Beneath the crooked shadow of a dying shrub, a man lay motionless. Armor clung to his body like a parasite, its steel plates mottled with rust and fused to the blackened rot of his flesh. The air was still. Even the wind seemed to avoid him.
His eyes opened. No breath, no heartbeat, yet somehow… he was awake. His gaze wandered without focus, as though trying to catch the faint threads of a dream that dissolved the moment he reached for them. Nothing came. No name. No memory. Only the bitter taste of emptiness.
He pushed himself upright. The world before him was a wasteland—sand the color of ash stretched to the horizon, dotted with skeletal trees whose bark had shriveled into parchment. Above it all loomed a vast, bleeding moon, so swollen and red it seemed to watch him.
Something inside him twisted.
The moon… why so red?
The words left his mouth before he knew he'd spoken them. The sound startled him—it was his voice, yet alien. Desperate for answers, he smacked his forehead again and again, as if pain could jar loose the missing fragments of his mind. Nothing. Only silence where memory should be.
He rose to his feet—or tried to. His left leg buckled, sending him crashing to the ground. A sharp jolt of wrongness crept through him, and he glanced down. His leg… the joint was twisted backward, grotesque and unnatural.
Grimacing, he seized the limb and wrenched it into place. Bone shifted with a wet crack, but no scream came; there was no pain, only the awareness of damage. He forced himself onward, limping through the grey sand.
The earth dropped away without warning. His foot slid over loose gravel, and he pitched forward into the void. The fall ended in a wet, brutal stop—iron spikes of a jagged grotto tore through his body.
The red moon stared down. The wind held its breath. The world went still once more.