"It didn't work again."
The words scraped out of his throat like gravel, dry, heavy, lifeless.
They echoed in the quiet hospital room. No one was there to hear them. No nurse, no family, no sterile bustle of clipped footsteps or rattling IV poles. Just silence. Thick, padded silence. The kind that pressed down on your ears until your own heartbeat became a nuisance.
Veyle Othuris lay still, staring at the chalk-white ceiling with pale blue eyes. One of them shimmered faintly in the flickering light above—the right eye, shaped with an unnatural hourglass slit in its pupil. It blinked once. Slowly. Then didn't blink again for a long time.
The room smelled like disinfectant and plastic.
He shifted. Every movement dragged like it was underwater. The black hospital gown clung to his skin—light, thin fabric, but suffocating in the way it reminded him of where he was. Of what he'd failed to do.
Again.
"I should be dead," he muttered, almost conversationally.
A breath shuddered through him. Not quite a sob. Not quite anything. Just a breath. The kind that followed disappointment. Not fear. Not grief. Just that dull, numbing ache in the chest that said, Still here, huh?
His white hair was a tangled mess on the pillow, sweat-wet and stuck to his forehead. His gloves—black, fingerless—were still on, for some reason. No one had taken them off when he'd been wheeled in. Maybe they thought they were medical. Maybe no one cared.
He sat up.
The movement was slow. Not because of injury—no, the damage was long healed, thanks to whatever miracle kept dragging his body back from the edge—but because of weight. Invisible, crushing, unbearable weight. The kind only the living had to carry.
His throat was parched.
He stood on wobbly legs, bare feet cold against linoleum, and dragged himself to the bathroom in the corner of the room. The tap handle was stiff. He had to wrench it sideways, and brownish water spat out before it ran clear. Veyle didn't wait.
He cupped his gloved hands and brought the water to his mouth. It tasted metallic. But it was cold, and it helped him feel real, so he drank again. And again.
A soft click.
A sound that wasn't water.
Veyle froze.
He turned around.
The mirror.
A cracked, rectangular mirror above the sink. It hadn't been there before. He would have remembered. It was tall, almost the size of the doorframe, but the glass was clouded and broken in a web of fractures that spidered across its surface.
It was—wrong.
The frame was rusted, like it had been underwater for years. The cracks weren't random; they converged on a single point, like something had struck the center hard enough to shatter time itself. No reflection stared back. Only murky gray fog behind glass.
Veyle blinked. For a moment, he thought it was some kind of trauma vision—an aftereffect. But he stepped closer.
And the mirror began to clear.
A figure emerged on the other side. Not like a reflection. No—it was behind the glass, like looking into another world. The figure looked like him. It was him. But...
Its skin was pale and sunken. Patches of its flesh sagged, melting off bone like wax. One eye was hollow. The other, the hourglass one, spun in reverse, ticking backward. The mouth split open with a smile that was far too wide, and it spoke without sound.
It reached out from behind the glass.
Veyle stumbled back.
"No—"
The mirror vibrated. The figure moved like a puppet on strings, convulsing, twitching, its limbs bending in wrong directions. The skin peeled from its hands. The hands pressed against the inside of the glass.
"Stop."
He fell backward onto the tiled floor, hitting his elbow. Pain flared. His body convulsed with dry heaves. His stomach twisted, bile rising—he turned and puked onto the tiles. The floor felt like ice. The light above the sink flickered again and again.
He looked up once more.
But the mirror was gone.
Just a blank wall.
Just a flickering light and the sound of his own ragged breaths.
---
Time passed.
He didn't know how much. Could've been minutes. Could've been hours.
Eventually, his body gave in.
He curled up on the cold tiles, trembling, his head resting near the puddle of water. A whispering voice echoed in his thoughts, but it wasn't his. It wasn't the mirror's.
It was something else.
Then—
Nothing.
1
When Veyle awoke, he wasn't in a hospital room.
He was flat on his back, lying on a floor of pale, cracked earth. No tile. No glass. No walls.
Just dust.
And above, a gray sky that stretched on endlessly—but without a sun. A cold, blanched dome where light came from nowhere, yet everything was visible. No warmth, no blue. Just the eternal color of dry bones.
He pushed himself up.
His hospital gown was still on him, now dirtied and tattered. His gloves too, somehow unscathed. He blinked. Rubbed his eyes.
Buildings.
Towers made of concrete and steel loomed around him, warping and twisting as they rose. Not skyscrapers—not anymore. They looked like melted candles, their shapes sagging in defiance of physics. No windows. No lights. Just immense, rotted pillars.
Where am I?
