Atreus froze.
He couldn't breathe.
Couldn't move.
The world around him immediately turned silent in a way that felt uneven, as though sound itself was stripped from existence and replaced with nothing but unease. An empty, foreboding air settled in the environment that spoke more words about the events to follow than a seasoned writer could with a thesaurus.
There was no wind.
No distant snap or crackle of branches and twigs.
No echo breathed from the frosty, howling caves behind him.
Even his own breath felt silent, trapped somewhere between his chest and partially parted lips.
He was frozen in the literal sense of the word.
Muscles tensed and heart pounding louder than the world around him—a world that had forgotten how to exist.
It was then that the world lost its colour.
The sky darkened not into dusk, but into something duller—a deep, unnerving shade of grey layered upon grey, suffocating, heavy. It settled over the land like a firm hand upon the chest of a patient in need of resuscitation.
The air was humid and heavy. Visibility was at a minimum. The mountains around him blurred at the edges as though reality itself had lost its curves and edges, smoothed out and impossible to make with the naked eye.
And then, all at once, the noise came.
A distant thunder of hooves—countless, terrified, stampeding beasts tearing through forests and plains alike as they displaced everything that crossed their path.
The ground broke open, trembling beneath his feet as ancient rock and tree came undone, splitting the ground as hell's gates opened to consume the world.
Wailing followed.
An orchestra of the damned.
High, hollow, shrieking cries that did not belong to any throat of the living.
Voices were layered atop one another like jenga.
Agony, pain, confusion, regret.
Their cries drifted through the air like mist. These were the cries of the forsaken, if the folktales were to be believed.
Or perhaps simply, the sound of a world realizing that an end had been reached.
The end of all things.
Atreus swallowed.
He knew exactly what this meant.
Everyone on the continent of Avaricia knew what this meant.
His uncanny purple eyes widened with fear as a cold sweat broke across his skin, perfectly complementing the temperature of the outside world. Of the dead.
His fingers trembled. His stomach dropped as millions of thoughts raced the length of his psyche in but a second.
No. No, no, no.
There was no need to wait for certainty, to be sure.
He had to go.
Atreus did not bat a thought and turned and ran.
His boots tore across the uneven snow as he sprinted without form, for fear of abandon.
His lungs burned his chest, his heart hammered, as every instinct screamed at him to pick up the pace.
Go faster. Harder.
The world around him fractured as he ran—the very earth splitting open beneath his feet, trees collapsing without warning, massive shapes lunging from the grey haze with teeth bared and eyes wild as they lunged for his neck.
He dodged where he could.
And when he couldn't, he endured.
Being flung about the maelstrom of chaos that was engulfing the world.
He had made but a few strides forward when a beast slammed into him from the side, sending him tumbling and arching his spine against the stem of a skinny tree with firm roots.
Pain shot through his back as he rolled onto the snow, barely managing to scramble back to his feet before the ground beneath him shook once more, eventually opening and giving way entirely.
He leapt purely on instinct. Out of harm's way, he landed hard against the snow, breath knocked from his lungs, vision swimming and struggling to find light.
But he had to keep going. Now wasn't the time to start seeing stars.
As Atreus stumbled back to his feet, tales from a past not forgotten echoed in his mind.
The Seven Horns of the Liberation.
Every child in Avaricia knew the tale.
A warning passed down through generations of race and people.
Spoken in hushed tones beside dying fires and dismissed with forced laughter once the sun rose again. The horns were said to herald the end of the world—an apocalypse not with fire or flood, but with chaos. Absence of reason in everything that constituted the world.
The beasts and spirits of the land would reject the natural order.
The land would forget itself.
All in an attempt to forsake those who walked upon it.
No one ever believed it would actually happen. It was just a children's tale, after all.
Oh, how they were all wrong.
Suffice to say, they had to believe it now.
Atreus believed it now.
But even as such an end clawed at him from the inside, begging the question of what happens now and what this meant for the future, the stampede in his mind narrowed to a single point.
Mother.
Her rosy cheeks as he left the cottage filled his mind as he ran—her earnest smile, tired eyes that still worried for him, the way she watched the horizon a little too long as he left.
He stumbled again, this time catching himself on his hands as jagged stone tore into his palms, exposing his skin as stains of red had begun to form all over the fur of his garb.
He couldn't allow himself to feel the pain though.
And he pushed himself upright and ran.
Harder. Faster.
—
A second break in the earth sent him flying.
Spinning through the frosty air as his lower back shrieked in protest when something clawed at his flesh.
The feeling of blood soaking through his clothes was warm and oddly comforting. But he could feel that the longer he stayed down, his strength escaped him, leaving through the very streaks of blood that not only warmed his body now but painted it.
He had to keep going.
In the distance, Barley loomed ahead at last. Over a familiar cliff rising before him that appeared to mock his sanity.
He skidded to a stop at the edge, chest heaving, legs shaking uncontrollably as he stared down at the humble hamlet.
It was small, insignificant to the capital, but warm.
And a checkpoint on his long trek back.
The cliff he stood on now represented hope in one hand, but also pain, a memory he had sought to forget over the years.
