Staggering to his feet, a man bolts into a sprint he cannot remember starting. His face, a canvas of bloodied grime and fresh bruises, turned to the heavens in a silent plea the sky had long forgotten how to answer. It was an ever-present darkness, a void that haunted more than the horizon. The thick grey fog did not just chase him; it permeated him, a cold dampness that had seeped into his marrow over countless repetitions. His dark eyelashes, clumped with tears and the fine, golden sand that blew relentlessly into his face, blurred the world into a smear of despair.
The sand itself was a traitor. It stretched into an impossible distance, a golden ocean whose shore was forever hidden by the rolling grey. Each step was a negotiation, his boots sucking at the surface, the land hungry to pull him under. His heart was a caged bird, its wings beating a frantic, familiar rhythm against the iron bars of his ribs. Thump-thump-thump. It was a cadence he knew better than his own name.
'Not again.' The thought was a ghost, there and gone, a whisper from a part of his mind that hadn't yet been fully erased. 'This part… this is where the hope ends. Just before the fall.'
As if summoned by his resignation, a bellow shuddered through the fog. It was not a sound of hunger, but of function—a deep, resonant note that signaled the beginning of the end. His skin tightened, every hair on his body standing on end in a primal salute to his own demise.
With practiced, desperate haste, he untied his shoes, sacrificing them to the sand's grip. The feeling of the cool, shifting grains against his stockinged feet was a small, fleeting freedom. He sprinted, his body flowing into the Tread of the Flesh Takers not by choice, but by cellular memory. His heartbeats were kettledrums in his ears, his fast legs a matched tempo to their doomed song. Then, his right foot plunged into a hidden pocket of deeper sand. The world twisted. A white-hot pain, so familiar it was almost a comfort, lanced up his leg as his ankle dislocated with a sickening pop.
This was the script. He knew his lines.
Hope, a feeble flame, was extinguished. As he fell, his hand, scrabbling for purchase he knew didn't exist, hit something smooth and unyielding. Cold. He knew this shape. It was the only touchstone in this entire nightmare. He pulled it from the greedy sand. A silvery-white skull stared back from hollow sockets. The bone was flawless, unnaturally so, and at the back of its head was a perfect, ridgeless circle, as if drilled by a divine and indifferent craftsman.
A memory, sharp as a shard of glass, stabbed into his consciousness: Laughter. The scent of baking bread. A woman's face, her features soft and smiling, her name a sweet taste on his lips— The memory was ripped away, leaving a void more painful than the physical agony. It was the core of his torture—not the death, but the fleeting reminder of what he had lost, again and again.
He screamed. It was a sound that splintered the air, a scream too vast for a single body to contain. It tore at his throat from the inside, ripping tissue and splattering the golden sand with dots of fresh, vital red.
Then, they appeared. Four elongated shadows resolving from the grey. Always four. Their movements were a loping, unnatural syncopation. Pale yellow eyes fixed on him, devoid of malice, full of a hollow, mechanical hunger. Hooked, finger-like bones clacked in place of teeth.
As the first creature lunged, its cold, bony digits closing around his windpipe, his gaze was drawn beyond them. There, on a low dune, the man with long, flowing white hair lay on the sand, naked and serene. His finger traced a single, perfect circle in the sand. A zero.
Their eyes met. In that endless, pale gaze, the running man found no malice, no pity. Only a profound, eternal boredom. He was not a person being killed. He was a function being performed. A note in a song that had been playing for eternity.
The world went dark, consumed not by pain, but by the utter certainty of his own insignificance. The tearing was just a final, physical period at the end of a sentence that had already been written.
…
A gasp of air, raw and desperate, filled new lungs.
Staggering to his feet, a man bolts into a sprint he cannot remember starting.. His face, bloodied and bruised, turned to the heavens in a silent plea the sky had long forgotten how to answer. It was an ever-present darkness, a void that haunted more than the horizon. The thick grey fog did not just chase him; it permeated him, a cold dampness that had seeped into his marrow over countless repetitions. His dark eyelashes, clumped with tears and the fine, golden sand that blew relentlessly into his face, blurred the world into a smear of despair.