He didn't say it aloud.
His throat was dry. Bone-dry.
He stood, knees shaking. The last thing he remembered was the mirror—that twisted reflection of himself. That thing with its eyes. Its melting face.
The sky crackled.
A sound like bones being snapped between teeth echoed faintly in the distance. Then closer. Then nearer still.
KRRRK-KRRRK-KRRRK.
His head snapped to the side.
One of the twisted alleyways between the towers shimmered with movement.
Something was coming.
A pale limb scraped against the concrete. Then another. Then six more. The thing that emerged moved with jerky, stuttering spasms, its motions too quick to register at first—like film played out of sync.
It was massive. Twelve, maybe fifteen meters tall.
A monstrous fusion of a crab and a centipede, with a bloated, gelatinous torso haphazardly crammed into a bony carapace. Its legs—nine of them—ended in malformed, clawed hands, each one twitching. Its head was bulbous, smooth, hairless. Its jaw opened side to side, mandibles folding back to reveal a hollow mouth filled with vertical teeth like needles.
It had no eyes.
But it looked at him.
It saw him.
And it shrieked.
A sound like a trumpet filtered through raw meat.
Veyle froze.
His limbs disobeyed. He wanted to run. He begged himself to run.
But fear stitched his muscles shut.
The thing reared up.
Then lunged.
Its hand-like legs wrapped around him, cold and rubbery. He screamed—the first real scream since waking. His feet left the ground. The world blurred as he was lifted.
Then hurled.
Fallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfalling
He fell, a violent descent through the gray void, through the bleak sky, through nothingness.
Fallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfalling
The air tore at him. His gown billowed outward, fluttering like a tattered flag in the wind. The barren landscape below rushed at him, spinning and warping, as his mind scrambled to make sense of what was happening.
Nothing.
No explanation.
Nothing at all.
He hit the ground, the impact sickening and all-encompassing. His spine shattered like a glass rod, his limbs snapped under the weight of the fall. His vision blurred. His breath was knocked from his chest, and his body crumpled into the dust, twitching and spasming in a final, dying dance. He gasped, choking on the empty air.
Then, the pain came.
It surged through him, the agony beyond what his mind could process. Every cell screamed, every nerve felt as if it had been pierced with fire. His ribs shifted like a cracked mirror, his skin split as if torn by invisible claws. His blood, dark against the pale landscape, began to pool beneath him, each drop pulsing in time with his dying heartbeat.
His body had broken.
But then—
The world shifted.
He didn't know how.
But suddenly, he was awake again.
It was as if he'd never fallen at all. The pain, the death—it was all gone. The aching, the agony, the brokenness—vanished. He lay there again, the hospital gown crumpled and torn at the edges, his gloves intact, the blood from the earlier wound nothing but a faded stain in his mind.
He felt dizzy.
He was back.
In the same spot.
The same cracked earth beneath him. The same cold sky above.
The towers loomed still, twisting in the distance. The air remained stagnant.
It didn't make sense. Nothing made sense.
Before he could stand, a shriek pierced the air, sharp and guttural. A horrifying, distorted sound like the crack of a hundred bones snapping at once.
He turned—too slowly.
The crab-thing, massive and grotesque, was charging again.
Its claws, sharp as obsidian, scraped against the barren concrete, sending out streaks of dark residue. Its form jerked and shuddered, like something that had been stitched together by madness. Each of its legs was longer than his entire body, and they moved with unnatural precision, each one snapping forward like a weapon primed for destruction.
It was no longer just a monster. It was a herald of death.
The thing's mandibles clicked in and out, its mouth wide open, its jagged teeth aimed at him. There was no mercy in its eyes—because there were no eyes at all.
It didn't matter.
It lunged.
Veyle screamed again, his body locking in place, too paralyzed by fear to move. His heart pounded in his ears as the claws came for him, reaching out like iron jaws of a trap. He couldn't escape, couldn't dodge.
Too slow.
Before he could think, before he could react, the creature's massive claw wrapped around his torso, lifting him off the ground again. His feet dangled helplessly in the air. The world spun as the crab-thing squeezed tighter, its claws pressing into his ribs, bending them under its crushing force.
Then it tossed him again.
The world turned into a blur of motion—his body hurtling through the air once more. The sky stretched into an endless horizon of nothingness, the ground looming like an unforgiving wall. His mind screamed for him to move, to stop the inevitable. But it was already too late.
Fallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfallingfalling
Again.
Again.
He felt it again.
The impact was worse this time.
The pain exploded through his body—worse than before, as if each part of him was being torn apart by invisible hands. His spine shattered again. His head snapped to the side with an audible crack. His legs bent in unnatural angles. His body hit the earth with a sickening thud, his skull bouncing off the cracked surface like a ragdoll.