Unwanted and unforgiving.
He was small again.
Standing right at the edge.
His friends... a group of random children stood beside him. They laughed together, played.
Until their shoving turned hostile, a little too strong, too heavy.
They started to call him names, and the voices that had once felt friendly lost their warmth.
He trusted them. Trusted his friends.
But as they pressed him to the edge, an uncomfortable step closer and closer, a part of him knew what would come. Their faces were masked in shadow; their warmth was gone. These people weren't his friends.
A young Atreus was shoved off the cliff.
The world beneath his feet vanished.
And the pain, when it came, was instant.
Even now that feeling rushed back to him, sharp and vivid as the day it happened.
He spent days at the bottom of that cliff.
His limbs bent unnaturally as he heaved and struggled to breathe, looking skyward in a forest alone.
He was an outcast. A soul the village avoided for fear of catching the curse that afflicted him.
—
It didn't take long for his legs to right themselves. That was just the type of creature he was.
And as he began his long, agonizing limp back to Barley, the young Atreus clung onto hope stubbornly in his chest.
It was probably a mistake. He was sure they didn't mean to send him flying to his death.
His bruised and dirty body slid through the town like a cripple without a crutch. He knocked on the doors of his friends' houses.
Faces peered out from behind frames and shutters, eyes distant and cold.
The parents, the families of those children, looked at him not with concern but with horror and disdain, like a wild beast that had wandered into their peaceful village.
Not a single door was opened.
Every shutter was slammed inches before his face.
The boy sobbed.
Not from the pain that coursed through his now-mostly-healed body,
But from the rejection.
From the disdain through which his peers looked at him.
He remembered dragging his sobbing self through the snow, blood staining the village's pristine white with his dirty, unclean crimson, until he was upon the path to his own home.
The memory shifted.
Hanna spotted him from a distance and came running.
Promptly abandoning everything for her lost son.
She ran, throwing her arms around him, shaking, crying, scolding him as she broke down in front of him. The façade of a superhuman parent breaking before an eight-year-old boy.
The warmth of her embrace brought him back to the present. To safety.
And as the boy's uncanny purple orbs met his mother's distant greys, a single question escaped his cracked lips.
"Why don't they want to play with me?"
It was too much for a young mother at the time. Too much for anyone.
Mother and son reunited with shared sorrow unspoken. And their wails were carried into the distant skies that day.
The image of them huddled together in the doorway as the cold crept in was the last thing he remembered as the present snapped back into place.
The boy, nine years older now, clenched his jaw and forced the memories away.
Not now.
Summoning what felt like all the strength his soul had to give, he ran once more.
The earth cracked beneath the sheer force of his stride as he launched himself from the cliff's edge, body screaming through the air in protest as gravity fought to claim him.
Wind tore past him as a peaceful descent to a future unrealized seemed to caress him to the ground.
If this was how he died, then he didn't mind it.
...but that's not how this tale goes.
—
Atreus crashed.
Falling through the thatched roof of Barley's largest building, a market called the Red Square.
Wood splintered and stone came collapsing all around and on him as he hit the concrete floor in a heap.
His whole body felt like it was being shocked at once.
After a minute of catching his breath, he laboured to move, pushing shelves, planks, and stone off his battered body.
Atreus dragged himself out of the market. His vision struggled to make out the state of the market, which, even before his glorious descent, was evidently already desolate and in ruin.
Stalls were overturned. Walls had collapsed. And bodies lay decorated almost artfully about the room.
Some weren't even bodies, only limbs remained, strewn in place of full cadavers that had just seen their last light.
Blood had pooled darkly against the shattered stone, an indication that it had long dried and set in place.
He couldn't bring himself to care though.
Or maybe he just didn't register what he was seeing through the red hue that clouded his vision.
Either way, he dragged his battered body through the wreckage, stumbling against and over corpses, struggling to keep his footing through the exit and into the street beyond.
As he stepped out the door, it became quickly apparent that the town was no better.
It looked like a tornado had just passed through. Homes were gone. Streets torn apart, and the village was painted crimson with the blood of its most dutiful residents.
Animals.
Children.
Parents.
It didn't matter.
Theirs were the faces he recognized from his past, faces that now threatened to haunt him as he stumbled through the wreckage of their homes.
This wasn't enough to stop him though.
He wasn't going to mourn them.
So instead, he dragged himself onward, leaving a trail of blood behind him as he moved through the ruins of a place he would now forever be a reject in.
—
Half an hour had gone by now.
Or maybe it hadn't.
He wasn't sure anymore. Time was passing at a rate that was both infuriating and spellbinding.
Through the pain and exhaustion, a familiar path came into view in the distance.
Evidence of snow recently shoveled lay in front of him.
Only such effort was now meaningless, for the rest of the path was covered in snow.
His eyes laboured upward, muscles straining with pain as he set his sights on the cottage in the distance.
A cottage that appeared, from the outside, to have fought the torrent of the last couple of hours.
He stopped.
His chest rose and fell shallowly as blood trickled down the side of his mouth. He was unsure of what awaited him at that point.
And for the first time since the Horns had sounded, Atreus was afraid to move forward.