"Haaaaaaa..."
The sound broke from his throat not as a word, nor as the call of any known creature, but as a wail that did not seem to belong entirely to this world. It cut through the forest like a silver blade drawn from its sheath, rending the stillness of that forgotten place.
It was the cry of something caught between—neither man nor beast—too human to be the howl of an animal, yet too raw to be the voice of any mortal in his right mind. It was pain and defiance in equal measure, drawn long as though each syllable was carved from the marrow of his soul.
The forest answered in whispers. Branches shuddered as if recoiling from the sound, and leaves hissed their alarm in the dim light. Somewhere in the unseen canopy above, wings flurried and vanished. Then came the heavy, final thud—a sound not unlike the fall of a felled stag.
Against the contorted bark of an elder tree, whose roots had drunk centuries of shadow, the boy hung in ruin. He could not have seen more than fifteen summers, and yet in that moment, he seemed far older—his life distilled to this single instant of agony. His hunting garb, once humble but clean, was now torn as though the forest itself had tried to claim him. Mud clung to the fabric, blood seeped from rents in the cloth, and his breath came in shallow, ragged pulls.
The thing that held him there was no ordinary quarry. Its size mocked the natural order—a horned rabbit, grotesquely enlarged, with eyes that burned with the single-minded hunger of the wild. Its massive horn, meant for piercing undergrowth and prey alike, had struck him with such force that both hunter and hunted were now bound together, the sharp bone buried deep into the ancient trunk.
The beast strained. Muscles rippled beneath its coarse fur as it tried to free itself, but the tree's gnarled embrace would not yield. The boy, too, was pinned—his weight sagging against the shaft of bone, each breath a small surrender to gravity.
Here, where sunlight dared not tread, the air was thick with the scent of damp moss and the bitter tang of iron. The shadows swayed like ancient ghosts in the undergrowth, bending with each muted rustle.
Slowly—so slowly it seemed the moment might stretch into eternity—the boy lifted his head. His eyes met those of the creature before him, and in that meeting there was no fear left to give.
A smile, faint but unmistakable, traced the corners of his lips. It was not the smile of joy, nor of forgiveness. It was something older. Something that spoke of grudges remembered across lifetimes, and of a will that did not break, even as the body failed.
When his voice came, it was soft—so soft that one might have mistaken it for the wind. Yet within it lay an edge sharp enough to cut through the marrow of the moment. It was the whisper of a soul speaking its last, and perhaps its truest, words.
"Got you…"
The words slipped from his mouth not as a taunt, nor as a triumph, but as a verdict—a quiet decree uttered by one who had already accepted the cost.
His free hand, pale and trembling, groped against the rough bark behind him until it found a jagged shard. It was sharp as broken bone, cruel as a weapon fashioned in desperation. When he tore it free, splinters bit into his fingers, stripping his nails to raw flesh. No flinch. No cry. Only that same cold, unyielding certainty in his eyes.
With a motion as swift as it was merciless, he drove the splinter into the beast's gleaming eye. The sound was wet, abrupt—a hollow snap beneath the surface. The shard sank deep, past the glistening orb, into the seat of the creature's mind. There was no hesitation, no faltering hand, and certainly no mercy.
The rabbit jerked, a grotesque marionette at the end of its own life's string. Its retreat halted mid-motion, its limbs locking in one last act of resistance. Then came the convulsions—violent, shuddering spasms that rippled through its unnaturally large frame. A final, desperate tremor… and stillness.
From the dark ruin of its face, blood began to seep—thin rivulets tracing paths from eye, ear, and nostril. The streams grew sluggish, then stopped altogether, leaving only the faint smell of copper in the damp air.
The forest received the death in silence. It was not the silence of peace, but of reverence—ancient and watchful. No birdsong dared return. No insect hum rose from the moss. Only the whisper of high leaves bending in an unseen breeze, the far-off drip of water striking stone, and the slow, uneven breath of the boy.
His hands braced against the cooling body of the beast. Muscles trembled under the weight of the task as he pushed, his legs shuddering with effort. The creature's horn tore free from his side with an almost obscene smoothness, as though reluctant to let him go. He gasped—not in fear, nor even in pain, but in something close to disbelief, as if he had expected the forest to claim him entirely.
Thud.
The carcass met the earth with a sound that seemed to close the moment—final, unarguable.
His knees failed him. The strength that had carried him through the struggle seeped from his limbs like water draining from a cracked vessel. He staggered, clutching at the nearest branch—its bark rough beneath his torn fingertips. The forest tilted around him, his vision swimming in waves of black and red, yet instinct—older and more reliable than thought—urged him to move away from the carcass.
He did not make it far.
At the foot of another elder tree, he collapsed. Its roots bulged from the earth like knotted sinew, its bark curled and twisted as though clenched in silent fury. The great shadow it cast fell across him in the shape of a guardian—or perhaps a sentinel awaiting his final breath.
