I woke up standing.
Which, for the record, is a deeply unsettling way to regain consciousness. Your brain expects horizontal. It expects the soft embrace of a hospital bed, the beeping of monitors, maybe the gentle touch of a beautiful woman's hand on your forehead. What it does not expect is to suddenly exist upright in the middle of an infinite void with your feet ankle-deep in black water that stretched in every direction like a nightmare's swimming pool.
"What the actual hell."
My voice echoed. Not like a normal echo, bouncing off walls and fading. This one multiplied, fractured, came back at me from dozens of directions at once, each repetition slightly different. Slightly wrong.
I looked up.
The sky was broken.
