FALLING.
The fall was not a fall of the body, for he had no body. It was a fall of the self, a nauseating unraveling in a place with no up or down.
A scream echoed in the space where his throat used to be, a raw, tearing thing of pure panic that the void drank without a ripple.
"STOP. OH, GOD, SOMEONE, MAKE IT STOP."
He was a leaf in a hurricane of nothing, his soul—a pale, shimmering filament of light—tumbling end over end. He tried to remember his name, his face, anything solid to hold onto, but the fall was erasing him, scrubbing away the person he had been.
Jagged shards of memory tore loose and flared into existence before being swallowed again: the blinding glare of sun on asphalt; the high, beautiful sound of Victoria's laughter; the wet, sickening crumple of metal; his father's disappointed face; a book, bound in leather, glowing with a light that had promised everything.
Then accident, the tree. The pain.
"PLEASE, NOT THIS. NOT MORE OF THIS..."
The darkness, which had been a total, featureless absence, began to bruise.
A trace of light seeped in from nowhere and everywhere at once. It wasn't the light of day or dawn, but the color of disease and gangrene, a sickly, pearlescent gray-green that pulsed with a slow, malevolent intelligence.
It was the light of things that died and refused to stay buried.
"NO. NO, THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING."
The light gave form to the void, and the form it chose was an abomination.
He wasn't in a place; he was inside a nightmare made real. A cavern so vast its ceiling was a sky of impenetrable stone, lost in the putrid glow. Below him, or perhaps above him, rivers threaded through the landscape.
They didn't flow; they oozed, thick and black as tar, and from them came a sound that was not a sound, but a million voices blended into a single, eternal scream of despair.
Pete felt the vibration of it in the very core of his soul, a frequency of pure agony.
His mind, a frail last bastion of reason, tried to name it, to categorize the horror. Like oil. Screaming rivers of oil...
But it was so much more. He saw a cascade of fire in the distance, a river of liquid flame that cast dancing, skeletal shadows, and he understood this was not a place of simple fire and brimstone. This was older. This was the engine at the heart of all human dread.
His gaze, or whatever sense served his soul for sight, was drawn upward. The ceiling of the cavern was alive. It was a writhing, weeping carpet of souls, countless translucent forms clinging to the stone like upside-down bats.
From them, a slow, silent rain of pure sorrow fell in shimmering, pearlescent drops. Weeping essence. When the tears of the damned struck the ground miles below, they didn't simply splash.
They sizzled, each drop a tiny abortive whimper of existence before it dissolved into a wisp of despair.
The realization struck him not as a thought, but as a physical blow.
HELL.
The word, a blunt instrument of childhood fear, was no longer a word. It was geography. He was a tourist in the charnel house of creation.
The architecture defied sanity. Cyclopean pillars, hewn from stone the color of a dried bloodstain, speared into the unseen heights, their surfaces carved with the contorted faces of the forgotten. Bridges, woven from the vertebrae of some colossal beast, spanned the chasms between floating islands of rock.
From the nothingness above hung chains so immense they should have collapsed under their own weight, each glowing with the faint heat of a million captured screams.
"THIS IS A DREAM. A DYING MIND'S FINAL FIRE..."
And then he saw the things that moved.
Spilled nightmares that skittered on insectile legs across the bone-white ledges. Patrolling figures, humanoid from the waist up but merging into the segmented, armored carapace of a monstrous scorpion below, their faces the withered mask of a hanged man.
Far in the distance, a shadow moved with the ponderous grace of a mountain passing, blotting out entire sections of the cavern with its sheer, unknowable bulk.
Pete's spinning descent slowed, and for a moment he hung suspended in the infernal air, a single, shimmering thread against a tapestry of abominations. The overwhelming panorama of horror, the screams of the rivers, the silent weeping of the soul-sky—it all coalesced into a single, final, undeniable thought:
"I AM HERE."
He was no longer just a soul falling through a void. He was a speck of dust in a place of eternal, mindful malice.
And in that instant of terrified clarity, the fall ended.
Not a gradual slowdown, but a sudden, violent cessation. He jerked to a halt as if he'd struck an invisible wall of ice. A force, ancient and colder than any star, wrapped around him, utterly still, completely inescapable. It held him, pinioned in the heart of the Underworld, and waited.
"Oh, thank god, thank—"
The brittle hope died before it could fully form in his consciousness. The chaotic spin of his soul ceased, and for a single, blessed moment, he was still.
And he was not alone.
Before him stood a warden of this accursed realm, a twelve-foot-tall effigy of Animated decay. humanoid in shape but an insult to the form. Its body was swathed in funeral shrouds that writhed with a slow, diseased life of their own, and its face was a skull sheathed in taut, gray flesh pulled taut over the bone.
its eyes were not eyes, but hollows from which the same infected, green-gray light of the cavern burned, fixing on Pete with the cold, predatory focus of a surgeon considering a specimen.
In its hands, it gripped a scythe. This was no farmer's tool; it was a weapon forged for reaping souls. The blade was a sliver of polished obsidian, sooo sharp it seemed to carve the very air, its surface etched with runes that twisted the eye and pained the soul to behold.
"OH NO. OH NO, PLEASE DON'T—"
Then, without warning, a force yanked him.
"WAIT! WHAT'S HAPPENING?! STOP! STOOOOP!"
His soul shot sideways, a blur of silver light. The guard's scythe whistled through the space he had just occupied, the air humming with the blade's passage. Pete tumbled end over end, pulled now by an invisible, relentless current, his speed accelerating.
"INTRUDER!"
The guard's voice was the crunch of gravel on a coffin lid. It raised a horn, a grotesque thing fashioned from a polished human femur, and blew.
The note spilled out was not a sound, but a wave of pure, unadulterated dread. It was the feeling of a tomb lid sealing forever. It was the final, panicked heartbeat.
"NO! DON'T! I'M NOT AN INTRUDER! I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHERE I AM!"
The dread-note echoed through the vastness of the Underworld, and the realm answered its call. From the shadows between pillars, more guards materialized, seething into existence. They rose dripping from the screaming rivers, their bodies slick with black water.