From his belt, he drew a strip of cloth. It was already torn, stiff with old stains, and carried the faint sourness of sweat and age. Without pause—without even the faint hope that it would truly help—he pressed it to the wound. Warmth met warmth, his blood soaking swiftly into the fibers. The bleeding slowed, but not enough. Never enough.
The horn had gone through him entirely—front to back—as though his flesh were no more than wet parchment. It was the sort of injury that did not forgive. That left marks not only on the body, but on the soul.
And as the truth settled over him, the list began to form in his mind.
No medicine.
No tools.
No weapons.
No way to summon help.
No clear sense of where he even was.
He looked down at himself—the ragged garments clinging to his frame, the dark patches where blood had stiffened the fabric, the trembling hands that no longer shook from fear but from habit. The hands of someone who had met violence too many times to count.
His chest rose and fell with slow, deliberate effort. At last, a sigh escaped him, heavy as stone in still water. His gaze dropped, and his voice came as little more than the echo of a thought.
> "At the very least… I managed to kill it this time.
Perhaps I'll finally be freed from this endless torme—"
He stopped.
Something in the air had shifted.
The silence was no longer merely still—it was aware.
The forest was not simply quiet, nor merely watchful. It was… listening.
The wind itself had ceased, holding its breath like a trespasser caught in sacred halls. No leaf dared to stir, no branch to creak. Even the faint drip of distant water seemed to falter.
It was a silence that did not belong to the mortal realm but similar to that of the mythical shadow realm.
The forest was silent—eerily, impossibly silent.
The leaves shifted and swayed, but no sound was born of them, as though each frond and frill had sworn an oath of mourning for some unseen passing.
The water still fell, drop by drop, striking stone and leaf, yet no voice rose from the impact. Each fall was empty—like a ritual robbed of its priest, movement stripped of its purpose.
And then—
It came.
The wind returned, but it was no longer the gentle wanderer it had been before. It rolled low through the trees, deep and resonant, almost alive. The forest groaned under its weight. In its wake, the waters found their tongues again—yet not in splashes, nor trickles. They whispered. Thousands upon thousands of whispers, weaving together into a choir of mourners and madmen. They spoke in no human tongue, yet the meaning pressed against the skin: grief… and warning.
Above, the sky began to change.
From the dark cradle of the clouds bloomed a strange radiance—silver veined with green, spilling like ink into water. Slowly it spread, knitting itself into threads that gleamed as though they might be touched. To eyes unknowing, it might have been beautiful. But beauty is a double-edged thing, and in this light there was a promise of teeth.
Within it stood a figure.
Suspended between the realms of sky and void, the stranger's form was shrouded, yet his presence pressed upon the senses—part divinity, part madness. A sight the world itself seemed unwilling to bear.
He moved only to speak.
Though the distance between them could have swallowed kingdoms, his lips shaped words that crossed more than air—they seemed to cut across the folds of time itself, through the endless deserts of years, over the oceans without shores.
And then—
The rabbit's corpse twitched.
Not with the last pitiful tremors of life departing—no, this was not the twitch of death, but the birth of something worse. Its limbs jerked with a rhythm not its own, each movement steeped in blasphemy. The very air around it seemed to shrink away.
It was wrong.
Unholy.
Defiled.
The boy's gaze fixed upon it. In the span of a single blink—it was gone.
A slow dread seeped into him, thick and heavy, settling in the marrow. His thoughts dragged like feet through a mire. And then—
Breathing.
Close.
Too close.
Hot against his ear, yet carrying no warmth. It was the breath of something that had never known life—beastlike, rancid, impure.
The voice followed.
Not one voice, but a multitude—
The ragged cries of a hundred men under the torment ,
The muffled wails of a thousand infants drowned beneath black waters,
The shattered sobs of countless maidens ravaged and broken defiled of reddish grace.
Every agony threaded into a single whisper, and that whisper dripped with rot and death.
> "Stay… with mE… Ezkazael…"
His blood turned to ice. His body trembled, yet deep within the terror, something in him refused to bow. Gathering what will remained, he lifted his head. His gaze met the figure above.
And what he saw—
—unmade the world.
Light erupted, not gold, not silver, but a white that devoured every shadow, every shape, every falsehood.
---
With a violent jolt, Waelz tore upright from his bed—only for his body to betray him. He pitched forward, falling from its height and striking the floor with a graceless thud.
Sweat clung to him like a fevered shroud. His eyes were wide, but their focus was elsewhere, fixed on some horizon that no longer existed. Even the shock of the fall could not drag him fully from whatever shadow still gripped his mind.
The moment broke when the door slammed open.
A youth of nineteen summers burst into the room, a wooden mortar clutched in one hand. His hair was tangled from sleep, his posture slow with the weight of waking, yet his gaze was sharpening by the second.
As the younger brother caught his breath, Waelz's mind began to crawl back toward the present. Pain stabbed through his neck as he reached for it, the muscles protesting with a violent thrum. The fall had twisted it into an angle that nature had never intended.
"What in the hell, man?!"
The older teen's voice cut through the haze like a jagged blade—hoarse, irritable, but carrying the solid weight of the waking world.
