Pain.
Blinding, searing pain — like fire threading through his nerves, harrowing agony spread through him.
Victor gasped, clawing at the ground. Except it wasn't marble anymore. It was coarse, jagged, filthy — the stench of blood and rust clawed its way into his nose.
He rolled onto his side, vision swimming. He pushed himself up, muscles trembling, his sharp suit shredded and stained.
Instinctively, Victor reached for his chest. The heart that had betrayed him... was beating again. Erratic, furious.
"I'm alive," he gasped.
The first thing Victor felt after the pain was cold — not the sterile chill of an office, but a bone-deep cold, ancient and clinging like rot.
His body lay sprawled on damp, cracked stone. A metallic stench thickened the air, sharp enough to sting his throat. When he opened his eyes, the sky above him was bruised purple, rippling with slow, sick veins of black cloud.
He tried to move. His limbs obeyed, but sluggish, foreign. Even breathing felt strenuous. His hands weren't the same — thinner, calloused, smeared with dirt and bloody cuts.
Only a sprawling ruin of broken pillars and shattered statues appeared before his eyes. It stood grand, yet brittle — like a memory straining under the weight of time, ready to fracture into dust. The ruin reeked of cruelty — not the loud kind, but quiet, patient, deliberate. The kind he knew all too well.
And whatever this place was — it had been built on suffering.
His eyes, though dim with exhaustion, glinted with curiosity — and a deep, gnawing sense of wrongness.
This was too abrupt.
Too sudden.
There were too many questions, too many unknowns clawing at the edges of his mind. But wondering felt futile.
The pain, the cold, the ruin — it was all real enough.
So he made up his mind.
Gritting his teeth, Victor dragged his battered body forward, one trembling limb at a time.
As he crawled forward, Victor's vision gradually sharpened — blurring into shapes, then colors, until the full scope of his surroundings struck him like a blow.
He was in a vast, crumbling hall.
"What the...?" he muttered under his breath.
Before him towered colossal statues — some decapitated, others crumbling, their faces lost to time. Black vines threaded with an eerie, otherworldly glow coiled along the cracked marble walls, devouring what remained of the hall's former glory.
At its center stood a row of thrones, or what was left of them — shattered relics of majesty, their splendor reduced to rubble.
Victor pushed himself forward, and with every step, nausea churned in his gut. The air reeked of old iron and something far worse. Rusted weapons littered the floor. Bloodstains — so aged they had become one with the stone — were etched into every surface.
And then he saw them.
Corpses.
Some impossibly massive, limbs sprawled in grotesque angles. Others... not human at all. Twisted, foreign things, as if carved from nightmares.
"No. This can't be real." The words echoed inside his skull.
He didn't know if it was paranoia or something real, but he felt it — something was watching him from the shadows of the broken archways. Whenever he turned, there was nothing.
Just silence.
And the overwhelming sense that he was completely, terribly alone in a world that had long since ended.
Suddenly a whisper brushed against the back of his mind, something faint, something ancient. It was as if the very stones beneath his feet were alive, breathing...
And then, from the corner of his eye, he saw it.
A movement. A shadow, too quick to catch, darting between the broken archways of the hall. For a moment, it seemed like just his imagination. Victor froze, his breath catching in his throat. He turned, slowly, his heart racing. There was nothing there. Just empty stone, and silence. This made him question his own senses, and the feeling of eeriness only increased, making his scalp numb.
After he calmed down a bit, he began to move forward again. This time, he stopped in front of one creature — a hulking figure, its skin stretched tight over bone, its face a twisted, faceless mass of scars and gore. A half-human, half-beast monstrosity, only half of the skeleton remained, a foul smell attacked his nostrils, making his stomach churn. But nevertheless, Victor knelt beside it, his eyes narrowing.
"What were you?" Victor whispered, his fingers grazing the creature's twisted form. He couldn't explain it, but it felt familiar, just as he was trying to lock into that inexplicable sensation. A sudden jolt of power surged within him, like a burst of flame, his eyes and veins turned pitch black as if he was possessed, and an overwhelming sense of greediness enveloped him. Seconds later, his entire body violently contracted from the massive volume of whatever he was consuming. With reluctance, he retracted his hand.
"I— hhh... I've never—" He clutched his chest, trembling. "Never felt anything like this... it's—"
Another gasp tore from his throat.
"It's not pain... it's hunger. Like... like something inside me is starving for it."
He raised his head slowly, voice trembling with awe and dread.
"It's calling me. Pulling me down. And I—" he exhaled, a crooked smile forming, "I don't want to fight it."
Without thinking, he pressed his palm against the creature's chest.
And then it happened.
A surge of corruption shot through his body, burning his insides as though fire had turned to ice. His vision blurred, a dark haze creeping across his sight. He felt his body shift, his form bending, twisting, expanding, then contracting. Pain flooded his senses, a searing agony that pushed him to the brink of consciousness.
And then... silence.
Victor gasped, the air rushing into his lungs like he hadn't breathed in years. He pulled his hand away from the creature, trembling, but something had changed. He felt it deep within — a dark power, coiling inside him, thrumming with life.
Victor stared at his hand, no longer trembling — then slowly curled it into a fist.
The bones cracked. The air warped faintly around it.
"After this..." he rasped, voice rough like splintered stone, "I feel like I could crush stone with my bare hands... rip a man in half like parchment."
His chest rose and fell with uneven breath. He looked down, smiling faintly — not with joy, but revelation.
"If I touched someone right now... I don't think there'd be anything left to bury."
Just as he was relishing in this unknown but terrible power, his vision twisted, the landscape that stretched out before him was wrong. The ground cracked and oozed with something dark and thick, as if the earth itself was bleeding. Above, the sky wasn't a sky at all — it burned, streaked with falling fire that drifted like dying embers through thick, ash-colored clouds. In the distance, jagged mountains loomed, rising like shattered monuments. Their peaks were twisted and broken, as if the gods themselves had fallen and left only bones behind.
Victor took a step forward, and the ground shifted beneath him. It wasn't solid — not really. It pulsed faintly under his boots, like it was alive, breathing. He felt something move just below the surface — not a creature, but a presence. Old. Watching.
And then he saw it.
Far ahead, barely visible through the heat and smoke, a figure stood among the ruins of a dead kingdom. Massive. Unfathomable in shape. Its outline flickered at the edge of understanding — too large, too still. It didn't move, but it didn't need to. Victor could feel its gaze even from here, heavy and ancient, as if it had always been there, waiting for him.
Then everything shattered.
The vision collapsed around him like glass under pressure. The world blinked out of existence, and Victor stumbled back, gasping. The air punched into his lungs like he hadn't breathed in minutes. He dropped to one knee, heart hammering, sweat cold on his skin.
"What…?" he muttered, pressing a hand to his head. His thoughts were scrambled, spinning. The world around him felt different — not visibly changed, but heavier somehow, as if reality had shifted when he wasn't looking.