You awake to the silent screams of riven flesh. Pain swells from a wound at your side, and every muscle is alight with pain's relentless flame. All is calm around you; the sky black as soot, the landscape an endless field of rolling hills like the sea frozen in time.

Yet inside you, a tempest seethes; your body cries out in anguish, your vision is weak and brittle. The ground beneath you is soft, like sand beaten by the tides; it clings to your flesh, and flows along the trenches in your weathered armor.

What happened? The question burns at your weary mind, yet its answer eludes you like sand flowing between clenched fingers. You rise and look around through bleary eyes; the path stretches left and right as far as you can see, and is the only plausible passage through these dunes of ash.

[go left chapter 2]

[go right chapter 3]

You turn left, striding cautiously along the faint path. It curves between towering dunes, whose shadows devour you, bathing the world in obsidian darkness. You realize now, that the stars above are faint, weak, fading like ill tended flames; with each moment, they grow dimmer. Soon, the darkness will be your permanent companion.

Trying (without success) to take off these bleak thoughts, you continue on, ash crunching underfoot, its foul scent wriggling into your lungs like parasitic worms eager and yearning for a host. It is not long before you escape those ravenous shadows, feeling their presence slide away like tar. Ahead, the path arcs deeper into the desert, burrowing between the dark mounds and passing into the distance where even keen eyes cannot see.

[If you choose to turn back, go to chapter 1]

You continue onward, exhausted muscles crying out, brittle bones feeling like fractured twigs, ready to snap under the weakest of forces. Slowly, the darkness of relentless agony creeps over you, and with the staggering, mindless gait of a creature brought back from death’s grasp after far too long in those cold arms, you stumble on, no longer registering each step, no longer fully aware of your course.

Lost in your suffering, it is with surprise that you register a change, an end of this long path, whose coarse sands cling still to your bare feet. Bare? You look down, realizing that your armor is little more than a few scraps of steel clinging against your body with admirable tenacity; their leather straps worn and feeble. Beneath, your skin is grey and pale, your heartbeat faint, labored, but in spite of your exertion, flawlessly steady. It is as though your flesh is but a thin covering over an automaton’s iron body.

When you raise your tired eyes, the sight that greets you is no more comforting than the tempest of woe that lurks in the ravaged mind behind them: a cave’s sleek blackness gleams in the hillside ahead like a visceral wound weeping pus and gore. You can feel malice emanating from it, but a familiarity to. A sense that once, long ago, you were here. It feels right, in a blighted sort of way.

[Enter the cave= chapter 4]

You turn right, the ash crunching noisily underfoot, its bitter scent squirming into your nostrils, clawing its way into your lungs. It burns like acid, but its pain is somehow comforting, a familiar sensation in this blighted, alien realm. As you plod onward, your gaze wanders from the horizon, to your own shambling feet, which you realize only now are bare, their skin pale and gaunt, grey as the soot on which you stride. When you reach down and attempt to brush the silken ash away, you realize that it is in fact, the true color of your flesh; your veins black tendrils curling beneath, a faint pulse rushing through them, pressing gently against your withered fingertips.

Disturbed, you straighten, and continue on your way, muscles blazing with pain, heart never hastening nor slowing, its steady rhythm a distant thunder in your breast. The path ahead leads to a shallow grave, from which faint footprints lead farther into this desert of ash, yet quickly fade away, erased by the gentle winds that rouse small dervishes from the earth; languid sprits that whirl slowly across the rough ground, before vanishing entirely.