As I open my eyes, I have a number of questions that make my head spin in so grotesque a fashion that my consciousness is startled into a kind of panicked clarity that makes the world momentarily slow down. Where am I? Why can’t I remember falling asleep? What is that horrible burning sensation on my back that makes me feel like I’m on fire?

Where I am is uncertain, but my brain somehow hasn’t gone into shock from the latter question, so I try to piece it together. I only see darkness above me. It’s a sky, but there are no clouds. No stars. Only an oppressive sense of oblivion. There is literally NOTHING above me. And I seem to only be able to orient my frozen body to look that way for the moment.

Where is the ceiling? Where is the sky? Am I dreaming? Is that what this is? It feels so real, but what else could it be? What I'm seeing doesn't mesh with reality as I know it. I have more important things to worry about than hypotheticals though. Back to the pressing questions.

As I try to concentrate on my memory to parse what the hell is going on, I feel terror as I realize that there’s nothing there. I understand logic and reason. Language and meaning I understand the horror that grips me when I realize that there is nothing I can recall. But my personal memory is simply… gone. No, wait. A mote of recognition from which spiderwebs to a number of other important factors. A starting point.

My name is Tyler. Tyler Snow. I struggle to touch much of anything beyond that, but I grasp for everything I can, the horror of an empty existence leaving me as I grasp at the few stray strands of identity that the name leads to. Nineteen years old. College student… Male… It’s gone. Nothing else comes to mind, just a few critical details of my self. That’s all I get for now, I suppose.

And that gets me to the burning feeling. My thoughts return to my physical senses as I feel the burning peeling at my back, the skin burning raw by now as I put a name to the sensation. I’m falling. I’m falling REALLY fast.

As soon as the reality of my situation crashes into me, I feel my back suddenly slam into something. It doesn’t stop me. It doesn't even feel like it's my body that's struck it. It feels like something shatters against something deeper than that as I’m forced through an intangible barrier, and suddenly my physical senses feel far more real. I feel like I've finally woken up.

I gasp for air, and I flail my arms, hoping uselessly to find some kind of purchase against the air, but none comes. I’m freefalling toward the-

I turn my head up, seeing ground at the top of my vision. The burning sensation is the friction of air as I drop at terminal velocity toward a far distant ground. I am somehow miles in the air, and I’m dropping fast.

I want to scream, but oriented facing down as I now was, I can’t take in air as it barrels past me. I turn myself back over to stare at the empty sky and take a breath.

What the fuck. WHAT THE FUCK!? I am plummeting toward the ground from so high up, I don’t even think planes can reach this high!

As the knowledge of what ‘airplane’ means quickly and automatically fills in a few disparate blanks in my memory, I begin to wonder if this was some kind of night skydiving gone wrong? But who skydives without a parachute?! I blink as another realization hits me because the friction burns I feel tear against the entirety of my skin. Who skydives naked?!

I breathe in deeply, over and over again as the reality of my situation dawns on me. I panic and begin to flail impotently at the air. I am going to die. I have no idea who I am or what I’m doing, I am plummeting toward Earth with nothing but my birthday suit, and I am going to slam into the ground and die, and there is nothing I can do about it!

I scream loudly, knowing it won’t change anything. Then I take a deep breath and turn my head back again to see what I’m moving toward. A city. I’m going to splatter myself across the sidewalk right in the middle of a city street, aren’t I? Or across the top of an office building, or…

Something feels wrong about what I’m seeing below me. There are no lights. Yet I can see the definition of the buildings just fine from this high up.

I spin around again to look back up at the… it’s still nothing. No moon. No stars. No clouds. Of course, at this height, I would actually be above the clouds, so I should have kept looking down for those. So what was illuminating the ground? I get the distinct feeling of something being unsettlingly wrong about where I am.

But who cares about that? I’m going to die! I scream again, but it catches in my throat as I see another shape in the distance. Something else tumbling through the sky. Is that… another person? I see a vaguely human shape flailing about much as I am in the distance. I turn to look around elsewhere, and I see a few others, all far away from me. I’m not the only one falling out of the sky, and I can’t see any conceivable reason we should be dropping from anywhere together. Just what is happening?

I see more movement in the corner of my eye and look to see another shape that… it must be human, but… it’s moving UP instead of down. I can’t see far enough to make out detail, but it looked like it launched from one of the large buildings, and it’s moving up toward one of the other falling people.

Wait, I know what this is. Superheroes? My addled brain started putting together pieces that it doesn’t understand, trying to make the reality of the situation make sense. Is that person getting rescued? Could I be rescued? I feel hope begin to bloom in my heart before my memory kicks in again and I realize that superheroes are fictional. Unreal. So what was I looking at?

Staring at the figures approaching each other, I watch as they make contact. And then there are three shapes. The falling figure continues to flail, but… the flying one holds onto what looks like it’s been torn half of the falling person’s body, vivisected from thigh to neck, mercifully too distant to make out the details of its spilling gore.

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WHAT THE FUCK?!

My mind races at a million miles per hour, unsure what I just witnessed, but I have to look away. I can’t see the details, but I’d seen enough to know that it was gruesome. I don’t want to scream anymore. I definitely didn’t want anyone to intercept me. I can’t believe that my preference for this situation is an instant death splattering into the buildings below me. I can’t believe that that’s the merciful outcome!

I can’t help but feel that this situation is profoundly unfair. What did I do to deserve this? Maybe I can have some peace with my impending death if I can put that together, but memories aren’t forthcoming, they just trickle in as I take in the world around me and find invisible tangents with hidden knowledge of things that I get the impression that I already know.

