It was quiet.

It was dark.

Was this what death felt like? Had Sonja’s freaking new age mindfulness bull crap actually killed him? He’d be mad if it had.

As he slowly began to get a sense of his body, he tried to find his way in the darkness, but the moment he put out his hands to search for something to grab on to, his fingers rapped painfully against something.

Pain.

That seemed like a good sign. Or maybe not.

Putting the tips of his fingers forward, he explored the hard surface in front of him. It was broad and flat. It felt like wood. Above him his fingers hit wood as well. And against his back too. Almost like… a coffin.

Blood rushed to his head as panic set in and he pounded on the wood furiously. Although it felt fragile and old, it didn’t break. He used hands, elbows, knees, and even his forehead a couple of times, but nothing worked. Warm blood ran down his face as he tried to wiggle his legs up in front of his torso, the tight space making any large movements problematic.

Finally, with his bare feet against what he presumed to be the lid, he pushed with all his might, a throaty grunt of exertion escaping him involuntarily. With a loud crack of snapping wood, the lid flew off, sailing through the air and landing in something wet.

Eik sat up. He gasped as cool, slippery water flooded the narrow coffin, alerting him to the fact that he was, in fact, not wearing pants. They weren’t in the coffin with him, so they must have been lost during whatever brought him to this strange place.

The sky was a swirling mass of clouds, sickly green light shining through the thinnest layers and casting a gloomy hue across the land. In the distance rain fell densely, the downpour looking like smoke as it formed a link between heaven and earth. Eik had landed in the middle of what looked like a swamp. Old, skeletal trees dotted the area, casting long shadows through diseased and tattered leaves that only darkened further what was already dark. He was sitting in a grimy pool of brown water, only the areas around the tree roots remaining somewhat dry.

What he had come out of was indeed a coffin. The wood was a dilapidated mess which frankly, with his F-rank strength, he should have been able to snap like twigs. Even as he stood up, the frame fell apart like a disassembled cardboard box. He wasn’t wearing a shirt either.

He waded through the ankle-deep water with no other goal than to get onto dry land. Once he made it to the first tree he continued ahead, walking from dry patch to dry patch, looking for anything that might provide a clue about either where he was, why he was here, how he got here, or who sent him him here.

For an hour he kept walking, watching his bare feet to make sure he didn’t step back into that disgusting water for even a second. None of the puddles of water he avoided were as big as the one his coffin had been lying in. A few of them he could even leap across without getting his feet wet.

After another fifteen minutes he came to a water hole of a size similar to his starting point. He began to make his way around it without much thought, but halfway around he noticed something floating in the foul sludge. A piece of a wooden board. He looked around the pool and noticed multiple other such pieces bobbing silently along the edge of the water. It looked suspiciously like the fragments of a certain coffin.

Eik ran the rest of the way around, finding a very familiar tree just a few paces from the water’s edge. He went to his knees as he looked around the mud, scooping wilted leaves away with his hands, hoping dearly that he wouldn’t find what he feared he might. He cursed out loud when he uncovered the first of his footprints. He was back where he started.

Again, he walked, this time in a different direction, and for almost three hours instead of just over one, but he still ended up at that pool, the wood still floating leisurely, all of his earlier remaining.

The third time it took less than half an hour before the pond reappeared. He felt like crying. Defeated, he let himself fall onto his bare ass, back against the same old tree he had used as a point of orientation for all three attempts to leave. He stared tiredly at his feet, gaze gradually panning upward as his head head tilted back. Through heavy eyelids, an absolutely enormous shape all but manifested in in front of his eyes, looming ominously like a mountain.

Coming awake, he sat up straight and looked properly. It was a mountain. It towered skyward in the distance, green clouds swirling madly above the peak in a whirlpool of roiling light. That peak was calling him. There was no doubt about it. He started walking, body suddenly bursting with energy and willpower.

After an hour of steady march, the mountain appeared to be no closer than it initially had when he first noticed it, the outline of it as hazy as ever. Maybe it was further away than it seemed.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

He continued.

Another hour later saw slight changes in the landscape. The muddy, rotting puddles of water grew steadily smaller and less frequent as he went, the leaf cover becoming denser, which, if nothing else, proved that he was at least going somewhere this time. A comfortable breeze rustled the leaves and blew through his hair.

Actually, no, his greasy, brown locks still clung wetly to his neck and face. There was no breeze. Something else was rustling the leaves of a tree to his left. This was the first sign of animal life he had seen since waking up in the coffin. He picked up a small, flat stone the size of his palm and flicked it into the leaves. A second later, a tiny snake fell from the tree, hitting the uneven ground with a dull thump. It’s entire body was a swirling mass of luminescent blue, churning murkily at even the lightest of movements.

“Profound Toxin?” Eik muttered, confusion absolute.