Darkness.
And then—
The void.
Nothing.
Nothing but the same feeling. The feeling of cold, brittle air. The same pain. The same death. The same nothingness. He should have been used to it by now. He should have been numb.
But he wasn't.
He wasn't numb to it. He couldn't be.
Because each time, it felt different. Every death was new. Every second felt more desperate than the last. And yet, each death was always followed by waking. Always followed by the same unrelenting pain.
He lay there.
His limbs useless.
The silence was deafening.
His mind was spiraling, trying to comprehend what had happened, what was happening. Why was this happening? Was this some twisted nightmare? Was he dead? Was this real?
He closed his eyes for a second, forcing his body to take in the sensations—the sandpaper texture of the earth beneath him, the cool air against his skin, the pounding ache in his chest.
He felt like he was going mad. Each breath felt like it was his last. But then, without warning, it all faded. The pain, the fear, the terror—it all slipped away as he once again found himself on his back, staring up at the same gray sky.
And the crab-thing was coming.
Again.
Veyle's heart pounded as the crab-thing advanced again, its grotesque form wobbling as it charged toward him with unnatural speed. His legs burned. His head throbbed with the terror of knowing what was coming. He had to move. He had to run.
But the panic. The sheer, unrelenting panic. His muscles shook, his legs barely holding him up as he scrambled, his hands brushing the cracked earth beneath him. He stumbled forward, every breath ragged, desperate. He couldn't let it catch him again. He couldn't—
Snap.
The sound was like a distant clap of thunder—sharp, crisp. But it was the last sound he expected.
The crab-thing froze mid-step, its movements suddenly halting, its body locking in place. Its claw twitched once, then twice. The very air around it seemed to quiver.
Before Veyle could make sense of what was happening, he heard the unmistakable sound of bones clicking. A sharp, deliberate sound, echoing through the empty landscape.
A figure stepped into view.
It wasn't just any figure.
It was a being of unearthly presence. His tall, slender frame was draped in black and violet, flowing fabrics that rippled as if they existed outside of time itself. A head of black hair framed a face half-hidden by a porcelain-like mask, the features exaggerated and twisted into an eternal grin. His eyes—if they could even be called that—were black voids with starry pinpricks of light, as if an entire galaxy swirled in the depths of his gaze.
Veyle's legs stopped moving entirely. He could feel his body trembling in fear—not just from the looming death behind him, but from the immense, suffocating presence of the creature before him.
The god spoke, its voice rich, resonating like the low hum of an ancient, forgotten tune.
"Well now, this is an interesting twist," the Laughing God said, the words playful, full of mockery and amusement. His voice was like a melody that twisted and turned in every direction, impossible to focus on, just like the grin etched into his face. "We can't have you going insane already. That wouldn't be too fun, would it?"
With a snap of his fingers, the crab-thing shrieked—its screech reverberating through the air as its massive form crumbled to the ground, disintegrating into a pile of ash and rusted scraps. The stench of burnt metal filled the air, as if the creature had never existed.
Veyle's mouth went dry.
The Laughing God stood still for a moment, watching Veyle with an expression of benign amusement. He tilted his head slightly, as if considering something, and then took a slow, deliberate step toward him. His presence felt heavier with each movement, like the weight of a thousand lifetimes bearing down on Veyle's very soul.
"You're still so new to this," the Laughing God mused, almost to himself. "Still so unsure. But that's alright. The game is just beginning."
Veyle's mind raced, his heart hammering. He should have been running. He should have been trying to fight. But he couldn't move. He was frozen in place, paralyzed by the sheer madness of what was happening.
The god smiled wider, his mask creaking slightly as if it too were alive. He knelt down, his fingers brushing the ground lightly. "You see, this place—this world—is like a great stage. A theater where things are always changing, always dying, always... amusing."
The Laughing God stood again, his grin stretching impossibly wide.
"Now, I can't let you die too soon, Veyle," he continued, his voice laced with dark joy. "Not when you're only just starting to see the fun. I need you to experience this world first. See its darkness. See the suffering. See everything it has to offer."
He paused, his grin faltering for a moment, as if he were considering something more serious.
"But I won't let you go mad," he added, his voice growing softer, more menacing. "Not yet. That would be a waste. You need to be... entertained."
Veyle still couldn't move, his mouth dry and his heart pounding in his chest.
