Rhys stirred, head lolling weakly to the side. His mouth tasted like ash and metal, and every breath felt like it was being filtered through gravel. There was noise—muted crunching, the telltale footfalls of Goro's heavy frame—but even that seemed far away.
He cracked one eye open. The world swam in and out of focus. He was still being carried. Wait…they're slowing down.
"Why'd we stop?" he rasped. His voice sounded foreign to his own ears, thin and fraying at the edges.
No one answered.
He blinked sluggishly, trying to orient himself. His eyes caught something ahead… and then refused to make sense of it.
The world ended.
Or at least, it looked that way. One second there was a rocky slope and brittle trees, and the next… nothing. Just white. A wall of it. Endless and roiling, like someone had taken an eraser to the horizon and kept scrubbing. Everything just stopped. Like the world had hit pause. On one side, the mountain breathed. On the other side, it didn't.
Rhys squinted. Frost lined the edge of stones and shrubs but didn't cross the line. It was like watching two different climates try to ignore each other out of spite.
He took it all in with half-lidded eyes, processing the absurdity in slow motion.
"Oh, come on…" he groaned.
His voice sounded like it was coming from underwater.
And then the weight of everything—pain, fever, cold, fire—swept over him like a wave. The edges of the world frayed. Darkness flickered at the corners of his vision. His limbs grew heavy, too heavy to lift.
Then the sound dropped out entirely.
And Rhys fell, not backward, just… inward.
***
It didn't feel like sleep. Not really. But he wasn't exactly awake, either.
It was like being stuck between channels on an old TV, all static and shadow-puppets of real events flickering around him.
"I'm dead, aren't I?"
He floated somewhere far away from his body, like a camera with no tripod. No weight. Just presence. He saw the world from a high, skewed angle—detached but tethered. Like he was a balloon tied to his own unconscious corpse.
Then it shifted.
The void flickered. The 'camera' moved.
Rhys saw the moment they'd hidden behind the ridge on the mountain. He saw the Marauders.
The big ones. The ugly ones.
They slithered and stomped and twitched their way into view, black magic seeping from their seams.
"I probably should have thought twice about setting those things free."
He thought about the train again. And shuddered. That's one of those memories he had to lock deep down in his mind.
"Ughh."
Goro and Silas began to move away from the ridge, finding a way to escape the deadly creatures. Rhys watched as his lifeless body was carried around like a princess. A 'damsel in distress', if you will.
"Okay. Definitely not dead," he muttered, or thought, or imagined thinking…whatever it was. It was weird.
"Pretty sure being dead doesn't come with this much second-hand embarrassment."
Below, Goro was carrying him through the blizzard, trudging like a half-frozen ox. Rhys could feel the cold leaking into his bones even here. Wherever here was.
"We should begin searching for the boy…I mean, Master Rhys."
Rhys blinked in the void.
"Boy? I'm twenty-two!"
He winced as Goro got hit—hard—and then watched him lift Rhys again and keep going.
Then came the moment.
That moment. Goro looked at Silas. At the horde. At him.
Then, with a sound halfway between a war cry and a dying oath, the big man hurled him through the threshold like a javelin.
Rhys spun through the air in slow motion. Limbs limp. Eyes closed. Mark burning across like a brand.
From his ghost-self's view, it looked almost majestic.
"…Did he just yeet me into the snowy death dimension? What is he thinking? I'm gonna die…even more than I already am."
While Silas and Goro were struggling for survival, he followed his body as it disappeared in the snow.
Rhys could not believe what he saw when he landed.
His body ignited. The blizzard parted. And he lay there like some magical corpse-shaped campfire while his soul floated somewhere in cosmic time-out.
A smile tugged at his lips, eyes sparkling with wonder.
Just then, Goro's voice cut through the void:
"I still need a little more convincing from the young man."
Rhys froze. His expression in the void turned sour.
"…Are you kidding me?"
But after a bit of thought, Rhys calmed down.
'Would I trust me?'
He did not like the answer to that. But Rhys still knew that he needed both Silas and Goro to survive this place.
He sighed, arms crossed in the weightless dark.
"Great. My life's an audition now."
He drifted closer, watching Goro limp through the snow like a dying warhorse, all dignity and frostbite. Silas followed beside him, muttering something about the Montclairs and ancestral foresight.
"I guess this world, or part of it, is known as Gehenna."
Questions swirled in Rhys's mind. He still wasn't sure if Silas and Goro were real. Were they a construct of the Abyss? But they felt…real to him. If they are real, why did his trial send him to another world? From his limited knowledge, the trials were more like pocket dimensions, ruptured spaces that didn't really exist but forced very specific torture to its victims; 'The Damned.'
If they survive, they are bestowed authority over an Aspect, escape back and become Revenants.
Pulling him away from his thoughts, the void cracked.
Not loudly, or all at once. Just a thin fracture of light along the black, like a hairline fissure in glass. Rhys turned; or maybe the space turned for him; and the flat, nothing of the in-between place gave way.
He stood on something solid now. Something smooth and dark and unmarked by time. The ground below was like obsidian, but breathing, each step he took sent faint ripples outward in muted pulses of light.
Ahead, the world was split.
On one side: silence.
A vast emptiness that seemed to drink in sound, light, even thought. A place without edges. Without gravity. Without presence. The air didn't move. There was no wind, no warmth, just an eerie stillness that pressed against him like a glass wall. Shapes loomed at the edge of vision—tall, sharp, and angular—but no matter how long he stared, they never resolved. As if the place itself refused to be witnessed.
It wasn't really darkness.
The other side was the opposite.
An inferno of hues he couldn't name, streaked with purples and bruised blues and brilliant flashes of crimson gold. Flame moved in slow spirals, licking the air in defiance of gravity, yet it gave off no smoke. It didn't destroy. It…sang?
Within the fire danced fractal patterns that seemed to echo his heartbeat, fast and wild. The rhythm was alive.
He took a step back instinctively, not from fear but from the pressure. The two halves of the space—the hollow and the blaze—didn't blend. They clashed, pulsing against each other like rival storms frozen in their moment of collision. Where they touched, the air screamed silently, the floor beneath warping in chaotic tremors.
And Rhys stood at the fault line. A single point between stillness and hunger. The cold vacuum and the consuming fire. He didn't understand any of it.
So he said the only thing that came naturally.
"…Holy shit."
The fire flared suddenly, brighter. The silence recoiled. Or maybe the other way around. Rhys staggered, catching his balance on nothing but instinct. His mark pulsed again—faint, but in sync with something around him.
Something was trying to pull him in both directions. The space where both sides pushed against each other, vying to claim him. Rhys felt stretched, like a thread pulled tight between two storm fronts.
Then something else shifted.
Behind him, unnoticed until now, doors emerged from the dark. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. All shapes and sizes. Some rusted and industrial, some carved with symbols he didn't recognize. One looked like the door to the orphanage rec room.
One was pulsing gently.
It felt like it shouldn't have been there, but it was.
From behind it, a voice—faint, like a memory trapped in glass.
"Make sure to come back alive."
His heart clenched.
That voice.
"Lenny, that psychopath."
He stepped toward the door. The thought unsettled him more than the fire or the void.
As he moved, the obsidian floor beneath his feet shifted, not resisting him, but changing with him. Like he was giving it shape.
He stopped.
That wasn't normal. Well, nothing since the train incident was.
And then, all at once, the fire surged.
The void screamed.
And Rhys felt himself being yanked back to the waking world. He didn't know if he moved… or if the world just decided to move him.
Pulling him towards the door.