There were flames, and there was blood. There was screaming, and there were claws, fangs, and eyes.

Cai couldn’t tell where any one of these things ended and the next started, but they were all there, swirling around him in a gory, violent inferno.

The blood, as hot as the core of a star, washed over him like a tidal wave. He fought against it, but his efforts were futile. He could taste nothing but the thick, scorching viscera surrounding him, and his screams did little more than to form a number of meaningless bubbles in the crimson maelstrom.

The blood assaulted his ears, screaming directly into them. A cacophony of a thousand voices wailing out in terror. Cai felt his eardrums burst, yet the sound only grew louder in response.

Cai still fought, but the currents had made him lose his bearings. He tried to swim, hoping to reach either the surface or the bottom, but the pressure on his limbs was so great that to simply move them felt like torture. He felt like a ragdoll in a blast test, helpless to control even his own motion.

The air he still had in his lungs was starting to run out. He managed to resist the urge to try to breathe for about a minute more, the toxins building up in his muscles only adding to the pain, then his instincts took the reins and sucked his lungs full of the scalding red, causing Cai to double over in agony.

Now realizing that fresh air was not likely to present itself anytime soon, his body shifted its metabolism to survival mode.

Cai’s consciousness wanted to fade, but there was something keeping him awake, something more powerful than even the pain. He looked up, knowing that it was the eyes. The eyes were all that was visible through the scarlet murk of blood. There were hundreds of them, floating freely through the sea of blood, though only a few remained fixated on him. The rest spun wildly and erratically. Cai wasn’t sure if they were suffering like him, or rather reveling in the pain. Cai could tell they had something to do with this place, this gory ocean. He vaguely remembered seeing them before. One of the eyeballs drifted past him, blinking at something Cai couldn’t see.

He hit something, or something hit him. A blunt, spiked object smashed right through his left shoulder, separating his arm from its socket with the flash of tearing sinew and breaking bone.

Cai couldn’t even try to scream anymore. He weakly brought his remaining arm to the stump, a sliver of his medical training pushing its way to the fore. He had to assess the damage, to stop the bleeding as much as he could. Only when his fingers made contact with where the wound should be, he found his arm completely unharmed.

Perplexed, he flexed the digits of his previously missing limb. This was no phantom pain. Everything was still there. Only the agony still etched into his nerves proved that something had happened at all, and even that was rapidly being blotted out by the constant, excruciating pain Cai felt all around as his skin started to melt in the fiery blood covering it.

He was struck again. A razor-sharp blade or claw, this time. It bit into his midsection and went through him like a plasma torch through dry ice.

Cai’s eyes shot wide open as he was eviscerated. His torso and his lower body had been separated. It would take a miracle for him to survive such damage even in the best of conditions. Cai almost wished for the attack to kill him, for the pain to ebb away and his soul to join with his ancestors.

He discarded the thought out of hand. His life was the currency with which the Runora would buy their way back to greatness. He refused to sell it so cheaply.

With a roar of defiance Cai willed to swing his mysteriously regenerated arm in the direction of his attacker, finding that the two parts of his abdomen had similarly reattached with not even a seam to show that they had ever been apart. His fist connected with nothing, only leaving a vortex of blood in its wake. Something brushed past Cai’s leg and he kicked down without thinking, feeling the cracking of chitin as his heel connected with something huge, bulbous, and sharp. Whatever he had hit recoiled violently, scraping past his foot and leaving a deep gash which had already healed by the time Cai took notice of it.

He wanted to fight on, to kill whatever had dared to harm him, but the lack of air took a greater and greater toll on him as time went on.

The nerves in his extremities stopped responding as his body withdrew its microscopic armies from those fronts, closing down the supply lines to his arms and legs to reinforce the bastion that was his center. Without oxygen to feed their movement, the muscles in his limbs instead ate away at themselves and the fatty tissue surrounding them. His own body consumed him from within even as the boiling blood gnawed at him from without. A disastrous tactic in the long run, though it would allow him to remain active until any and all energy reserves he had to offer were depleted.

It would buy him a few more precious moments. Maybe he could use those to–

Half a dozen serrated spikes pierced him from behind, puncturing both of his lungs, stabbing his heart, and tearing open several other organs in their way.

