"I… I shouldn't have drunk this much. My head… my head feels… dizzy."
Leon struggled through the darkness before falling to his bed in a heap. The room seemed to spin around him in vicious, violent whorls. Pressing one hand to his temple, Leon could feel a pounding ache in his head. "Wh… what time is it?"
The door creaked, and a figure stood in its doorway.
"Uncle? Uncle Julian… is that you?" Leon slurred, squinting through the darkness.
But there was no reply. The figure moved back, and the door closed.
"Oh… he's gone already," Leon said into his pillow, bitterness filling his mouth. Shifting in his sheets, Leon was struck by an unpleasant smell that invaded his nostrils. Coughing at the stench, Leon pushed himself up using his elbows. "W-why do I smell like this? W-what is that smell?"
It smelt like ozone, like burning copper and death.
Then there was the sound – a soft buzzing coming from his bedroom window pane.
"What is that sound?"
Leon staggered to his feet and walked toward the window unsteadily, as if made out of lead. But just as he stretched his fingers toward the glass, the buzz abruptly stopped.
"Why did it stop?"
Then-
A blinding, incandescent light exploded from the center of the room. The silence vanished, replaced by a deafening, mechanical roar that shook the very foundations of the manor.
"Aah! What is happening?!" Leon screamed, shielding his eyes as the air pressure dropped, violently pulling at his clothes. He spun around, desperately lunging toward the door to escape, but his drunken balance betrayed him. He tripped over his own feet, crashing hard onto the floor. "No! Wha—"
Before his scream could leave his throat, the light violently imploded. The roar ceased. The bedroom, the manor, and Leon vanished from the face of the earth.
An endlessly expansive sky colored with the intense, seeping hues of an orange bleed loomed above him. The screams of carrion eagles resounded in the vastness.
A stench of ghostly, decaying spirits drifted on the warm breeze across the lands, while the cold, unforgiving surface underneath bore the frozen bodies of dead people.
Leon's eyes shot open. He gulped hard, inhaling air that smelled of smoke.
"Huh? Am… am I dreaming? Where-? What place is this?"
As he stood up, the reality of his surroundings immediately cleared the fog of inebriation out of his mind. He was wide awake now. He furiously started to wipe away the dirt-colored grime off his costly garments.
"DODGE!!"
The roar split the air. Leon, still disoriented, stood frozen like a stone statue.
An iron grip slammed into his shoulder, violently ripping him backward just as a massive shadow fell over him. Leon's eyes widened, reflecting not a man, but a living nightmare. His throat went completely dry, and a high-pitched shriek tore from his lungs.
The entity was a towering colossus constructed entirely of jagged, shifting boulders. It possessed no eyes, no mouth, no human features—just the brutal, terrifying silhouette of a rogue Golem. As it slammed its stone fist into the earth where Leon had just been standing, the shockwave rippled through the dirt, sending a jolt of pure, agonizing fear straight up Leon's spine.
"What are you doing?! Do you want to die?!"
The voice belonged to a man in his late thirties, clad in scarred armor and wielding a notched broadsword.
"Is... is this a dream?" Leon stammered, his voice trembling.
"A dream?!" the warrior snarled, parrying a stray shard of rock. "Get out of here, you lunatic! You'll get us all killed! Who the hell even hired this guy?!"
"Hired?". "What is he talking about? Where am I?"
The boulder monster crouched, then launched its massive body into the air, leaping to the height of the surrounding dead trees, descending upon them like a falling meteor.
"Oh, no! Lyvia, seal it now!!" the warrior cried.
The burst of mystical energy came from up on the ridge. An intricate web of magical bindings appeared within the air surrounding the plummeting Golem, immobilizing the creature in mid-air.
Without any loss of time, the warrior grabbed Leon by his shirt and threw him atop the back of a nearby warhorse, which he then urged forward with reckless haste as the magical binding started cracking.
Some way down the road, the warrior stopped the horse and shoved Leon off. Leon fell to the ground.
"Get out of here and run for your life, kid!" the warrior shouted without sparing so much as a glance as he turned the horse around to rejoin the battle.
"But where... what is happening?!" Leon cried out, but his voice was swallowed by the wind.
The man was gone. Leon stood entirely alone in the desolate wasteland. Every pampered instinct told him this was a cruel prank, but the raw scrape on his palms and the violent heat of the orange sky screamed a singular, terrifying truth, his life was in danger.
He turned and began to run. But his heavy, luxurious noble garments—the thick velvet cloak, the embroidered tunic, the heavy leather boots—dragged him down like iron weights. Panting, his chest burning, he frantically tore the expensive clothes off his body. Stranded in nothing but his thin silk pajamas, he kept running.
Suddenly, a low, guttural growl echoed from the brush.
A small beast crept out onto the path. Leon skidded to a halt. His mind, conditioned to the safety of his family's estate, rationalized the threat. "It's just a small animal. I can defeat that, right?"
