for Boss Lady and her squad beneath the rubble, but they couldn’t be found.

“Fisher!” I yelled more than once, but no response came. It seemed I was still alone in my own head.

“I know you can hear me, you fucking bird!” The only answer was silence, and an increase in the weight that bore down on me.

The weight and darkness began to erode my will. Flashing system updates failed to illuminate the darkness, instead, warning me that I was injured and that the drain on my stamina had increased in speed. I battled an urge to give in, to just fall asleep and never awake. What was left to save? There was nothing that could be done, best to sleep …

No, not yet.

I pushed aside my loneliness and despair and did what I do best — I lashed out blindly and violently at everything I could touch.

My right arm narrowed and elongated into a whip ending in five razor-sharp claws. I thrashed and spun, using the weaponized arm to crush the rubble into a fine powder. As I created more room for the limb to maneuver, I slowly inched it toward the surface.

At the same time, I created a skintight barrier around myself and slowly began pushing it outwards. The weight was intense, and it took all my focus, but the pressure on my body slowly lessened as the shield expanded. This gave me room to move and allowed me to strike with more leverage as I tried to dig myself upwards toward the unknown sky. Perhaps, I would have been better off hiding in my tomb.

Eventually, my clawed hand broke through to the surface and I saw light. It split and scattered as it reflected off dust, breaking through the dark with visible lines of alternating greys and red.

I worked to widen the tunnel, and several small objects rolled towards me, creating clinking echoes. As one came to rest beside my face, I recognized it, and with that realization so too did I understand the nature of my surroundings.

I reached over and picked up the small, chipped knuckle bone. I held it in front of my face, before focusing on the dome of white and yellow that hung above me. It was bone; all of it a mountain of skeletal remains. Most were broken and crushed, but under the pale red illumination, they became recognizable. Half-intact skulls were wedged between cracked ribs and shattered femurs. The ridges of a severed spine could be seen under the crushed remains of an ulna and other bones too small and damaged to identify.

To be surrounded by that much death made we wonder in awe at the power of whatever had caused it. It reminded me of the fragility of my own life. Rather than be horrified, however, I mostly just felt unclean.

I had an urgent desire to be free of it, and to scrub away the rot and death. Despite each bone being fleshless and dry, I felt as if I were covered in a layer of slimy filth. I retched silently, but the action only served to remind me of how long it had been since I had eaten.

I stuck out with a strength born from blind panic. I continued my efforts until the tunnel was just barely wide enough for me to slide through, each inch slowly and painfully gained. My barrier kept my passage open until I broke through the surface, after which the tunnel collapsed inward while expelling a cloud of white dust.

I breathed in large ragged gulps. The air was sweet as it filled my lungs, and cool as it gently brushed my face. I closed my eyes, allowing myself a brief moment of blissful denial before standing to survey my surroundings.

I stood on a small mound amid a field littered with desiccated corpses, and sun-bleached bone. What had felt like a mountain as I clawed and scraped my way free, was no more than a half-dozen yards tall. Dozens of similarly sized piles were visible, and many more existed beyond the thick fog that limited my range of sight.

Above me, a glowing orb of red and black dominated the sky. It formed connections to everything within sight, slowly draining the living and empowering the dead. I could see this connection as forking channels, like black lightning frozen in time.

I was being drained as well, which just meant I needed to find something to kill. Re-kill? Hopefully, the Herald of War feat wouldn’t make a distinction between killing and re-killing. It was quite considerate of the budding death goddess to provide me with handy arrows pointing towards everything in my immediate area, alive or dead.

I leaped from the mound of bones, sliding down an incline while leaving a trail of crushed ivory behind me. There was no solid ground to land on, just a thin layer of remains to crush under my boot. I ran across this field of white, aiming in the direction a particularly dense group of the undead. I was unsure, as it was hard to tell the difference, but there seemed to be a small group of the living in the area as well.

As I ran forward, the large sphere only grew larger. I seemed to be aiming for a point directly below its center. The field of bones grew thicker, no longer could small glimpses of brown earth and blackened grass be seen between cracks and gaps.

The air was full of mist, gentling the deathly imagery though obscuration. To uncareful eyes, I might have been running through snow-capped hills. It even crunched under my feet, much like the snow I remembered from an almost forgotten Christmas my family had spent in Vermont.

Once I approached the area under the sphere, I noticed a change. The bones were vibrating and slowly sliding across the ground, and a deep rumbling could be heard within each mound. Some of the piles seemed to be growing upwards as if fed from some underground source.

“That’s it,” I yelled. “There is no way I need to be here.”

I came to a stop, realizing for the first time that I was charging into a graveyard that was likely to be my own. My entire body shook. Even my eyes began to water, but I sighed and continued forward. I wouldn’t call it bravery, just a stubborn refusal to change course — I was Ahab chasing my whale. I was determined to find some meaning, save some corner of a world that had been changed irreparably.

These sound like likely reasons, but the truth was I was terrified and wanted to turn back. I cried and shouted at myself. I fought, but like an addict watching the needle slowly plunge into his vein I felt powerless to stop my relentless charge towards death.

My pace became slow and stuttered.