"Where am I?"
Kyle's voice came out low, a little hoarse, as if he hadn't spoken in a long time.
He stood in the middle of an open meadow—wide, quiet, and oddly empty. Rolling hills sat in the distance, small and gentle, not steep enough to hide anything.
The ground was soft beneath his bare feet, but not wet. Not warm. Not cold. It was simply... there.
Herbs surrounded him in uneven waves. Some stalks rose high enough to brush his chest, while others barely reached his thigh.
Wildflowers were scattered between them in quiet patches—small, pale blooms and brighter ones that looked almost too clean, as if they'd grown wherever they pleased.
Farther out, a few lone shrubs dotted the field, each one sitting by itself, separated from each other.
The plants shifted softly, swaying in a faint rhythm caused by the wind.
Kyle watched them for a moment... then frowned.
He didn't feel any wind.
No brush of air against his bare skin. No coolness. No warmth. Nothing at all—yet the plants kept moving as if something was passing through it.
It was strange.
He lifted his head toward the sky.
It wasn't blue.
A pale yellow stretched overhead, washing the world in a tired kind of light. It was like sunrise, but different—as if the sky's original color was a faint, weak yellow.
Thin clouds hung above in soft, uneven shapes... and they didn't move. Not even slightly.
Kyle stared for several seconds, waiting for a drift, for change... but they simply stayed there, fixed in the same place no matter how long he watched.
The light wasn't coming from any source he could see—there was no sun, and there was no moon either.
There was no glare, no location, no direction to it—just an even, sickly glow that made the meadow look flat in the wrong way.
It was strange.
In the distance, a few birds crossed the sky.
At least, Kyle thought they were birds.
They were too far to make out clearly, and that was what bothered him. Some of them weren't even that high, yet his eyes couldn't focus on them properly.
They blurred at the edges, then sharpened, then blurred again—as if his eyes couldn't decide what they were looking at.
He blinked once. Then again, harder.
His gaze dropped to a cluster of flowers nearby, and for a split second the edges looked... strange. It seemed to smear, as if his eyes had become wet glass.
Not blurred exactly—more like they didn't hold shape until he stared directly at them. When he did, they snapped into clarity, like nothing had happened.
It was strange.
Kyle swallowed.
`Is my vision... blurring?`
His senses felt wrong in small, irritating ways. Not broken—just inconsistent.
But suddenly a more terrifying thought occurred to him.
`Maybe it wasn't my eyes... Maybe it was the place.`
That idea was worse.
And then there was the sound.
At first, Kyle thought it was the wind passing through the herbs. But the noise wasn't steady.
It came and went, faint and uneven. A low hum, like the humming of a living being, distant enough to be hard to place, close enough to make him notice it.
Kyle turned his head slightly, trying to figure out where it was coming from.
He couldn't.
The sound was everywhere and nowhere, like it existed inside the light rather than the air.
It was strange.
Kyle's stomach tightened.
The last thing he clearly remembered was Alara's room. Warmth. The bed. Her voice.
Then—Nothing.
No memory of getting here. No memory of transition. There wasn't even any memory of waking up here. Just like when you wake up from sleep, you couldn't remember exactly when you woke up.
Kyle breathed in slowly and tried to steady his thoughts.
That was when the worst part hit him.
The feeling.
`Have I... have I been here before?`
A faint, crawling certainty that this wasn't his first time seeing this place.
Kyle's eyes swept the meadow again, slower now, as if searching for a missing piece he didn't know how to describe. The hills in the distance. The uneven herbs. The frozen yellow sky.
It felt familiar in the worst way.
As if this place had been sitting in the back of his mind, waiting for him to notice it.
`I've been here.`
The thought made his spine go stiff.
It was strange.
Kyle stood still, not because he chose to, but because his body seemed to understand something his mind didn't yet.
His gaze drifted across the field again—grass, flowers, shrubs, hills, sky.
Nothing moved properly. Nothing behaved properly. And yet everything looked harmless.
That was what made it worse.
Then—
`Look at me.`
Kyle froze.
His body reacted before his mind did. A sharp tension locked his muscles, and a thin tremor ran through him like a warning.
He heard something... No, he didn't hear. The words simply... appeared in his head—complete, understood, and not his.
His pulse kicked hard.
A sudden urge surged up inside him, sharp and undeniable.
`Turn around.`
Kyle's jaw clenched. Every instinct screamed that turning in situations like this never ended well.
And yet the urge didn't fade.
`Turn.`
His fingers curled into fists.
His body resisted for one breathless moment.
Then, slowly—too slowly... he turned.
And there... He saw it.