But then he saw its eyes. They were a burning, demonic crimson, glowing with a parasitic, unnatural flow. Panic seized him. Leon took a step, grabbed a stone from the dirt, and hurled it towards the creature, hoping to scare it away.
The beast didn't flinch. With fierce speed, its barbed tail whipped forward, catching the stone mid-air, spinning it, and hurling it back at Leon with twice the velocity.
"Aah!" Leon shouted out in pain, squeezing his wounded arm tightly. It had cut into him deeply enough. His bright blood trickled between his fingers. "My hand… it… it is bleeding!"
He ran away, while soft soles were bleeding from the cutting rocks below him. That monster was clicking its claws against rocks, closing the gap easily.
"I am going to die. I am going to die!"
Leon's leg got caught in roots. He rolled to the ground, scratching his face against the dirt. He turned his body around just in time to see that crimson monster coil its legs and jump towards him, teeth wide open in order to tear his throat out.
"Is this the end?" Leon thought, as the scene slowed down. "But why… why did it happen to me…"
In that instant when everything went grey, something that came from long ago and was stored in Leon's blood rose to the surface. Leon did not have a sword. Leon did not have any flow. But he did have the dirt.
Leon threw ash-filled soil right in the face of jumping monster, rolling to dodge.
The creature missed its mark, crashing into the dirt and clawing frantically at its blinded eyes.
Leon scrambled to his knees. His gaze fell upon a jagged rock the size of a human head. For a fraction of a second, he hesitated. This wasn't a disobedient servant he could throw a cup at. This was a killer. If he didn't strike, he would be eaten.
With a breathless cry, Leon hoisted the heavy stone and threw it blindly at the thrashing creature. He didn't wait to see if it landed. He turned and ran, never looking back. Behind him, the heavy thud of the rock pinning the beast's tail to the ground echoed, followed by a frustrated, muffled screech.
Leon ran until his lungs felt like they were filled with broken glass. He ran for an hour straight, his silk pajamas torn to shreds, his bare feet bleeding and coated in grey dust. Finally, his body gave out. He collapsed against a withered tree, using a thick, sturdy fallen branch he found as a crutch just to keep his knees from buckling.
He looked up. The oppressive orange sky was deepening into a bruised, violent purple. "The sun's going to go down soon," he whispered, his voice cracking from dehydration.
As the shadows lengthened, Leon spotted a small, shallow cave-like opening in the side of a jagged ravine.
He almost crawled into it. It smelled of soil, damp stones, and the musty smell of age, but at least it would provide some sort of protection from the cold winds that started blowing around the desert. As soon as he sat down, all the adrenaline in him disappeared, and his legs were shaking uncontrollably.
Shivering violently, he forced himself to crawl back to the mouth of the cave, gathering a few dry twigs and dead leaves, just as he had seen the manor servants do a thousand times when lighting the fire for him.
He grabbed two sharp pieces of flint from the cave floor. With trembling, blood-stained hands, he struck them together.
Spark.
A feeble and pathetic spark that died off before it reached the leaves.
He continued, faster and harder each time as his knuckles turned red from the harsh collision of stones until he was finally breathing heavily.
"Why is this not working?! Why can't I-?!"
His shouts reverberated around the cavern. Nothing happened. As before, nothing happened except for the weak sparks disappearing into the darkness of the night.
He gave up, his body falling down on the ground, feeling the weight of reality bearing down on him. For the first time ever in his sixteen years, he truly felt that without all his titles, all his money and the servants he hated so much... he was nothing. He didn't even know how to light a fire to survive the coming night.
Shaking and tired from the exhaustion of everything that had happened, he fell asleep on the hard floor of the cavern.
The night crawled over the desolate realm like a shroud.
There were no distant lanterns of a patrolling guard. No warm voices from a dining hall. No signs of human life for miles. Above the shivering boy, an endless, heavy sky held a constellation of cold, unblinking stars that offered no comfort, no matter how long one stared into the abyss. The wind that snuck into the cave smelled of ancient dust, dried blood, and a faint, rotting stench of corruption. The very earth felt dead, as if this realm had long forgotten what life was supposed to feel like.
Morning arrived with agonizing slowness.
The pitch-black sky bled into pale, sickly shades of orange as the first light crept across the scarred horizon, illuminating the endless fractures and craters of the wasteland. The wind howled through the empty plains, carrying the distant, unnatural screams of nameless creatures beneath the rising sun.
For a single, fleeting moment, the vast emptiness almost looked peaceful. But the broken ground and the scattered, skeletal remains across the dirt were a permanent reminder of the horror of this place.
The pale sunlight drifted into the cave, touching Leon's face. It brought no warmth.
Leon's eyes slowly opened, his joints stiff and aching from the freezing cold. He looked at his bleeding feet, his torn silk clothes, and the desolate waste stretching before him.
The final realization cemented itself in his chest. It... was never a dream.