Alex persisted, each step less a stride than a lunge, as if stopping would let something catch up to him.
He bit at his nails. The thrill of the hunt had become him—sharp, familiar. Something else moved beneath it, uninvited, threading through his thoughts without shape or name.
He came upon it gradually: bundles of dead trees collapsed inward, their bark blackened, their interiors hollowed. Not burned wildly—emptied. The air carried a scent that did not belong to fire alone. He followed it.
Smoke hovered ahead, low and patient, parting as he advanced. The trees thinned, not cut or broken, but dispersed, as if unwilling to stand too close.
The clearing opened around him.
At its center lay a basin of coals, red and steady, arranged with intention. Heat rose without flame. The ground beneath it had sunk, forming a wide, shallow furnace that glowed with a light too dense to flicker.
Alex slowed.
Everything beyond the coals felt incomplete. The trees at the edge of the clearing blurred at their outlines, their forms thinning, as though detail had been taken from them and not returned.
Looking into the furnace, he had the disquieting sense that the sky had been altered—that something distant and innumerable had been gathered, compressed, and left to burn here.
As if someone had plucked all the stars in the sky, one by one, and this was where they ended..
"Well—this isn't bad. Not bad at all. Too bad I can't eat it." Alex growled.
The words surprised him.
He could imagine it.
Life here.
In the nightmare.
Not grinding himself to death in the real world—the things he didn't understand, and hiding his vulnerability even from himself.
Here, he could pour out desire.
Embrace the heat.
The intensity of life.
No guilt.
No judgment.
No gods.
The voices stirred:
"Stay," The menacing voice from before commanded
"We'd die eventually," The hesitance in him warned. "Nothing lasts forever."
"I want to go home," The frail whispered.
But even that voice sounded distant now.
Fading.
Like it was speaking from somewhere far away, through walls that kept thickening.
Alex stared into the coals.
And for the second time in his life—
He considered it.
Really considered it.
Just... staying.
Becoming part of the nightmare.
Letting the rest of him burn away until only hunger remained.
— — —
Alex lay down, refusing to yield to the turmoil in his mind—at least, not yet.
Hours passed. He began to recount his life in fragments.
His parents surfaced first. He tried not to think of his mother, but the image came anyway—the entity that had worn her body like a ventriloquist's doll. Even that didn't make his anger boil. That scared him more than the memory itself.
He didn't understand. Not what had happened since he awakened. Not anything since he had been born.
His father followed. Alex could say many things about him, but only one mattered now: his ambition had damned him.
"They say the sins of the father are visited upon the son," Alex muttered. "Guess it's true. Is this my reckoning?"
The answer came uninvited.
It was his ambition that killed Milo. Not fear.
The thought cracked something open.
"WHY DO I ACT LIKE THIS?"
His voice echoed, raw.
"WHY DO I COMPLAIN SO MUCH? WHY DO I ACT LIKE I KNOW EVERYTHING—LIKE MY DECISIONS ACTUALLY MATTER?"
He laughed, sharp and broken.
"EVERYONE I KNOW IS PROBABLY DEAD. AND I'M STILL HERE, THINKING I CAN JUST WALK AWAY."
— — —