He shuddered miserably, his body freezing up in response to the catastrophic wounds. Salty tears flowed from his eyes and mixed with the blood before being carried away by the violent currents. He groaned and kicked down in response. But too clumsily, too slowly. The spikes were already being withdrawn, their sharp hooks wreaking further havoc on his broken body.

Cai watched how his flesh knitted back together as soon as the spikes protruding from him were gone, only for another gaping wound to appear on his leg as he was attacked yet again.

His half-severed leg regrew equally quickly, but his attacker was relentless now. Whether angry at his earlier retaliation or growing frustrated by Cai’s persistent regeneration, the creature became increasingly more aggressive.

Appendages of all shapes and sizes, sharing only their lethal purpose, swung at him from every angle. Cai was bludgeoned, sliced open, torn apart, and maimed with such intense hatred that the onslaught started to become a blur. Each wave of pain crashing before those before it had washed away. He should have been dead by now. He should have been dead a thousand times over, yet his flesh stitched itself back quicker than even the monster in the blood could harm him.

Cai closed his eyes, his resolve at its breaking point. He sobbed without breath, painful convulsions running down his spine every time the chitinous appendages of the monster cut into him. He still tried to trade blows with it, but the creature was adapting to him better than he was to it.

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Desperately, he scrambled his brain in search of a solution. Some tactical plan he could leverage to come out victorious. But his options were limited. However stubborn Cai might be, intellectually he knew that he was screwed:

Even if he kept recovering physically, the pain never lessened. He would not get used to it. The agony would shatter his mind sooner rather than later. With a whimper, Cai realized it was already showing cracks.

He could not escape the blood, he could not win against the creature, nor could he outlast it.

That left Cai with only two options: He could give up, or he could struggle until his body gave up for him. Of the two, Cai only ever considered one.

He opened his eyes, ready to roar his defiance and fight until he collapsed, only to find himself face-to-face with one of the eyes, the white orb floating about ten centimeters away from his face.

The strange organ was as large as his fist, its whites run through by a million hair-thin veins of gold and black. The iris was similarly unusual, with its color seeming to shift through the entire visual spectrum depending on where Cai looked at.

What drew Cai the most, though, was the infinite abyss of the eye’s pupil; the black was deeper than even that of the void, instead resembling what he imagined the event horizon of a black hole looked like.

Captured within this well of darkness were ever-shifting golden threads which created patterns which were tiny and enormous at the same time.

The patterns vaguely reminded Cai of those created by a kaleidoscope: Made beautiful by their complexity, yet impossible to ever get a good look at.

These patterns of gold on black mesmerized Cai such that when his foot was crushed by the creature, he barely took notice of it. It was like the eye had sucked him into a whole new world, one where his pain didn’t matter, even though he could still feel it. It was cool and calm and completely free of monsters: A paradise, compared to the boiling sea of blood behind him.

“You could be here forever.” A soft and formless voice promised, its tones accentuated by the slightest shift in cadence from the patterns, as if the gold itself spoke to him. “You suffer needlessly. I can set you free. Just let me… take… over.”

Cai was tempted. He felt at home in this blackness, and the cool nothingness on his skin was like ecstasy in contrast to the pain he had endured.

Still, he remained unconvinced. There was something he was supposed to be looking out for. Something far more dangerous than even the monster in the blood, though Cai couldn’t remember what.

He took a closer look at the gilded patterns, secretly hoping that their complex beauty could convince him to embrace the eye and leave the pain behind for good.

Instead, Cai realized the lines forming the patterns moved with hate, with contempt. They angrily gave their shapes form, like an artist frothing at the lips as he created his masterwork.

The eye was not welcoming at all. It regarded him with disgust so palpable Cai could almost taste it.

The pain returned with a vengeance the instant Cai recognised this, knocking the wind out of him as a million tiny teeth carved into his flesh.

“Never” He mouthed at the Demon’s eye in front of him, hating that he was unable to scream the word. “I’ll never give in to you.”

The eye, despite being lidless, blinked once. Then everything disappeared in a whirlpool of red, black, and gold.