I take a deep breath and turn completely over, holding my arms out to brace slightly against the wind shear. I get the distinct feeling that the wind should hurt a lot more than it does, but it doesn’t, so I table that thought. I need more information, maybe something will awaken a memory of where I am.

A city… it has paved streets, concrete buildings, but something looks… wrong. It’s like the buildings are just set pieces. They lack the veneer of commercially pleasing aesthetics, instead displaying raw concrete, misshapen architecture, angles that make no sense for people to use. Skeletons of what should make a city rather than actual homes and businesses. Businesses… did I have a job? I was a student, but… right, yeah, I worked at a little coffee shop on campus.

I looked around briefly to see that mercifully there were no approaching figures ready to rip me to shreds, and closed my eyes to follow that train of thought. Anything to stave off my impending doom for another moment and make peace with my nebulous sense of self. Coffee shop in the middle of town, right on the corner of the street. What town? Not relevant.

This is hard. I open my eyes again and whimper at the approaching ground. How long do I have? A lot longer than feels reasonable. I’m approaching the ground rapidly, but I started so unreasonably high in the air that I’m not sure that I didn't start my journey in space. But it was a measure of minutes until impact.

I spin around to take another deep breath, trying in vain to relieve what’s becoming an irritating burn on every side of my skin, and then look at the ground again. The streets. There was something important about the street. I felt that tangent fizzle out, though. No matter how hard I try, I can’t shake that thought that there was something in the road. I shake my head. Okay, dead end there.

I let out a whimper. Maybe I don’t have as long as I thought. Oh my god, I’m going to die and I’m sitting here trying to wonder why traffic is important to me. What the hell am I doing? What else am I supposed to do, though? Call out for help and hope to be eviscerated before I get splattered? What kind of choice is that?

Time feels like it slows down as I make my approach. This is it. I’m going to slam directly into that tall building. I can’t watch. I turn to face up and watch a tear float up above me from my eye, bracing for harsh pain followed by blackness.

I feel my back impact with the top of the concrete building and pain sings through my body, breath leaves my lungs, and concrete collapses around me. My eyes go wide as I feel terrible crushing pain course through me, the sheer force of my impact not only ripping through the concrete, but then tearing into the metal structure reinforcing it from within, and I expect that to be the end of it.

But then the roof collapses entirely under the force of my impact, doing nothing to slow me down. My back impacts the next floor down, then another, then another, each time sending me to a new level of agony I didn’t think possible as the sharp bits of stone and metal rip through my back. I watch as the edges of the hole above me start to show blood and torn viscera, my own body’s guts hanging from the broken rebar of the building, and I somehow remain conscious as my body tears itself to shreds against each floor of the building, then continues down to the next to destroy my body even more before the energy of my descent finally displaces itself against the ground, cracking down into an enormous crater beneath me in a deafening crash.

I shiver, my eyes fill with terror as I look up at the empty sky and the dripping bloody fragments of my torso hanging in pieces all over the dozen floors above me. My body refuses to obey my instructions, simply shivering in sheer shock as I try and fail to ignore the pain. The unbearable pain. I have to wonder how much of my body actually remains in the pile at the bottom of this brutalist mockery of architecture.

How… am I conscious? How am I alive? I whimper, my twitching muscles delivering new pangs of horrid suffering through what remains of my body as I undeniably feel the pressure of numerous objects sticking all the way through my sternum. My ears ring, my vision blurs in and out, and I can’t feel anything except burning, all-consuming pain. I can taste blood on my lips. I feel like every bone in my body must be broken. But I’m alive.

Aside from the dust settling from my meteoric impact with the building around me and the thundering ringing in my ears, the area around me is deafeningly quiet. Eerily so. The only thing I can hear in my surroundings is my own faint whimpering and the sound of blood slowly pooling beneath me while I choke on the taste of iron on my lips.

I can’t move. Will I ever move again? Will this miraculous survival even last long at all without intervention? Where are the inhabitants of this nightmare city?

The sound of slow padding footsteps rings out through the silence. Oh god, yes. Help is arriving. Then I remember the person that I watched torn in half up in the sky and froze. No, wait, no, this isn’t going to be help, is it? This is going to be the opposite of help. I try to get any of my muscles to respond, every instinct I have screaming to flee, but everything is too tired. Too damaged. I can’t even move a hand to my body to check what exactly is running me through at the moment. I suppose I was going to bleed out pretty quickly despite surviving this, though. Having something tear me apart just sped up the process, right?

I watch from the corner of my vision as the shape of a person walks right into the room and watches me from a distance, from beyond where I can make out any details, and turning my head is out of the question. They aren’t saying anything, and they don’t seem alarmed. Then suddenly, a sultry voice that makes me release a shuddering gasp speaks up “I didn’t think I’d get one delivered right to my doorstep.” she lets out an amused giggle as she steps over me, and I can’t believe what I was seeing.

A woman towers over my broken form. Her eyes are a deep crimson, her hair long and black, and she wears only a pair of tube-shaped pieces of thin cloth carressing her ridiculously-proportioned chest and the luscious curves of her waist. Most alarmingly of all, from behind her, I can see a pair of leathery wings and a thin spade-tipped tail that curls lazily around her own leg as she takes a step closer. A pair of small horns crowns her smiling face.

Terror grips me and my whimpers grow louder as my mind dredges up another shred of memory. I know exactly what this is.

Succubus.