I was woken up by the sound of a man screaming out in pain.

I was pretty used to the sound of screaming by now. But still, it woke me up every now and then, whenever the one suffering was screaming out in an especially anguished cry for help.

… like they were doing now.

The scream echoed out through the dark building once again, and a chill ran up my spine. Then, it all fell silent.

I sat up, and rubbed my forehead. I was really tired, and I didn’t want to be awake right then. Honestly, I didn’t want to be dealing with any of this, period. But especially not in the middle of the night, when I needed to rest and to restore myself for the trials of the day ahead.

My name is William, and I’m twenty-one years old. Three years ago, I was arrested for murder. I was innocent of the charge, of course. But in the end, my innocence hadn’t mattered at all.

I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that had been more than enough reason for the state to arrest me, and to bring me to trial.

I hadn’t been able to afford a lawyer to defend myself. I had been an orphan for as long as I could remember, and I had just about no money to my name. My parents had died when I was about two years old. But I didn’t really have any recollection of them. All that I knew were the foster homes that I had been placed into, where I was barely even treated as a person.

Back then, the only thing that kept me sane was the small handful of friends that I had made along the way, who looked out for me, and helped to protect me. But I just kept moving from place to place, and eventually, I had left all of the friends that I had made behind.

At the age of fifteen, I was placed into an especially bad household – so bad that I didn’t even feel safe coming home anymore. So, after thinking about it for a while, I finally decided to just take my life into my own hands, and to run away.

Then, I just took to the streets, and tried to survive.

I rummaged through garbage cans. I stole from stores. Eventually, I started breaking into cars, and then into houses. At the time, I didn’t know what else to do. I was too young to get a real job, and I thought that getting mixed up with adults again was just going to get me back into trouble. I couldn’t beg for money, because a kid my age would just get brought into the police for questioning, and that would get me wrapped up in the system all over again.

So I did what I thought was best. I stole to provide myself with food, slept out in a little tent just on the edge of town, and tried to keep out of the view of the police.

For a while, it kind of worked. I got good at breaking into places, and I thought that I might really be able to get by that way, at least for a while.

Then, one day, I broke into the wrong house. I smashed in a back window, and snuck in through the broken pane. I took a few steps forward, and then I felt something wet.

Something wet, and thick.

I looked down, and saw blood, everywhere. Blood that was flowing out of the body of a young man, who’d been ripped to pieces by some sort of knife or blade.

I froze, looked around, then tried to flee. But it hadn’t worked. The police were already at the house, and once they heard me run, they chased after me, and tackled me to the ground.

I tried to explain to them that it was all just a terrible mistake.

But of course, they didn’t believe me. Why would they? To them, I was just some street punk who’d been standing in the pool of a freshly murdered man’s blood. Pretty open and shut case, I guess, and the jury must have agreed. Because they didn’t even take a day to deliberate before coming back out and declaring that I was guilty.

And now, I was here.

In a jail cell, for the rest of my life.

I sighed, and kicked against the walls of my cell. I could still hear that awful cry of someone screaming, that I had heard just a few moments before. Maybe it was one of the prisoners who was going crazy. Or maybe it was someone getting hurt badly, and crying out for help. In any event, it had such a miserable sound to it, and just hearing it made me feel sick to my stomach.

But really, I felt so disgusted with all of this right now. I hated the guards here, hated this prison, hated the sounds and the smells and the sights that I had to deal with day after day after day after day. I hated this place, and I hated the world that had made it.

I closed my eyes, and just tried to block it out.

But I couldn’t, of course. And the more that I heard that awful screaming, the more hatred that I felt for everything, and for everyone. In that moment, I really felt as if every single being on Earth was rotten and disgusting, and as if I would rather be dead than to live a single day longer in this miserable place.

And then...

From the corner of my cell, there was a strange, blue light. It was faint at first, so faint that I couldn’t even be sure of what I was seeing. But it grew stronger, and stronger, and stronger, until it was about as bright as a dim lamp.

While the light had been growing stronger, it had also been growing bigger. At first, it had been little more than a dot. But now it was a large, almost perfectly spherical orb, about the size of a basketball.

A basketball-sized orb of bright, blue light.

And it was getting larger, and brighter, by the second.

I was pretty confused by what I was seeing, so I took a few steps towards it. As I got closer, I could just make out a faint humming sound. It sounded like the noise that a power generator makes, or like the faint whirring of a computer fan that’s running at medium capacity. But just as the light was growing bigger and brighter, so was the noise getting louder and louder

Then, I saw something that just about took my breath away. There in the very center of the ball of light, I could just barely make out the image of a forest. It was quite small, but it was so clear and distinct that it was unmistakable.

I should probably have felt scared. But something about the whole thing was so beautiful that I didn’t feel scared at all. I was just so captivated by the light, and by the image that was flickering and dancing at its center, that I couldn’t be scared right then.

That forest seemed so inviting, and so serene. I used to love playing out in the woods when I was a kid, and those sweet and joyful memories were all coming flooding back to me right now. In deep contentment, I just let my half-awake eyes rest on the image, taking in the sight, and not trying to figure out what was actually going on.

Then, from a place that seemed both infinitely far away and infinitely close at hand, I heard a quiet, almost feminine voice whispering inside of my mind.

“Would you like to go,” it asked.

Instinctively, I nodded.

“Alright, then,” it said. “I will take you there.”

“My name is Kalia, William. Welcome to your new home...”

What happened next all took place in an instant.

The blue light swelled up to three or four times its previous size, and grew so bright that I could barely even see. The once quiet humming of the light was now like a train roaring past the outside of the prison, so loud that it must have woken up every single person in the building. I tried to reach my hands up, but I didn’t know whether to try to protect my eyes from the blazing light, or to protect my ears from the booming sound…

But before I could do either, all of that was gone.

And I was standing right in the heart of an enormous, dark forest.

Exactly the same forest that I had seen just a moment before.

I blinked my eyes.

Stood in place.

And then…

… I tried to figure out what had just happened.