Quinn fell onto something reminiscent of grass, but much softer than anything she had ever felt before. The softness, although nice, didn’t help the agony that she suffered. She felt like her world had splintered. If she had to compare the pain to anything, she would have to say it was like that time she got compression sickness while trying to scuba dive. Except, instead of feeling bloated and unsteady, she felt like her entire body had been wrapped into a ball and impaled on a metal stake. A metal stake that had just come out of a forge.

Every vein in her body felt like it had burst and she felt like her blood was squirming around in her skin. Her skin itself felt ruptured, but she couldn’t even see how badly it had broken. Her eyes didn't want to work. She tried to open them up, to see what was going on, but her very vision itself seemed to be entirely ruined even more than it usually was. With way too much effort, her eyelids finally parted. She wished they hadn't. A chunky liquid flowed down her cheeks, following a similar path of tears.

Quinn didn’t know how long it had been that she suffered. Surely she should have long died by now with how much blood she felt leaving her body. Or at least passed out with how much pain was surging through her every nerve, but no such thing happened. She just silently endured. Well, she thought it was silent since she couldn't hear anything.

After days of struggling, she felt a change. It was subtle, a slight difference in her hearing. Until now, all she had been hearing was a high-pitched ringing, like what she had heard war veterans suffered from. Her hearing was slowly returning as the ringing began to grow silent. It was slow, ever so torturously slow. The pains in her head, of which there were too many to count, also began to fade as her hearing fully returned.

Although her eyes were still- she would rather not think of it... she could at least hear once more. A harsh breeze flew through the branches of nearby trees. The wind was blowing hard enough she could envision the trees would lose their leaves.

The pains in her body faded away and her senses slowly returned. First, it was her hearing, then her sense of smell, and her vision began to come back. It was terribly blurry, but Quinn could finally see where she was. And how was it that her vision returned? How was she even alive for that matter? Nothing made sense...

She was laying on a dark patch of grass between trees. The grass reminded her of fescue, but it felt unnaturally soft. She also couldn't tell if it was just a dark variant of grass, or if it was a, uh, different cause. Slowly, ignoring the agony her nerves sent her, she sat up to get a better view of her surroundings. Everything was still horribly blurry, but she could make out the thick trunks of trees all around her. She stretched a hand up to her face and groaned as her hand came away sticky and red.

For that matter, it wasn't just her hand. Although she could barely see far away, her vision of her own self was crystal clear. She was entirely soaked in blood as if someone had perfectly hit a dunk tank she was in. Not one bit of her clothes, horribly sundered as they were, retained their normal colors in the wake of the gore. Her lab coat, at least, didn't seem to be coated in the deepest red. That being said, she looked around for her lab coat and couldn't find it.

Due to the blood that was frankly everywhere, she couldn’t tell what her actual injury was. It felt like several dozen broken bones and potentially ruptured organs all over her body. Her very nerves seemed to cry out their brokenness to the world.

The entire place reeked of blood. It was as if someone had scattered tiny bits of copper all over the place. It was making her slightly nauseous. It wasn’t all bad though. Under the coppery tang, she could smell the delightful scent of rain. The burnt ozone mixed with the scent of blood, slightly numbing it down.

She tried to think back to her last memory, but even just the thought of what happened caused a terrible migraine to strike. All she could remember was heading to the meeting that would decide her fate alongside Daniel.

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Quinn moved her hands slowly around herself, scared that she would aggravate whatever was wrong with her. Her searching became more desperate as she looked for her glasses, but they, like her poor lab coat, were nowhere to be found.

“Ah!” Her voice cracked several times as she spoke. She coughed and sputtered off to the side as her voice box felt the might of a billion shards of glass slicing it. It was like the worse strep throat she painstakingly went through. "Uhh!" She tried once more, but her voice was barely a whisper. It came out horribly hoarse as if she had been screaming her blood-ridden lungs out for four hours.

Quinn reached over to one of the nearby trees and shakily pulled herself up. Her legs nearly gave out on her, but she forced herself to stand up. Every muscle in her body screamed to lay back down, to rest. She knew, however, that she couldn’t just lay about when she didn’t even know where she was.

She attempted to take stock of what was happening. She felt severely wounded, though with no idea what was injured. She had become stranded in a forest somewhere with no idea how. Her clothes were all torn up and some of them were lost though she didn’t know why. She was entirely lost with not even a clue as to where. Worst of all, the forest was gradually becoming darker.

Quinn took a deep breath to calm her nerves. It wasn’t the first time she was lost in a forest, though it was her first time in such a terrible situation. She attentively listened to the ambient sound to find anything that could help her, but all she heard was the wind blowing through the outstretched trees and thunder off on the horizon.

She frowned deeply. A forest should never be silent. Something was terribly wrong here. She listened harder, desperate to hear even the slightest clue as to what was going on. There, so far in the distance that she could barely hear, she heard a near-silent clanging barely louder than the thunder. The sound triggered a memory in her brain, but it quickly vanished as yet another migraine struck like a foul drum.

A glance around the forest revealed nothing else of interest in between the blurry bark of the trees, so she made up her mind. She took a step towards the clanging, gasping as she felt like her bones grating against her flesh. Her ribs hurt something fierce and she nearly coughed up a lung as she took her second step, but she struggled on. She obviously needed help, and the clanging sound was her best bet.

The forest only creeped her out more as she walked. There should have at least been insects chirping if not birds squawking, but there was not even a hint of natural activity. The good news, she figured out what the noise was. Quinn couldn’t hear it very well since the trees blocked the sound, but it was definitely a bell. It reminded her of one found on a bell tower, but slightly higher pitched than normal.

She walked through the trees, careful to avoid the roots that stuck up out of the ground. The last thing she needed was to fall over and injure herself even more. The trees seemed to glare at her as she passed, their dark bark warping into countless pained faces as she passed by. She nearly had to close her eyes as her imagination was getting to be too much.

A chill was filling the air as she entered a clearing near where the bell rang. She blurrily saw a walled settlement of some sort. The walls, although hard to make out from the distance, seemed nothing more than simple wooden stakes drilled into the ground. A tall tower rose from behind the walls, the sound coming the clearest from its tallest eaves.

The sky finally came into her view too. It was dark and roiling as if some kind of beast was just itching to break free. The blurred clouds rolled over each other, violently moving about in a wind that she couldn't feel. The light of the nearly set sun just barely set through the stony sky.

She walked a little way out of the forest and something moved. She focused on it, the rough shape of a human making its presence known as it moved. It yelled at her, but she couldn’t understand what the person was saying. Quinn wasn't sure if that was his fault, or her scrambled brain's fault. The pitch and intensity of the yells increased as she slowly walked towards the wall. The person seemed super panicked as they motioned her to a gate nearby.

Quinn stumbled forward, her brain barely working from the agony that was coursing through her. One step, then another. She chanted just one more as if it was her mantra. And one more step she took towards the gate. 'Just one more. Just one more. Just one m- oh, I fell.' She stumbled as her right leg gave out. That stumble caused her entire form to collapse just outside of the gate. She detachedly watched as the gate cracked open. Her vision seemed to keep zooming out as a figure approached her. Then it finally zoomed out enough that all she saw was black and the sweet release of sleep.