Beginning of Part I - Catalyst
“Wake up.”
The first thing they feel is pain. Everywhere. A heavy, burning blanket of it laid over their skin, their muscles, their nerves. Their fingers twitch and it’s like pushing against a rip current. The voice triggers more of it, reverberating inside their head like knives embedding into their skull.
“Wake up, Sira.”
Sira’s eyelids snap open with a loud gasp. Their vision is blurred and a bright light from above forces them to squint. Their fingers spasm again, scraping against the rough, hard surface beneath them. Cold, too. An icy chill against the heat of the pain.
They blink several times but it’s impossible to focus past the ringing in their ears, the unrelenting thrum of their heart in their ribcage, and a groggy, weighed-down feeling beneath all of it. Their legs spasm next and send more searing jolts up and through them. It hurts too much. The light above is too bright. The ringing is too loud and so is their heartbeat.
Stop - the first clear thought to cut through the storm. Just stop and breathe.
Despite the voice’s earlier insistence, Sira lets their eyes fall shut again. With a long, shaky breath, they focus on the air filling their lungs, then flowing out again. The simple act of breathing hurts, although that hurt is the main way Sira can feel their body at all. Still, with each breath, the beating of their heart slows a little, as well as their racing thoughts. They open their eyes once more and blink rapidly, looking away from the light that comes from the ceiling. Their vision then starts to clear--
--except that everything is tinted red.
They blink more, but that doesn’t help. It’s not their eyes. No, it’s a thick, crimson haze that permeates the air in the room. They inhale deeply and their lungs buzz in response, but it’s hard to tell whether the sensation is separate from the pain dominating the rest of their body. As their eyes flit around in confusion, another thought breaks through the tangled mess in their head: I need to get out of here.
An inexplicable, all-powerful urge to flee hits them like a wave. They need to move. Everything else can come later. A slight turn of their head, as much as it hurts, allows them a better view of their surroundings - something they immediately regret.
Around them are high walls of dark stone and a cavernous ceiling that stretches out above. The floor is a few feet beneath them, their body lying across a raised platform in the center of the room. None of that is what bothers them. What does are the things that stretch across the floor and crawl up towards the ceiling.
They’re shaped almost like vines - or veins - except they’re a dark shade of red. They twist and weave their way through the cracks and curves in the stonework like an infection. Looking at them for too long makes the pain in their head much, much worse. Looking at anything here for too long makes it worse. They need to move. They need to leave.
Now voluntarily, Sira moves their fingers, then their hands. At the same time, they try to move their feet and lower legs. They press their palms against the stone beneath them for support as they slowly attempt to sit up. It’s too much too soon. Their muscles are like impossibly heavy rubber, but they can’t let it stop them. Dizziness and nausea wash over them as soon as they’re upright, but the desire to escape this place that now pumps through their veins overpowers everything else.
They shift their legs around over the side of the raised stone. The brutal pounding of their heart returns and the ringing comes back too. Straining, they manage to push themselves off the platform into a standing position.
Immediately, their legs give way underneath them.
Sira catches themselves on their hands against the floor with a smack that echoes loud against the walls of the chamber. They squeeze their eyes tight and suck air in through clenched teeth as the force of the contact sends another hot lance of pain through their body. The last thing they need here is to fall, hit their head, and knock themselves unconscious again.
They can’t give up. They have no choice. Something in them is screaming at them to run. If only it was enough to get their legs to cooperate.
Sira opens their eyes again and raises their head. A dozen or so feet from where they lie, the vine-like growths surround a darkened opening in the wall. Their gaze drifts down to their arms braced against the floor. Skinny and pale, they tremble in the effort to support their weight, and the full-body pain has only increased in their attempt to stand. Still, they’re working better than their legs right now.
They swallow hard, their throat stinging from how dry it is, and start to shuffle their arms and legs in a forward crawl.
The process is agonizing, but it gives them a better feel for their limbs. Their skin scrapes against the flooring and brushes up against the not-vines. The growths are lumpy, yielding, and unsettlingly warm. They fight the urge to retch, but nothing else happens upon touching them, which comes as a small relief. The ill-fitting garment they wear gets caught at various points where they stop and shimmy it loose.
