The world had been quiet enough that Lucian could almost pretend the weight inside his chest belonged to someone else.
But the stillness did not follow him into the next moment.
It shattered.
Then, in the blink of an eye — so fast he wasn't sure he hadn't imagined it — everything began to die.
The shift was immediate, violent, and almost personal.
A breath ago, light had clung to every blade of grass; now the ground began to crumble into dust. The petals withered, their colors draining away like they were bleeding out. Even the air seemed to pale, its warmth sucked into some unseen throat.
Even the great tree itself — the colossal vision that had haunted his dreams — darkened, its luminous bark fading into shadow.
It stood lifeless now, a hollow monument to something ancient and forgotten —
Lucian stared, eyes wide open, his breath catching in his throat. A chill ran down his spine — fear, awe, and something else he couldn't name twisting together in his chest.
The air felt heavy, thick like the world itself was holding its breath.
Even his own lungs resisted, dragging in cold, reluctant gasps that scraped like frost against the inside of his ribs.
He turned slowly, trying to make sense of his surroundings.
The field stretched endlessly in every direction, but it felt wrong — too still, too silent.
No wind.
No movement.
Nothing alive but him, and even that felt temporary.
A sound split the stillness.
A soft crack — too sharp to be a settling branch, too deliberate to be chance. Lucian's breath hitched. The hairs on his arms rose, prickling with cold warning.
He didn't turn immediately.
He forced himself still, listening.
The dead field around him felt — felt... aware.
The air pressed in on his skin like it wanted to keep him from moving. The dying tree behind him groaned, faintly, its bark shifting as if reacting to something unseen. Even the dust at his feet seemed to hum with tension.
Something is here.
Something that wasn't before.
Another crack — closer, heavier.
Lucian's pulse hammered at his ribs. Only then, with a dread that pooled cold behind his ribs, did he slowly turn his head —
— and see it emerging.
Emerging from behind the dying tree was a creature that should not exist — a serpent, or something wearing the shape of one in the same way nightmares wear the shape of a memory. It revealed itself in a slow, immense unfolding, a being shaped from darkness rather than matter.
Its body was so wrong.
Dark flame coiled around its form like living smoke, each ember a tiny void rather than light. Through this drifting shroud, Lucian glimpsed no scales, no hide, only a depthless black that seemed older than the forest itself, as if night had been given a body.
The creature looked stitched together from shadows of different beings, jagged seams twisting around its nearly twenty-foot length like crude, uneven sutures.
Some portions twitched independently, as though they still remembered being part of something else — a distorted limb here, the faint suggestion of a jawline there, all swallowed up into the serpent's form and forced into obedience.
Every time it moved, the stitches pulled taut, stretching as if the darkness beneath them was swelling and shifting. Thin strands of shadowy sinew snapped and reformed, knitting themselves back together in sickening pulses.
Nothing about it flowed naturally — it slithered in sharp disjointed motions, a creature imitating life through pieces of stolen shapes.
And the sound —
God.
The sound.
It wasn't the slick whisper of scales or the heavy drag of a living serpent.
It was the grinding of bones moving underwater, muffled yet unmistakable, as if hundreds of skeletal fragments scraped against one another inside its hollow form.
Its tongue flicked out — long, thin, forked like a lash of darkness — tasting the air with an intelligence that felt ancient and predatory.
And when its melted-gold eyes locked onto Lucian, the seams along its body twitched, pulsed... almost like the entire creature smiled.
Lucian couldn't breathe. His body wouldn't move.
He whispered to himself with trembling voice.
"It's just a dream... it's just a dream..."
He repeated it like a prayer, a fragile mantra, almost like the words alone could hold the night at bay.
The creature glided closer, silent and relentless. Its dark body seemed to absorb the weak light around it—
sliding across the rotting earth like smoke curling through a tomb.
Deep down, he knew.
This was no dream.
Panic clawed at his throat, hot and merciless. His legs trembled, but they wouldn't move. Run. Run!
His mind screamed, but his body betrayed him.
Then another voice — cold, patient, familiar — slithered into his thoughts.
"Why. Hadn't you already chosen the end?"
His breath fractured in his chest. A shudder tore through him — not just fear, but something older, something he had buried so deep he no longer recognized it.
I wanted quiet.
I wanted the world to stop pressing its hands around my throat.
I wanted a life where I wasn't a monster in someone else's story.
The truth hit him with sudden, brutal clarity.
He didn't want to die.
He just didn't want to live like this.
The realization unshackled something instinctive, something primal.
His legs moved before thought could catch them.
