I scrambled blindly away from the charnel pit. In my haste I collided with a heavy, wet mass hanging from the ceiling. I hit the ground and lost all sense of where I was. My feet felt wet and sticky.

Lost, I forced myself to get close to the object in an effort to cast light upon it.

Hanging upside down from a large meat hook, was the pallid corpse of a young man. His head hung back at an angle revealing his slashed throat. The grey hook pierced through his calves where the flesh was thicker. And because the body's ankles were shorn through. An almost severed foot dangled loosely from a strap of fat and skin. His chest was torn up as well. Several deep slashes cut right through his leather chestplate. The tattered flesh within was grey and weeping.

I scrambled away from the corpse and dry heaved. But the surface of the ground shifted and I flailed wildly. Deep grooves in the ground trailed out from beneath the corpse. Dried blood stained the edges. The grooves grew wider. They branched across the ground and soon I was leaping off of one misplaced step to another.

Virtually blind, I crashed into a stone countertop, knocking over a wooden cup filled with a fine, dark powder.

Well and truly out of curiosity, I paced along the wall until I rediscovered the wooden door I entered through. No disgruntled voices could be heard on the other side, nor the shrieking of an imminently collapsing roof beam. Not satisfied, but out of patience, I eased the door ajar to catch a glimpse of what awaited me.

Stillness. The room was much brighter, thanks to a long smear of purple light the width of a human being spanning half the room. The stack of debris was no more. A single timber beam remained on the granite slab and the remaining splintered wood was scattered about in low-lying piles.

The hole in the ceiling was more visible now and through the serrated, gaping hole above was what appeared to be a dust-caked storage room. There were even sweeping strands of spiderwebs covering cloth-covered boxes and shelves. How quaint.

Content that the room was secure, I slunk in. Quietly and firmly, I secured the door behind me.

Dodging the dust, splinters and smelly fluid, I made for the only other door in the room. It was locked, but from the inside. I unbolted it and rested my hand on the handle.

My hand was trembling at this point. I glared at it, and gripped more tightly, stilling the tremors. It was at that moment, with my shining body alighting the door, that I saw my hand clearly for the first time under light. A lustrous grey metal coated my entire forearm, all the way up to my elbow.

Pockmarked and grainy, but devoid of rust or corrosion, the metal crept up my arm in decreasing volume. My hands were smooth and almost totally covered, barring the inside creases of my fingers and palm. The metal surged up my ulna towards the elbow, and then swept down to the inside of my arm in drifting, wispy patterns. The surface was rough to the touch. Up close, I could see it was composed of an intricate lattice of interlocking microscopic cubes.

I released the door handle, stepped back and took a good look at my body. The body that I had possessed. That I had hijacked?

My feet were bare. Though, not completely. More of the lustrous grey metal covered them. Metal concentrated over my shin bones and knees, creeping backwards to my calves.

I reached underneath my cuirass and felt my chest. First I noticed my ribs, which protruded out concerningly. Below them, my stomach shrank in and my hips stuck at sharp angles. The realisation I was underweight recontextualised the numbing pain felt in my gut. What I thought was the pain of bruising was in fact incessant hunger.

Shaking off the eclectic unease which had begun stabbing at my brain, I continued probing my body. More grainy metal coated the left of my chest in a patch over my heart that extended up and over the right of my neck.

Rather disconcertingly, my left nipple seemed to have completely vanished beneath the metal. Elsewhere, palm-sized patches marked my back and right side, along with a smattering of scars and blisters for good measure.

The metal wasn’t heavy thankfully, but the feeling in my fingers and everywhere else the metal covered, was dulled. Not erased, but dulled.

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For an entire minute I lost myself, tracing my palm with my fingertips in a circle. Around and around again. The sensation was cool and glassy. The sound was hypnotic.

A lingering spear of wood dropped to the ground behind me, shattering into a frayed mess. The disturbance snapped me out of my trance-like state and I shook my head in an attempt to regain some semblance of focus.

Keen to avoid any more potential falling debris, I reached for the door handle again, only to discover a crumpled mess of iron in its stead. The metal was bowed and dented where each of my fingers had wrapped around it.