At those words, the snake, measuring no more than half a meter from head to tail, shot forward like a whip, the streak of blue crossing the distance between them in a split second. It slammed into his nose with a bony crunch, sending blood spurting out and down his chin. He gasped in pain and surprise as he stumbled back, reaching for the knife on his belt but finding nothing.

Before he could blink the tears out of his eyes, the snake had wrapped itself around his neck and begun to tighten its grip. Eik wheezed as the strangulation trapped the blood in his face and made it feel as if his eyes were about to pop out. Managing to dig his fingers in between his neck and the snake’s constricted body, he ripped the creature away and hurled it up and down into the ground.

Motionless, the snake began to dissolve into motes of blue light, circling and swirling around Eik like a dust devil, only to then rush toward him and disappear into his bare skin.

He yelped in fright and tried to bat away the tiny sparks of Profound Toxin, but they simply entered his hands instead.

“What the hell?” he shouted as shivers ran down his spine, echoes bounding through the now silent swamp. “What the hell was that?” It felt nice to hear a voice, even if it was his own.

The mountain still loomed ahead like a colossus, unmoved by the short scuffle in its shadow. Again, the peak called with deafening silence, daring him to make the climb. Unable to resist the pull, he resumed his walk, the strange, blue snake shoved to the back of his mind.

But something was happening to him. His vision was growing hazy and his limbs were turning numb. Although it had been difficult to focus properly ever since he woke up in the coffin, his mind now seemed to be growing foggier by the second.

“N-No, no, no…” he mumbled, tripping over nothing as his head began to droop. “What’s… What’s happe—”

He managed one final look up at the majestic mountain, wishing more than anything that he could make it up there.

Then he fell, long as he was, face first into and then through the mud, his consciousness fading to black.

***

Eik sat up, looking around the living room with puzzlement. Michael, Heath, and Sonja were staring at him wide-eyed.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“Uuh, my house?” Heath tried with a frown.

“And why do I have my pants on?”

“Why do you—,” Heath said, glancing between Sonja and Michael. “I don’t… know?”

Abruptly, Eik flew to his feet and rushed for the nearest window. “The mountain” Where is the mountain?” he gasped, going for the door next, spinning around in their front garden on bare feet as he scanned the horizon. “It’s gone! But it—, but it was just here! Where did it go?”

“Eik!” Sonja yelled, momentarily seizing his attention. When he looked at her, she slapped him hard across the face. “Wake up!”

Eik blinked, a fog seeming to fade from behind his eyes. “What happened?” he asked.

“You were out for a good ten minutes there, buddy,” Heath said, leading his friend back into the house by the shoulder while Michael assured the passersby who had stopped to watch that there was absolutely nothing strange going on.

“Ten minutes?” Eik asked as he was sat down and handed a glass of water.

“Yeah, it seems like Sonja’s technique really worked for you,” Heath said. “Where did you go, man?”

“I was… It was another world. I woke up in a coffin in a swamp. There was a big mountain. I wanted to go there. I wish I could go…” His eyes grew distant again but he snapped back to reality again when Heath set down a cup of salted nuts on the table with a bang.

“Sounds like it was just a dream, Eik.”

Eik stared at his water glass, feeling around his nose that had been broken. He stuck a finger into a nostril. It came away bloody. “Yeah, maybe that’s all it was,” he muttered. Something was different from before he went to that swamp. Something inside him had changed.

“Yeah, that sucks, but!” Heath said and pulled out the wooden plaque and turned it so Eik could read the message. “You hit E-rank!”

Eik’s eyes widened to teacups. “Already? But I just Awoke…”

“That’s what Sonja said.”

“I’ll do it now, then!” he said, excitement welling up inside.

He plopped onto the living room couch, heart racing away in his chest at a million beats per minute. The text on his plaque never faded, inviting him to jump in with both feet.

“What’s going to happen?” he asked Heath, who had been through the same process only days earlier after they had completed the rescue mission for the Nidafjeld Alliance.

“It’s super easy. Did you ever have an operation in the hospital when you were a kid?” Heath asked.

“Yeah.”

“It’s like that. You fall asleep, and then it feels like you wake up five seconds later. No dreams or nothing.”

Eik took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm his nerves. “Alright,” he said and nodded to his three friends who were gathered around him expectantly.

The moment he triggered the evolution his eyelids grew heavy. For the sake of it, he attempted to keep his eyes open, but he was overwhelmed by drowsiness even quicker than he had been by the anesthesia for the operation on his broken leg when he was nine.

The last thing he saw was Heath’s upturned thumb right in front of his face.

***

Plip. The sound of a droplet of water.

Plip, plip. Again they fell.

Now the gentle drumbeat of a spring shower.

A downpour. A torrent to wash everything away.

A flood to annihilate all life in an extinction event.

Eik’s eyes flew open. He was surrounded.

The world around him was a crushing billow of luminescent blue.

It was a world of Profound Toxin.