The god reached out a hand, fingers twirling in the air like they were tracing some invisible pattern, before snapping again. This time, the world around them shifted—immediately, Veyle was back at the beginning. He was no longer standing in the barren land, but in the hospital room again. The sterile walls, the uncomfortable bed, the flickering lights. It was as if nothing had happened, as if the twisted reality he had just experienced was nothing but a fading dream.
The god's voice was distant, like an echo coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. "Remember this moment. I won't intervene again for a while. You'll have to fight for your life again, and again, and again. But I'm watching, Veyle. I'm always watching."
Then, without another word, the Laughing God was gone—vanished into the air like smoke, leaving behind only the faintest trace of his eerie laughter, echoing in the emptiness.
Veyle was left alone once more.
Veyle's mind was spinning, his senses overloaded. The world, the landscape, the creature—all of it was beyond his comprehension. He had only just woken up from an attempt to escape it all, only to be thrown into a nightmare so vast and surreal that he couldn't begin to process it.
The creature—a monstrous hybrid of crab and centipede—was gone now, reduced to nothing but dust and rust, vanishing into the air like it had never been there. The laughter still hung in the air, faint but mocking, as if the very world itself was amused by his confusion.
His legs wobbled beneath him, and he had to lean against one of the warped concrete pillars for support. He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself, but it was like the air was too thin to breathe, too dry to feel anything real.
The Laughing God had spoken to him. Had spoken to him.
"Not yet," he muttered to himself, his voice rough, barely a whisper. He couldn't make sense of it.
The god. The thing that looked like a man but wasn't. That laughing thing. He couldn't understand its words, its meaning, its existence. How could something like that even be real? How could something so absurd and—frankly, terrifying—exist in the same space as him?
Veyle turned slowly, scanning the space around him. The towers loomed like hollowed-out skeletons, casting long, distorted shadows in the gray light. There were no sounds, no other life forms. Just the unnerving hum of emptiness.
And then it hit him again.
The world wasn't real.
No, not just that—it couldn't be. How could he be back here? How could he be in a hospital room, only to have been pulled to this place and now, back here again? Was he stuck? Was he dreaming? Was this some sick joke that his mind had conjured up?
He clenched his fists at his sides, still unable to fully process what had happened. The Laughing God—that absurd, terrifying being. What had he said? What had he done? He had snapped his fingers, and the world shifted. He snapped his fingers, and Veyle was back where he started.
Veyle rubbed his face with both hands, the sensation oddly grounding. His fingers brushed against the soft fabric of his hospital gown—tattered now, torn with dirt and grime. It wasn't real. None of this was real. How could it be?
His mind buzzed with the same questions, over and over again. Where was he? What was that god-like thing? What did he want from him?
He had to run. He had to get out. This wasn't a place for him. He couldn't stay here. But even as the thought crossed his mind, his legs refused to move. They were weak, shaking from the shock of it all.
I'm losing my mind, Veyle thought, his head spinning.
The laughter again.
Faint, distant, and then—closer.
The sound was maddening, like the echoes of a broken bell, a laugh too perfect to be real. The hair on the back of his neck prickled, but he couldn't even summon the strength to turn around. The god's words echoed through his mind.
"Not yet..."
Not yet what? He was lost in the fog, his mind clouded by the bizarre events that had unfolded. He barely remembered the mirror—the twisted reflection, the melting flesh. That wasn't a dream. It had felt too real. But now?
This place. This strange world. Was it another level of hell? Was it some punishment for his failed attempts to escape it all? Was he trapped forever in this cycle of confusion and death?
"God," Veyle whispered, his voice shaking, "what the hell is going on?"
His breath came in ragged gasps as he slowly sank to his knees. He couldn't process this. He couldn't. It was too much. Too overwhelming. There were too many questions, too many things that didn't make sense. And yet, here he was. Here in this strange place, with its warped towers and endless gray sky, the laughter echoing like a twisted lullaby in the distance.
He gripped his head, fingers tangling in his messy hair. It was all too much. Nothing was real. Nothing made sense. He was trapped.
Wasn't he?
He tried to breathe, tried to steady his thoughts, but it was like trying to hold water in his hands. Nothing stayed. Nothing stuck.
The universe felt broken, like pieces of a shattered mirror scattered across an impossible landscape. And Veyle, sitting in the middle of it all, was just one more fragment, desperately trying to understand how the pieces fit.
But there was no understanding. No clarity.
Just the sound of distant laughter, echoing in his ears.
"Not yet," the god had said.
What did it mean?
What did he want?
Veyle collapsed forward, his body limp on the cracked earth beneath him, the questions swirling around in his mind, never quite forming into answers.
And then, just as before, the world around him shivered.
The laughter stopped.
The towers swayed.
And everything faded to black.