The sand was black and warm and wrong.
Kael opened his eyes to the taste of metal and smoke. His lungs shuddered like rusted fans, dragging air that didn't belong in a human body. The sky above him was cracked open like a butchered fruit—bleeding slow, pulsing light through something that was almost a sun.
He didn't remember falling. Or landing. Or burning.
He remembered screaming, maybe.
He moved—barely. His arms stung with a dozen tiny cuts, each one laced with gritty dust that hissed on contact. There were bones embedded in the sand around him. Not fossils—fresh. Some were human. Others weren't.
Kael tried to speak, but his mouth was full of dry blood. Something in his throat was swelling fast. He choked, rolled onto his side, and vomited half-digested bile into the sand. It steamed.
His fingers dug blindly into the dirt. He needed something—water, a direction, a clue. But all he found was a jagged splinter of what looked like metal, or maybe a cracked talon. He kept it.
He dragged himself up the side of the crater.
Every movement hurt like a betrayal.
The crater edge cut across a horizon of nightmares—charred dunes, ruins skewered on floating spears of rock, a dying wind that sounded like it whispered names. His knees buckled, and he collapsed just shy of the rim.
That's when he saw it.
Far above, where the sky should end, a rip spiraled open. The light inside it blinked.
It blinked again—slow, deliberate, like a thing pretending to be a star.
Kael forced himself upright, ribs groaning like old floorboards. His breath came in gasps, thin and sour. The sky scar twisted slowly above him, a spiral of black static rimmed in sickly light. Inside, there were… stars?
No, not stars.
Some blinked wrong. Others moved.
They shifted like insects on glass, crawling across a surface that should've been infinite. The scar pulsed once more, and a long thread of ash began to pour from it, drifting down like slow snowfall—only thicker, heavier. It tasted like iron and fire and things that should be buried.
Kael's knees wobbled again. He sat, clutching the sharp bone-splinter like a dagger.
"What the hell is this…" His voice croaked dry in the open air.
No answer.
Instead, a low hum thrummed through his chest—not through the ground, not through the wind—but directly inside him, like a plucked nerve.
Then: voices. A dozen of them, maybe a hundred, whispering in layered echoes. They didn't speak words. They implied them. Like meaning transmitted through pain.
Kael clutched his temples.
UNBOUND.
ILLEGIBLE CORE DETECTED.
SEQUENCE DISORDERED.
PROTOCOL: OBSERVATION.
He screamed—reflexive, animal, defiant.
The voices stopped. The hum didn't.
And far above, the spiral uncoiled wider.
Kael dropped to one knee, choking on the sour ash still drifting down.
Then he felt it—a sharp heat blooming across his chest, not from the sky, but inside his body. Right below his collarbone, left of center, something pulsed.
He pulled at the tattered remains of his shirt—mostly melted into him now—and saw it.
A mark. No, a burn. Or maybe both.
The flesh around it had warped into the shape of a spiraling glyph, the same spiral as the sky, seared into his skin like a molten brand. It was glowing—dimly, at first—pulsing in time with his heart.
The hum in his skull got louder.
Kael touched the mark. A mistake.
The world shattered.
For one impossible second, he saw everything: lines of code flowing across an endless canyon of mirrors, numbers that didn't belong in nature, equations looping into themselves like snakes eating their own tails. He saw HUD windows blinking, overlapping, crashing.
SYSTEM ERROR. CORE CORRUPTED. FORMAT ABANDONED.
And then a voice. This time singular. Closer.
"Who… remains?"
Kael reeled back, eyes wide, lungs forgetting how to breathe.
He collapsed backward, sand scalding his spine.
The mark on his chest had faded to a dull ember, no longer glowing—but it throbbed with every heartbeat.
And somewhere in that fading moment, Kael knew one thing:
This wasn't a dream.
And that spiral hadn't stopped growing.
Kael lay motionless for a while.
The wind had changed. Softer, now. Less cruel. But it carried with it the first real sound he'd heard since waking—no whispers, no code.
Just… shrieks.
Distant. Layered. High-pitched, like a bird dragged through rusted wire.
Kael sat up fast, adrenaline spiking so hard he tasted copper.
Still no map. Still no HUD. No glowing blue overlay. No convenient narrator explaining how to level up or where the next safe zone was. Not even a minimap or compass.
Just heat. Hunger. A brand on his chest and something watching from above.
He glanced toward the spiraling sky again. It hadn't stopped widening. The ash was thinning, but it hadn't stopped, either.
"Okay," he muttered, voice shaking. "No tutorial. No status screen. No exit."
Kael looked down at his hand.
The bone splinter he'd taken earlier was long, jagged, possibly a talon or a tooth. He gripped it tighter.
Then snapped off a length of torn shirt and wrapped it around the handle.
He tested the edge. It was sharp enough to bleed.
It would do.
Something howled again—closer now. Not birdlike this time. Throaty. Four-lunged, maybe. Hungry.
Kael rose slowly, one knee at a time, and backed down the slope of the crater. The dunes beyond swirled like the surface of a dead sea.
Behind him, his footprints were already vanishing.
There was no welcome.
There was no help.
There was only forward.