Waelz winced, drawing in a breath that seemed reluctant to leave him.
"…Sorry, bro. Another nightmare."
Jemmiel's shoulders slumped. The irritation bled from his posture, replaced by something quieter. He let out a long sigh.
"Gee… another one? What was it this time? Same rabbit? Did you get beheaded again? Gutted, like last week? Or… impaled, like the last time?" His words stumbled to a halt, as though the thought itself were something distasteful to hold. He waved it away. "You know what—forget it. I don't want to know. Just… try to get some sleep."
The tone was weary, but beneath the rasp lay the faintest thread of concern—unspoken, perhaps unnoticed even by him.
Waelz held his brother's gaze for a moment. Words began to gather on his tongue, heavy and uncertain, but dissolved before they could take shape.
It seems I've told you too much, he thought, eyes narrowing slightly. My fault… and who else could I blame but myself?
He rubbed at the ache in his neck—the dull reminder of how he had landed.
Jemmiel had almost closed the door when Waelz's voice found the courage to break the silence.
"Jemmiel."
The elder brother paused, leaning against the frame. "What?" The single word dragged, worn half by sleep and half by habit.
Waelz hesitated—five heartbeats, maybe more. The thought sat in his mind like a coin on the edge of a table, waiting to fall. He wondered if it was worth speaking aloud, if it would change anything at all.
But Jemmiel read the silence as though it were a language they had both learned in childhood. His sigh was quiet, yet knowing.
"Ez… I've been saving, you know. Enough for us to go see a priest at the temple. We could ask for purification. Maybe…" His voice softened, cautious in its hope. "…just maybe, you'll be rid of these nightmares."
Waelz's eyes lifted to meet his brother's, the question in them quiet, almost fragile.
"That's the tutor fee, isn't it? For the law firm training?"
"What use is law," Jemmiel muttered, "when what we need is a priest… or a psychiatrist…"
The door closed with a tired thud, leaving Waelz alone in the dim, breathless quiet.
He stared at the space before him, and his breath escaped in a long, uneven sigh. Shaking his head, he tried to clear the faint dizziness that still lingered like smoke in the corners of his vision. Slowly, he pushed himself upright.
The worn wall clock across the room ticked faintly, its hands unmoving in their quiet judgment.
Three-thirty. He grimaced. Well… there goes my sleep.
He drifted toward the lone open window, letting the cool night air touch him. Outside, the silver moon stood in perfect stillness—a sovereign unmoved by the turning of the earth. Around it, silver-red rings crowned the night, lending the sky a beauty that was both eternal and strangely foreign.
His gaze wandered to the clouds beyond—dense, dark, and restless. They seemed almost alive, shifting in slow, deliberate ways, drinking the moonlight as though they meant to hoard it.
A chill worked its way down his spine.
Another sigh.
Why am I even sighing so much? The thought came like a faint echo, drifting as he crossed the narrow room.
In the far corner stood the only other furniture the space possessed—an old wooden table, splintered and worn, and a chair whose joints creaked in protest each time it bore weight. Both had the look of things that persisted not out of strength, but out of habit.
He sat, the chair groaning faintly beneath him, and let his gaze move across the scattered debris atop the table. Carefully—almost reverently—he pushed a few items aside until his hand found what it sought: a rusted iron box lying in shadow, half-forgotten beneath the table's edge.
From his neck, he removed a cheap military locket. The metal, dulled by years of skin and sweat, clicked open with a reluctant snap. Inside, beneath the small corroded key, was a photograph—faded, edges curling. A young man looked out from that frozen moment, his eyes bright in the way youth always believes itself eternal, yet dulled by the slow hand of time.
Waelz's gaze lingered there, unblinking, before he closed the locket and tucked it back beneath his sweater.
The key came free, its teeth pitted with rust, its weight heavier than its size could justify. He slid it into the stubborn lock. The box yielded at last with a metallic sigh, as though it, too, had been holding its breath.
Inside lay a single object—a book, if it could still be called that. Its cover had long since given up any pretense of dignity. It was held together by countless stitches of rag and thread, a patchwork of desperate repairs that seemed less an act of preservation than a stubborn refusal to let it die.
Across the front, in crude and uneven needlework, someone had forced a title into being:
« Surviving Nightmares »
By Waelz
The letters were jagged, their thread fraying, yet each one was anchored deep—as though the act of stitching had been less about naming and more about binding something in place.
Waelz opened it, the worn spine sighing in protest. Pages of uneven texture and tone passed beneath his fingertips—some crisp and thin, others thick with age, all marked by the restless scrawl of his own hand. He did not linger on the older entries. Instead, his fingers sought the end, where the pages thinned toward emptiness.
At last, he found it—the most recent blank sheet.
For a moment he only stared at it, his pen unmoving above the surface, as though the page were a frozen lake and he feared to break it. Then, almost abruptly, the words began to come, scratched into the fiber with a pressure that threatened to tear it.
August 15, 1067
Once more…
My name is Waelz Ez Benedict. I am seventeen, and again… I am in hell.an