Part One: The Vision
The first thing I noticed was the smell which was very suffocating, like burnt flesh mixed with blood. My eyes snapped open, but before I could even register where I was, the world tilted sideways.
I was somewhere else where I shouldn't have been in the first place.
The ground beneath me wasn't solid. It was movingrivers of lava flowing in slow, deliberate patterns like blood through veins. The sky above wasn't sky at all. It was something that looked like exposed muscle, raw and wet, pulsing with a sickly red-orange light that made my eyes water just looking at it. Every breath I took felt like inhaling poison, and my lungs burned as if someone had filled them with ash.
That's when I felt it.
The presence.
It wasn't just a feeling. It was like the air itself had weight and was pressing down on every cell in my body. My legs gave out before I even saw him. I collapsed to my knees, then further, my palms scraping against scalding stone as the pressure crushed me down until my forehead touched the ground. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. It felt like my bones were bending the wrong way just from the sheer force of his existence.
Then I saw him
His body was similar to human but twisted muscles that didn't belong in any biological framework, skin that looked like it had been burned and reformed a thousand times over. But it was his hands that made my stomach turn inside out.
He was holding a woman's head.
Not just holding it but playing with it. Her face was frozen in an expression of absolute terror, eyes still wide open, mouth still twisted in a scream that would never finish. The light from her eyes had long faded, but somehow that made it worse. Those empty eyes stared right at me.
I knew that face.
Amanda.
Behind him, stacked like some kind of trophies, were bodies. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe. They were piled so high they disappeared into the red haze above. Some were fresh, still dripping. Others were so decomposed they looked like wax figures left in the sun. But they were all his.
But it wasn't the sheer number that made my stomach twist itself into knots.
It was her.
In the very center of the stack, elevated above all the others like a monument to something sacred and profane at the same time, was Amanda. Kept like it was important to him.
And in the center of it all was a pool of blood.
It was so deep and dark it looked like black glass. The bodies were arranged around it in patterns deliberate. But the patterns all led back to Amanda . The heart of it all. Like an offering to something unspeakable
His face was the worst part. It was beautiful and monstrous at the same time a face that shouldn't exist, with features that seemed to shift when I wasn't looking directly at them. His eyes were solid black.
Then He began walking toward me.
Each step echoed like thunder. The lava rivers redirected themselves to avoid his feet. The very fabric of reality seemed to flinch away from him. And I could do nothing but kneel there, trembling, as he got closer and closer.
The pressure increased with every step. I felt blood running from my nose. My ears. My eyes. The world started to darken at the edges, and I realized with absolute horror that he was going to kill me just by existing near me. The pressure alone would tear me apart.
He stopped directly in front of me.
His shadow fell over me like a shroud and i understood that this is what death felt like. I couldn't lift my head. I couldn't look away from the ground. All I could hear was breathing.
When he spoke, his voice didn't come from his mouth. It came from everwhere as his voice echoed.
"So... you're the human that will try to threaten my existence."
The words had weight. They were physical things, pressing into my mind like hooks.
"How... pathetic."
He crouched down, and I felt his presence shift. Every instinct in my body screamed at me to run, to hide.
"I was hoping for something interesting." His voice shifted into something almost like amusement, and that was somehow more terrifying than anger. "But you're just... weak. A mere human And yet somehow ? "
He reached out and lifted my chin with one finger. I screamed. The touch itself felt like frostbite and fire at the same time.
" you carry his power inside you."
He pulled his finger away, and I gasped for air that felt like daggers that were pointed to my chest.
"Tell me, lowly human," he whispered, leaning closer. "Do you even know what you are?"
I tried to speak. Nothing came out but a choking sob.
He laughed, and then his expression shifted. The amusement faded, replaced by something almost like... reverence? His black eyes turned back toward the pile of bodies, toward Amanda's preserved form at the center.
"You see all of this?" His voice dropped to something almost intimate, which somehow made it a thousand times worse. "Everything you see here? All of this death? All of these broken bodies stacked upon one another?"
I couldn't move. I couldn't look away from his face, even though every fiber of my being wanted to.
"This is your future, little one. This is what awaits you."
The words landed like physical blows.
"Every. Single. One. Of. These." He gestured broadly at the mountain of corpses, his voice carrying a terrible certainty. "They are coming. This is destiny and the end state of all things you hold dear."
He leaned down again, his breath like cold wind from a crypt.
"But do you know what the most amusing part is?" he asked, and I heard genuine delight in his voice. "Do you know which corpse matters most?"
I couldn't answer.
He turned my head forcefully toward the center of the pile, forcing me to look directly at Amanda's preserved, perfect body. At how she was elevated above all the others. At how every other corpse seemed to orbit around her like planets around the sun.
"She is the masterpiece," he whispered, and there was something almost tender in his voice, which made it infinitely worse. "Out of all the millions of bodies that will fall before me, her death... her is the one I will treasure most. The others? They are merely the audience. The supporting cast. But she..."
He dragged a long, blackened nail down my cheek, leaving trails of burning cold.
"She is the reason I exist. She is the song that plays at the end of all things. When every other light has gone out, her light will be the last I extinguish. And I will savor it."
He released me, and I fell forward onto my hands, gasping.
"So understand this, little hollow one," he said, walking away. "When we meet again and we will meet you will not be fighting for victory. You will be fighting against the inevitable. And the beautiful, terrible thing is that you already know you will lose."
He snapped his fingers.
Before he disappeared into the haze, I caught one last glimpse of Amanda's head still in his hand. And for just a moment, just long enough to shatter something inside me
Her eyes moved.
They turned toward me, and I saw recognition there. Not just recognition. Blame.
I woke up gasping, my body so drenched in sweat that my sheets were soaked through. Morning light was streaming through my window. 6:47 AM.
My heart was hammering so hard I thought it would tear through my ribs. The edges of my vision were starting to blur, and I couldn't seem to get enough air no matter how many times I tried to breathe. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn't control them.
A blue window suddenly materialized in front of my face, and I had to squint to read it through my blurred vision.
[SYSTEM ALERT: User health is at critical risk. Elevated cortisol, adrenaline, and heart rate detected. Immediate stress mitigation recommended.]
I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars, trying to ground myself back in reality. The ceiling was still my ceiling. The walls were still my walls. The demon was gone.
But the memory of his touch lingered on my chin like frostbite.
I spent the next hour just breathing. In through my nose, out through my mouth. Slowly, my heartbeat came back down to something resembling normal. My hands stopped shaking. The nausea that had been creeping up my throat finally receded.
But I couldn't stop thinking about what I'd seen.
The bodies, blood.
And her .
God, Amanda.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her face. Not how she looked in the real worldbright, strong, confident. But like that, she was just Broken. A trophy to something that didn't even see her as worth remembering.
I pulled myself out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. When I looked in the mirror, I barely recognized myself. My eyes were bloodshot. There was dried blood on my upper lip and around my ears. I looked like I'd been through a war.
I cleaned up and sat on the edge of my bed for a long time, just staring at nothing.
That thing had been right about one thing. I was weak. Pathetic. I'd inherited something, some piece of power that didn't belong to me, and I didn't even know how to use it. And more importantly, I didn't know how to survive.
I thought about Amanda, the real Amanda, not the thing in the vision. How she'd always had my back. How she'd helped me when literally everyone else thought I was worthless.
I wasn't going to let that thing take her.
Not in my future. Not in any timeline that I had any say in.
I clenched my fists and made myself a promise right there, sitting alone in my room with dried blood on my face: I was going to get stronger. I was going to survive that encounter. And when that thing came for me and I knew, with absolute certainty, that I was going to be ready.