Isaac seized his shirt, knife raised, “Just like your whore mother!”

“STOP,” he swung around, elbow struck his father’s jaw.

Isaac stumbled, vines of rusted iron wavered in the air. His father slipped. Sound of his skull cracked was like a carrot broken into two. Teenage Kayden crawled back, eyes wide. His mouth worked though no scream came. Around the yard he looked. The young man dashed towards the house.

Kayden watched his younger self retreat inside. All he recalled was waking up in the hospital. The rest was gone, just like the memory of Andre, until he’d seen it again. He turned back to Isaac, who shambled back up onto his feet. Vines wavered in the air. Each step was a labor, blood and brains dripped from his skull. Bruised purple light arose behind him. Darkness devoured him, left a god shaped hole. The name Ghlaad whispered to his mind, curse and revelation.

Riotous light blazed, and he staggered away. Kayden fell back into the well. The darkness swallowed him.

“He comes!” a man declared, rapturous yet incoherent.

In the endless black he floated, as the infinite was torn open. Another reality rotted, stars died, and the sane order was defiled. The Gallows King approaches, Kayden’s mind insisted, though it was another’s voice like his, yet darker. Out of the ragged hole a silhouette came like a slash of night, head obscured strange features. Flesh beneath the midnight violet cloak writhed in a bedlam of dark mass. The molten skin was peeled from the festered heart of dead stars, once gods. His visage shifted, though always clothed in the raiment of monks. As a virgin saint, the mad deity descended. The world wavered, shimmered, and was cast adrift in the infinite corpses of celestial bodies.

Kayden was spread across the boundless expanse, but he receded back into the tomb of his body. He coughed, blood flecks flew. Under the vast, dead nothing, the first sense of peace eased knotted muscles. All the horrors of this Dream Land sent tremors through him. If he had needed to piss, he reckoned, he would’ve wet himself. Not real, the declaration was a prayer against the madness. Only morbid curiosity and terror kept him moving. They dissolved too. Here, finally, there were no indignities or cruelties. All was nothing, a part of the infinite, so to make each part insignificant. The tormented isle of his heart felt the calm sea of apathy.

A question in the silence lingered. Inside, where Andre’s brilliant but sad face had waited; it came as an insistent plea. This need he had, why did he feel it? To live was to suffer, Kayden thought, so was the plight of everyone upon the earth. Never had he quit, but never had he felt this peace. I have to get back to Jillian. He blinked. She needs me. If I don’t get her into rehab, no one will. I need to save her.

As he sat up, the tattered strands of peace fell away. Again, the world had shifted. The graves were in neat rows over the rolling land. Tombstones caught light from the furtive moon, which was half hidden in the storm. Bruised purple lightning crept through black clouds, thunder like wails of the mad. No rain fell, though the tumult above promised a downpour. Wind through the stones screamed, and flesh pebbled on his skin. Ancient rot set on the tongue. A low musk of mushrooms bled up from the earth. Past the storm above, the dead realities still watched.

“Heavenly Springs,” Kayden looked about the cemetery.

If Blackberry Bog was the battered, besieged heart of Lear County, the graveyard was its abandoned soul. It was massive, but the Blackburn family, cousins to the Van Lear, had it maintained. No one would dare ask why the Van Lear allowed anyone but themselves to handle such an important part of the town. Like all cemeteries, it was the cold memory of people. Name and date told little of their stories. All their tales were buried with them, tragedy or comedy. Everyone who died in the county, except anyone from Swannanoa atop the mountain, found their rest here.

This memory of the past, Empire of the Forgotten, surrounded Kayden. The storm had abated. No thunder echoed from the mountains or hillocks. A ground fog, thin and ethereal, drifted amongst the tombstones, chill icy. Silence filled the dark. He listened to the rattle in his chest with every exhalation. He wiped his mouth, taste of blood salty. About the hills he looked, surreal now banal.

Throughout the grounds, the Blackburn family had placed benches surrounded by trees. Kayden looked up at the moon, but the dead galaxies were gone. No cloud stalked the sky.

He stepped towards the bench, wiped cold sweat. Kayden froze, head tilted. On each of them was a poster, the kind children put on trees or powerlines. He studied them. The plain script was of a midnight purple like a violent bruise, though shimmered with the faint touch of light. Underneath pictures, it gave a brief summation. Christopher Peck had died in a car wreck, body disappeared, and Sheila Richardson had vanished, car still at the Black Priory. Brian Weber was also gone, but burned down his home. I don’t recall this, he thought with a frown.

A hand reached towards the paper, words brightened. Each seemed filled with a bruised purple light. A deep ache dug into his skull memories bled into the mind. Christopher shambled on a snowy road in the dead of night. Sheila was sealed inside black stones. In some strange desert, Brian bummed a cigarette from a dead soldier. Each memory rammed inside, real yet more than dull sensation of consciousness. They overlapped, mixed, or stitched together in a vile amalgamation. All memories were held together by a battered violet light that blazed, all inside of impossible angles and proportion. An alien shape, impossible geometry beyond the strictures of this Dream Land, hung inside. It crushed all thought, and Kayden felt the world ravage him.