He ran. His legs finally obeyed, stumbling means spilled down his cheeks. He ran, stumbling, clumsy and terrified, the ground dissolving beneath him as he cried out into motion, clumsy & desperate as his legs launched into motion. voice cracking in the still air.
"I just wanted to breathe... to exist without being feared... to not wake up every day wondering what part of me people will hate next."
His voice cracked, ripped open by years of silence.
"Was that really too much to ask?"
But the serpent's gaze followed him, unblinking, patient and hungry.
And somewhere deep within the stillness, the air itself seemed to listen.
The serpent's presence was a palpable, patient—
Lucian's world had narrowed to the searing, absolute agony in his legs. It wasn't pain, it was a tireless, molecular demolition.
The acid had fused with him, a liquid fire that did not cool or cease. It was eating through the ruined fibers of his trousers, through the outermost shield of his skin, finding the tender, wet layers beneath.
A vicious, oil-slick sizzle was the only sound, competing with the blood-roar in his own ears.
Every nerve ending in his lower body was screaming, making his vision flash white and his gut heave with a sick, blinding surge.
He tried to run — a primal, desperate instinct — but the muscles in his thighs were already dissolving, gone gelatinous.
His legs didn't just fail, they simply ceased to exist as instruments of flight.
He collapsed, the impact sending a fresh spike of pain through him as he dragged himself forward. began to drag himself forward.
His hands became now scoops, nails tearing at the dead, unforgiving earth in useless resistance. Tears, too hot and clean, mixed with the frozen condensation on the ground, futile moisture against the inferno consuming him.
Then the acid, impatient, crested another internal barrier.
A wave of focused, relentless heat struck his hands. They blistered instantly, the delicate, intricate, intricate flesh giving way with a soft smoke and the smell of cooking meat.
The acid didn't just burn, it consumed the bone's protection.
Lucian didn't just collapse.
He sprawled, a limp, trembling mass, his hands now useless, sizzling wrecks.
Can't crawl. Can't move. Can't even will the pain to stop.
The serpent's shadow bloomed over him, thick, absolute, and colder than the grave. He had no time for a thought, only the animal terror of the final strike. The tail, a blur of black-and-gold, moved with the concussive force of a thrown boulder. It didn't strike; it erupted against his ribs.
Lucian didn't fly — he was flung, a broken rag doll. His back slammed into the base of the gnarled, dying tree—a jarring, ultimate impact that drove the air from his lungs in a single, desperate whoosh. He tasted coppery, warm blood that surged into his mouth—a mouthful of it, thick and slick. Warm liquid, too thick to be rain, trickled past his eye and down his cheek. Something inside him had ruptured.
The world was a violent, blurring kaleidoscope of red and black. It didn't just tilt; it was shattered.
The serpent watched. Not with malice, but with a horrifying, biological indifference. Its massive eyes were dark, polished glass, unblinking, without sympathy, without judgment.
Lucian tried to speak, the sound barely escaping his ruined throat, a cracked, wet whisper: "
Why me...? Why me?"
His tears, hot and useless, soaked into the dead, unfeeling soil.
The serpent gave no answer, no nod of recognition. It simply stared, as if the answer was less a reason and more a law of physics—older than him, older than the world, older than memory.
Then came the second, deliberate strike. A ripple, a pulse in the serpent's black throat, and a thick, yellowish stream of acid lanced across Lucian's exposed stomach.
He didn't scream; he howled. It was a sound stripped of all humanity—a raw, brutal, tearing sound that clawed its way out of his diaphragm. His body bowed into an impossible, agonizing arc. The smoke rising from his burning skin was thick now, and his cries, once loud, dissolved instantly into the desolate, dead air, absorbed by the vast indifference of the landscape.
The serpent watched, its head tilted, a subtle curve at the edge of its jaws that looked sickeningly like an idle smile. It was playing, stretching this moment of finality into an eternity of exquisite torment.
Another, final surge of acid hit his face, splashing across his eye and searing his cheekbone. The pain fractured his scream into sharp, rattling gasps. His body gave one last, uncontrollable spasm—a final, useless twitch of life—and then stilled, the nerves fried, the pain-centers obliterated.
The serpent didn't hesitate. it began to coil, not to kill, but to possess. The vast, cold bands of muscle began to tighten around the ruin of Lucian, beginning the slow, final, crushing hug of consumption.
And just before darkness swallowed him whole—
Something else moved in the field.
A second presence.
A ripple of pressure.
A wrongness that did not belong to serpent or dream.
And the serpent froze.
Its coils halted mid-crush, its golden eyes narrowing, its head snapping toward the unseen intruder with sudden, violent tension.
Lucian's ruined heartbeat gave a single, stuttering kick.
Something was coming.
Something that terrified even this monster.
And then the world—his world—went black.