I gingerly reached out to turn the handle, but it snapped clean off. I grabbed hopelessly at the mangled stub of twisted metal to no avail. The door remained shut.

Anxiety shot through my body like electricity, and a sizzling pop resounded from my spine. With nothing else left to grab, I jammed my hands into the small gap between the door and the wall, and pulled hard.

The iron band of metal that lined the outside of the door buckled under the stress, and the wood collapsed behind it. I stared for a few moments, in awe of my own strength, then with my newfound purchase, slowly dragged the door open. The hinges screamed and the wood protested loudly the entire way.

Though my grip strength was certainly frightful, my stamina and upper body strength was not. The effort was draining, and the moment the door was wide enough, I leapt outside. Wind brushed my metal feet as the door crashed behind me.

I slumped to the ground as cold nighttime air introduced itself with pleasant numbness. My face was slick with sweat. I reached up with both hands to wipe it off and swung my head involuntarily backwards at the sight of my metal fingers. It seemed best to keep the crushing metal vices that were my hands, away from my head until I gained some self-control.

Pale amber moonlight cast a hushed glow upon my sprawled body at the base of a narrow, steep staircase. The steps were stained a deep black colour and a thick, chalky grey substance was pressed into the tops of the stone steps.

The sky above was a deep blue, like the darkest waters of the ocean. At its centre, a hazy circle of soft amber light radiated from a small crescent moon - half the size of Earth’s. There were few stars present. I could see only their distant pinpricks of light in the small rectangle of sky at the top of the staircase.

I was beginning to feel quite drowsy, and the night sky reinforced that feeling. However, I determined it was likely best not to spend the night in the freaky, crumbling mess that I had just created. The ‘fresh’-ish body strung up in the room with the pit, and the bioluminescent mess that covered myself and the floor behind me suggested there was some form of life around here. Not that I wanted to meet them, but at the very least, I could perhaps find someplace that hadn’t been so blatantly intruded upon. Even if in reality, I hadn’t intruded, but instead broken out.

Weak, either from trauma or hunger, I wasn’t certain, I heaved myself off the ground with my hands, leaving a purple handprint behind. That was a problem.

Though the light had been helpful getting around, this blatantly placed me at the centre of the crime - not that it ought to have been a crime, but if I were the owner of this horrid charnel pit, I would probably consider the intruder liable for the damages.

And if I were a maniac who hung corpses on bloody meat hooks, I think compensation may just include a little more than money. Maybe something like bodily mutilation, or immolation!

Hastily I swept my hands along the sooty, dusty walls of the stairwell, gathering as much grit and filth as I could to cover my hands and torso, whilst I smeared the handprint into the grimy gunk on the ground with my foot. The purple residue rolled off me in gooey, grainy chunks. The grit was thick enough to swallow the light entirely, so I just nudged the flabby goo into the corners of the stairwell.

Eventually, all that remained adhered to me was the pungent smell of rotten fish. That would have to remain unfortunately.

Red faced, soiled with grime and sporting a nasty graze on my chin I began my trek up the sixteen steps to the outside. I counted each one as I progressed. My blood pulsed hot and loud through my temples. Each pulse synched with each step.

Hopes and doubts danced through my mind. The words of the omnipresent stranger who sent me here replayed over and over - a planet which “suits my needs”. A world of danger and excitement. Could this place really be what I longed for? Somewhere I can be someone? Somewhere I can do something great with my life? Affect change? This was a brand new, fantastical world! Everything I’d dreamed of! A smile managed to ease its way onto my face.

I stopped at the top step. A dilapidated watchtower slumped behind me. Before me was desolation. A barren, ashen landscape topped with cracked spires of charcoal and scorched rock. There was not a blade of grass in the ground, only jagged gnarled roots poking up from the blistered earth to reveal their barbed heads. Murky pale pools dotted the landscape. Steam drifted up from their turbulent surfaces. In the distance a low-lying stronghold built behind a dark stone wall lurked behind scarred slopes. A few purple lights bobbed up and down atop the wall. Bleak grey towers peeked just over the edge, their roofs smeared oily black from the ash.

My smile dropped. No, this was decidedly not the world I had longed for.