Fire. An endless sea of fire was all I could see. I turned to look behind me without really knowing why and saw what I recognized as my home burning to the ground. There were bodies inside, nothing more than black skeletons. Before I could process what I was seeing, a loud cracking sound followed by a shockwave sent me tumbling to the ground putting me face to face with the burning corpses.

I stared into the lifeless eyes of what would have been a relative, watching as the fire danced around the skull and lit the inside of the empty eyes with a dark orange glow. It wasn’t hard to imagine that the heat I felt now was coming from a person instead of the raging inferno around me. The explosion that had knocked me prone had deafened me and as my hearing returned even my thoughts were drowned out by the crackling of the fire.

Something crashed through the burning house next to me. Startled, I quickly rose to my feet ready to run at a moments notice. The sound of screaming came from the direction the object had just come from but I ignored it in favor of seeing what had caused the damage.

I carefully moved closer to the wreckage and saw that it was a person with long pointed ears and horns that had made their final resting place here. I recognized the ears and horns not from a story but from familiarity of having them myself. The body’s skin color wasn’t discernible through the clothing and fire that had already managed to char their bloodied skin black. Looking down for the first time since I opened my eyes I finally saw my own body.

The skin I saw was a pale lavender color and I carefully studied it while flexing my hands. For some reason it felt so difficult to do; almost as if they were trying to move through an incredibly viscous yet invisible liquid.

Another crash near me drew me out of my introspection. A similar figure had landed nearby and I finally turned to look in the direction that both of the bodies had come from. Even with the hole in the burring buildings carving an easily walk able path to the next row of houses there was nothing but fire there. I stood and watched this all happen while not really knowing what to do with myself.

A breeze moved the fire and with it the thick black smoke that had choked out all light from the sky allowing me to finally see beyond this hell I had found myself in. I had expected stars. I knew they should be there, but only more inky blackness greeted me as the wind once again stirred the flames into a mad feeding frenzy.

Despite the heat of the flames, I found myself shivering from the winds. They were unnatural and felt as if they carried ill intent with them. It was with this feeling that I finally sensed that I wasn’t alone and looked to see that there was a column of smoke with two eyes glowing with the same color and fervor of the fires around us. For the most part, the smoke hid their features but the occasional stray ember would illuminate tiny patches of the smoke revealing a supernatural darkness that made up a vaguely humanoid shape inside.

The smoke moved in the manner of a waving hand dismissing me. The eye’s motion signaled that the figure had turned around and they left without looking back. This entire time the smoke from the fire had started to move as if alive and closed in on me, trapping me inside it. It moved its way to my face and, upon breathing some of it in, I began to cough.

Each cough started out lightly, but eventually the smoke thickened in my throat to the point that I began to gag. I fell onto my knees as the both the nausea and the lack of breath started to make my vision blur and blacken around the edges. Soon I was coughing hard enough to feel as if I was trying to force my lungs out of my body and with a final reaching cough that brought with it my stomachs contents I woke up and continued the action I had performed in my dreams.