They reach the section of the wall nearest to them. With heaving breaths, Sira reaches upward. Their shaking hands get a grip on the growth-covered masonry. They shift their legs into as supportive of a position as they can and pull themselves upward. The muscles in their arms scream in protest and the ringing in their ears grows into a roar until they brace their legs against the floor and lean their weight on the wall.
The masonry feels cool against the spots of exposed skin that press up against it, but the growths give off their eerie warmth and…pulsate, as if they truly are veins. Sira puts it out of their mind to avoid their thoughts going into an even worse tailspin. They take a moment to breathe. Everything hurts so badly that it’s stopped fully registering as pain, just white, all-encompassing heat. At least their arms and legs feel less unstable.
They glance up toward the ceiling of the chamber. The light comes from a large hole in the center above them. It looks natural. Sunlight. The darkened opening along the wall is only a few feet away from them. A passageway of some kind. It’s the only one in the room.
A way out. It must be.
Hands pressed against the wall, they take a small, unsteady step forward. The movement is still wrong, uncoordinated and unsteady, but they’re regaining control over their legs. With the support of the wall, they reach the opening. It’s illuminated only by the light coming from the hole in the ceiling, but there’s enough to make out a cramped stone staircase leading upward.
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A lump forms in their throat. Stairs, when they can hardly walk as it is, and who knows how many until they’re finally out. Regardless, the longer they stay in the oppressive, dizzying atmosphere of this place and its redness, the less of a choice they feel they have. The skin on their palms and heels is already raw from their crawl.
Getting out of here may physically break them, but remaining feels like it might do something worse.
With a deep breath, Sira continues into the dimly lit passageway.
The ascent is a blur of physical sensation overriding conscious thought. The darkness that sets in as they distance themselves from the chamber and strenuous upward climb return their disorientation in full force. Control of their limbs improves but the pain gets worse by the minute. It feels like ages pass before they finally catch a glimpse of the tunnel’s end: another opening, this one with light pouring out of it.
Tension leaks out of their shoulders as they enter a small room. Still stone walls and flooring, but more refined than the place they came from below. It’s well-lit and trying to focus their eyes here doesn’t make their head feel as if it’s going to split open at any second.
But the haze hasn’t gone away.
It’s not as thick, but still present. The growths also managed to creep their way up the staircase and into the cracks and gaps of the flooring, though they’re smaller and less abundant than they were in the chamber below.
Sira moves away from the opening, defined by a section of unevenly removed brick, and to the support of the walls. They turn to rest their back against the masonry and gracelessly slide to the floor, chest heaving and a sheen of sweat covering their skin. Their body presses against the sickening texture of the growths, but they ignore it. Their gaze drifts around the room as their mind stabilizes - as much as it can in their current situation.
The first thing to register is the source of the light: a large set of doors on the other side of the room with shattered glass windowpanes. Were they underground? They aren’t anymore. So close, but they need to recuperate. Whatever it was that made them want to run so much was something about the chamber, not in this place.
The second thing to register is what the light from outside pours over: a stone platform that rises from the floor, like the one on which they awoke.
They blink. No, this isn’t a platform. It’s something different. The top part of it has a clear division from the rest, enough that it looks like it could be removed. A lid. Not a platform. It contains something.
Casket.
Sira stares at the thing blankly. It’s ornately carved. Everything in the room is much more ornate than the chamber’s structure, from the walls’ stonework, to the wood of the doors, to what remains of the broken windows.
A lone casket in a small, stone room. The term for that arrangement swims somewhere in the muddied waters of their mind, but they can’t fish it out. Leaving the underground has helped significantly in clearing up their thoughts, but the lethargy in their limbs and the heat of the pain still radiating through their body continues to weigh them down.
Looking at the casket more closely, they make out a name engraved on its side: Ethan Dreyer.
It’s not familiar to them.
They aren’t familiar with any of this.
Sira pulls their knees to their chest as their breathing steadies. The realization would hit them harder if they didn’t already physically and mentally feel like they’d been tossed down the side of a cliff. They close their eyes and gently prod inside themselves, searching for something - anything - from before they woke up, before hearing that voice that told them to, as well as spoke their name. Sira.
“Sira,” they say aloud.
Their dry throat makes their voice so raspy that it’s barely audible. The name feels strange on their tongue. Unpleasant. But somehow, they know that it belongs to them.
After hearing it again, for one small moment, they remember something. A place unfathomably deep and dark. The sensation of their body suspended in the thick murk of that darkness. Another voice from nowhere echoing through their body, as if it could weave its way through every fiber of their being.
