Plop. Plop. Plop
Raindrops fell all around the barren street. On the sides lay piles upon piles of rubble. Broken walls that had fallen from tall buildings, were scattered all over the unpaved dirt road. Amidst this walked a boy, with a weak frame and puckered face. And worst of all, he was barefoot.
Every step he took tore a piece of skin from his foot. The path he had been walking on was already covered with a layer of dark red. Rats and roaches gathered behind, nibbling on those luscious red scraps as a form of nourishment. Even within all this pain, the boy walked on and on.
He knew no one, he knew nothing. No human had acknowledged him, no human had even conversed with him. It was as though he was never present at all.
Life in the outskirts was bad under normal conditions, but his life was worse than it all. Unknown, unseen and misunderstood, he had learned about life through pain and horrors alone. He learnt language and about emotions, simply by looking through windows at others. He ate purely from the leftovers which he could find around. It had gone to the point that even a few dregs of edible substance that he found, would be considered a 'hearty' meal.
And when it comes to money... Ha! He had none of that.
Worst of all was the fact that when enduring all this suffering in his life, he had felt a relentless urge to sleep as of late. Even he knew what that truly meant. He was infected by the vile, dreadful spell.
He had listened through the windows of many shacks and had learnt a good deal about that unstoppable horror. He'd heard stories of people who had slept and never woken up again. That spell, which took in humans under its wing, just to devour them for its own sustenance. The dreadful hunter, the loathsome beast. The nightmare.
And this was also the reason he was doing something he should have never done. He was staying awake.
He had not slept for more than 3 sunrises at this point, and he couldn't even remember the last time he had seen a person. When he had realised that he was infected, his first and only thought was to flee. Flee human civilization and to die in the hands of that cruel hunter.
It was a stroke of serendipity that he had found this jagged and abandoned road to nowhere, which led to the outskirts of the outskirts themselves. This was the most uninhabited region of the outskirts and probably the entirety of the NQSC. And he would sleep there, in peace.
It took a few more hours for him to reach the gate of the abandoned hideaway, far away from any human contact. The people here had been killed by a rogue sandstorm a long time ago, and no human had visited since.
He stumbled inside, his foot bleeding beyond comprehension, his eyes dark and empty without the hint of any light.
And then, sleep overtook him, and he collapsed onto the cold, stone floor.
[Aspirant! Welcome to the Nightmare Spell. Prepare for your First Trial...!?]