A hot dampness enveloped Cai, and he thrashed his limbs in fury, only to find himself restrained. He roared defiantly and forced his eyes open, only to be met with the familiar contours of his cabin.

Panting heavily, Cai realized he was in his bedroll, wrapped by minepol straps to prevent him from floating off in the zero-g environment. He was practically bathing in his own sweat, and his throat felt as rough and dry as a desert. He coughed, then reached for the straps with trembling hands.

“It was all a dream.” He muttered to himself, his voice croaking and hoarse. “Just– just a hallucination from my first voidwalk.”

"Yeah?" Chirped a chipper voice from in front of him. “How’d you like it?”

Cai’s head shot towards the voice with enough force to painfully strain the muscles in his neck. Across from him, a young boy sat cross-legged on what Cai perceived to be the ceiling. The boy flashed him a smile, then pushed himself off the surface he sat on and effortlessly brought himself to a floating stop in the center of the bunk.

The child couldn’t be older than nine, with fair skin, golden hair which came down to his ears, and sharp, piercing eyes of gold. He wore nothing but a simple, yellow robe which left one of his shoulders bare. With how well-fed and cared for the boy looked, he immediately struck Cai as the scion of some noble family. There was not a blemish on his skin, not a crease in his robe, not a single skewed strand of hair.

Normally, Cai would take an immediate dislike to a child like this. One which never had to endure hardship, one whose every need was served on a silver platter. There was something unsettling about this one, though. Something which set off his every instinctual warning signal.

Perhaps it was how the boy carried himself. His every action was precise and calculated. Every motion he made had purpose, much like how a machine moved. This ease of movement in zero-g was especially at odds with the boy’s posture, which was undoubtedly planet-born. Then there were his eyes, which were cold and calculating, devoid of any childlike wonder one might have expected. This boy was a stone cold killer, and he did little to hide the fact. The contrast between the boy’s warm smile and his piercing, golden eyes creeped Cai out. It gave him the inexplicable impression that this kid could snuff him with his bare hands, as unlikely as it seemed.

“Who are you?” He asked sternly, undoing the clasps of his bedroll and freeing himself from the prison of cloth. A wave of his own sour odor was released into the cabin, but Cai had bigger things to worry about. “How did you get on the ship? You should know there’s harsh consequences for stowaways.”

He did his best to speak with confidence and authority, but it was clear from the onset that he wasn’t the commanding figure in the room. His words came out weak and uncertain, and his flimsy attempts at keeping his floating self oriented properly felt especially clumsy compared to the boy’s perfect movements.

“I was thinking we skip this part.” The kid said, smirking. “I’m inside your head. We share thoughts now. I couldn’t hide from you even if I tried. You know what I am, though you haven’t accepted it yet.”

Cai’s throat tightened up. He shook his head no. Of course he knew what this child– this creature– was, but that simply couldn’t be true. The Veil would keep such monstrosities out, and even if not he could not be the one that got possessed.

“I don’t believe you.” He muttered, even though he did. His body was still shaking from the cursed nightmare, and he now remembered the overwhelming presence forcing itself into his fragile mortal coil when he was out on his voidwalk. Despite that, the beliefs ingrained in him all his life clashed with his personal experience. Had this creature not stood before him now, Cai would likely have dismissed the horror of the dream as just that, no matter how real it had been.

“The Veil destroys creatures like you. You cannot exist here.” He said, then swiped his hand towards the boy, hoping to wave the fiendish apparition away like a mirage.

Instead, the Demon grabbed his arm with lightning-quick reflexes and dragged him towards the surface normally considered the floor. Impossibly, this action yielded no reaction. The creature was half Cai’s size, and only a third his weight, yet it remained perfectly still as it forced the cadet against the cool ferro-ceramic in a zero-g headlock.

“I can see you’re not ready for this.” The Demon said casually, holding the struggling teenager in place without a care in the world. “I’ve got time, though. We’ll get to be friendly with each other before you know it.”

“Death upon your misbegotten kind, Demon.” Cai spat at it, feeling the nails dig into his skin.

“Yeah, I get that a lot.” It said, ”Still, can we round this up? You’ve got the next watch, don’t you?”