They remember redness. Around them. Inside them. Everywhere.
A chill runs down their spine as the memory slips away from them as quickly as it came. They’re not sure why. They’re sure of very little right now, other than the fact they can’t stay for long in this room either. They don’t know the last time they’ve eaten or drank anything, if anything’s physically wrong with them, or how much longer their body will hold out.
They need to find help. Help isn’t here, and the further from this place, the better.
Sira turns to get a grip on the wall again, stands up, and makes for the door. They can’t tell for certain if their decision to rest made a tangible difference, but they don’t feel the need to lean on the wall as much. They’re not yet able to walk but may be able to limp. They continue to keep a hand against it just in case.
The doors open with little resistance, the elements having worn them down over time. Sira pushes through them, and when the light of the outside world fully pours into the stone room, they go still.
The place they’ve found themselves in sits nestled in a forest - or what used to be a forest. Only a few trees still cling to what remains of their dead or decaying leaves, while the others are stripped entirely bare. Skeletons of bushes and shrubs dot the landscape. Sparse, lifeless patches of grass cover some of the ground, but the rest is cracked, dry earth. Closer to sand than dirt.
And the redness is everywhere.
Out here it’s more mist-like than haze, some parts curling around the trees' branches and other parts smothering the ground, as if it's suffocated the life out of everything. The same mist that is touching their skin and inside of their lungs. Sira’s heart beats hard again as their fingernails press into the wood of the door they lean on and their gaze trails upward. It’s even in the sky, the color of which is a pale, barren shade of gray.
They glance behind them. What they came out of is a small building with an embellished stone exterior resembling the style of the interior. Once-living vines - actual vines, not the growths from inside, although a number of them are also present here - crawl up the sides and give it the look of a place that’s been left abandoned for years. Judging by the state of the area around them, Sira assumes that it was.
Turning back to the desolate environment, their breath hitches as their eyes catch sight of something extending above the tree line: tall, dark, rectangular forms in the distance, partially shrouded by the red mist that chokes the air.
A city?
A city might mean people, and people might mean finding someone to help them, but something is wrong. Between the circumstances of where they’ve found themselves, the red mist that seems to blanket everything, and the dismal wildlife that surrounds them, something is deeply wrong. The wrongness gathers in a pit in Sira’s stomach until it weighs enough to make them sicker. They lack the memories, but their intuition tells them that this isn’t how the world is supposed to look.
They push the sense of wrongness down to keep it from taking control of their senses. It doesn’t matter right now. There’s nothing here for them. The only thing they can do is keep moving until they find help.
Sira limps down the small set of steps from the building’s entrance, back hunched and arms loosely wrapped around themselves. Dead grass and leaves crunch beneath their feet and the mist swirls around them in a foreboding embrace. They try to empty their mind of everything and focus on just moving forward.
It works for a while, until they’re well under the cover of the dead trees’ branches.
Snap.
Sira pauses. They turn to the right - the direction the sound came from - and freeze.
A few yards away, between the trees, something looks back.
If the mist wasn’t thin enough between them and where it stood, they could have mistaken the figure for a person. Or a tree. Its form shifts too much to be either, as if not entirely solid, but it’s more person-shaped than tree. Thick clusters of the mist dance around it in bizarre patterns, and like the mist, the figure is red. The shade is deeper, as if its body is made of congealed blood.
Whether it truly sees Sira or not, they aren’t sure. It doesn’t have a face, but its head is oriented towards them, and there’s a cold sensation that runs through their body that tells them they’ve been ‘caught.’
It moves in their direction, but not in a way that anything should be able to move. Instead, it shifts. It’s like a series of images - it’s in one place, then a few feet or so closer, with the thing’s body changing position each time and a brief glimpse of motion in between. Watching it brings back the same mix of disorientation and nausea from the underground chamber, locking Sira in place as it stops a mere few inches away.
It towers over them. The proximity allows them to bear witness to its abhorrent form in detail. Its sludge-like, mottled skin. Its emaciated body structure. Its distorted, gurgling growl as it reaches a hand out towards them with fingers that are entirely too sharp.
The sound snaps Sira out of their stupor, and with a newfound surge of panic coursing through them as the creature’s hands inch towards their face, they bolt.