Bleached sand, sprawling dunes, a starless sky and a pale, cold moon.

He knew this place, intimately—but he didn't know how he knew. He only knew the nightmares that followed. As they always did. Nightmares so real, so visceral, he felt their echoes even after waking. A phantom pain so great and so vivid, he was left impotently cramping and clenching against the agony.

He shelved future worries and surveyed the dead landscape, bracing himself against the inevitable. He didn't know how he knew, but he was absolutely sure they would come. Because they always did after all.

To prove him right the horizons darkened, from navy to a moon-less midnight. Light hid and even the moon, perpetually fixed to the firmament, dimmed in fright, and the nightmare began in earnest.

Something crested the dunes to his front, a hunched, wolf-like beast of oily flesh and a featureless snout. It eyed him from above, its eyes nothing but glaring, yellow needle-points, and barked an ominous laugh—and he knew it was a laugh, just distorted beyond humanness by its animalistic form.

That single tone heralded his end.

The horde approached.

Shifting shapes crawled and clawed over the seemingly endless dunes. Their sheer numbers turned the scrum of monsters into a carpet of destruction and unmistakeable ravin. White sand was kicked up in the wake of limbless wyrms, knuckle-dragging titans and hissing gigapedes, and turned into a veritable storm-front of bone-coloured clouds.

The ground quaked with their steps, trembling as if afraid, nay, haunted by terror. Constructs of quartz, huge, crystaline trees, were batted aside like plastic toys, the mountainous dunes were flattened into plains. And he was in the middle of the storm, always.

Hot was the pain that followed, as the first creature he always met, the spindly dog-thing, took a limb into its maw. Gingerly it set its too many teeth against his skin and took more and more of his leg deeper into its gullet. Its yellow eyes smirked balefully in the form of happy crescents when the limb was swallowed in its entirety and then it began working its jaw.

The jagged vices squeezed.

He couldn't speak, he couldn't move, he couldn't temporize nor plead for mercy. He could only watch and scream in silence.

Flesh burst from skin drawn too tight, bones cracked and spilled their marrow.

Claws and tongues reached from the press of bodies, their every move full of hunger and bidden by the stench of prey suffusing the air.

The pain was overwhelming. It was lightning that singed every nerve and fire that burned every inch of skin. His mind split and tore and an unfeeling darkness took him.

With the after-effects of the nightmare booting our Hero into the waking world, a question remains: What is his name? (It doesn't need to be japanese.) -Voting closed - 30 voters Votes Ershin Carver 9/17 Makoto Cifer 4/6 Asphodel Moore 4/5 1 Uemura Kai 1/1 Tite Kubo 1/1 Ishii Nobuo 0 Morimoto Doi 0 Eikoto Shig 0 Takashima Chiharu 0