There was no safety or kindness to be found in your dreams; and you were dreaming again, that same wretched dream that had haunted you always and forever. It felt like a stage play, like a formality as you watched the stage dress itself and the players arrive. The curtain rose on familiar chaos.

A city in ruin, streets empty and weed-choked. You were in the center of it all, surrounded by destruction that you could do nothing to stop. Not the end of the world, but the End-of-Everything, the Mother of all Cataclysms.

The sky was a green-gold mirror, broken, reflecting everything that ever was and everything that would ever be within shards of Dreams that fell like verdant rain and distorted the landscape around you as they crashed haphazardly to the ground like glass meteors, shattering on impact.

Glittering splinters of impossibility cut your cheek as they flew by, and you could taste the bitterness of your future in the pain.

Before you stood a Nameless Thing.

An unfathomably huge serpent with many legs that each ended in a seven fingered human hand. Its body curled and coiled in such non-euclidean ways that it arched and rolled against the sky like the apex of an impossible rollercoaster. Its white scales shimmered with a terrible iridescence that reflected more than the mirror sky, showing you the dark and distorted shapes of terrible things that would soon come to pass.

Its body split at the shoulders, branching into seven heads wreathed in a mane of blindingly green flames. In all fourteen of Its eyes, you saw the End of all things at that creature's countless hands. Universes subjugated and consumed until there was a True and Endless Nothing left behind.

Though the Thing was on fire, nothing around It burned or even smoldered, instead things grew wild and out of control.

Patches of Green swallowed impossible structures, the once glittering behemoths of buildings that should not and could not exist if physics and logic had anything to say about it.

And where the venom from Its many open mouths fell, sprouted flowers and native grasses. Plants sprang forth from places they were never meant to, devouring everything they touched like a cancer, they tugged at your feet as you walked. Moss and vines tried to crawl up your legs, only to be torn apart with each solemn step towards the Nameless Thing.

Metal groaned and glass shattered under the constricting grasp of roots and vines thicker than your entire body, strangling building's foundations until they leaned dangerously and drunkenly across the deserted city street.

In your hand was a sword. An old and heavy thing, carved from the bones of a beast Higher than you. Among the rabbits and snakes and suns carved into the blade was a Word that smoldered and crackled like an old grudge, it meant "to assemble a name from scars" and was the closest thing to a real name you'd ever had. The tip dragged across the seething wasteland of invasive life, making it blacken and wither like death given form.

Hatred given teeth.

You felt so very tired and so very alone, but you could not rest until your task was complete.

To Name the Beast and set you both free.

The Nameless Thing hissed as you drew near, and spoke in seven-times-seven tongues. “Do you know who I am?” It said in a choir of voices that crackled and snapped like Its halo of fire.

There was an edge of frustration to Its tone, as if It were just as tired as you, and you simply stared at It with empty, exhausted eyes.

That Nameless Beast had invaded your dreams and asked you that question more times than you could remember, and each time you'd failed to answer correctly.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

You were running out of ideas and probably time.

Stubbornly, you clutched your blade, white-knuckled, and it grew lighter in your hand. Just a hair, just a touch, but you could feel the weight leave as the dying embers of your resolve glowed just a little brighter.

You opened your mouth to speak, next words utterly inaudible as they were obliterated by a jagged, droning noise that wrenched you from sleep and left you dry mouthed in your wakefulness.

Waking up hurt.

You felt soggy, like an oversaturated sponge, like if you moved you'd leave puddles of yourself behind.

Nala was there, or at least a ghost of her rendered liquid by the remnants of sedatives and paralytic in your system. For a second, you thought that you were still dreaming as she tucked something small and white against your chest. It was warm and breathing, but you couldn't move enough to properly see it.

You were strapped tight to a gurney and muzzled for good measure, carefully wheeled through the loading bay towards the empty black mouth of a cargo truck.

Just like the one that brought you to the lab on your very first day.

Every single nerve in your body was on fire, both from the electrocution and the abuse the dogs had put you through. Your foot was almost completely gone, hanging onto your leg by the thinnest ghosts of frayed wires that popped and sparked at irregular intervals.

You were surrounded by people, both scientists and specimens.

In the distance was an orderly line of test subjects you'd never seen before, adults in various stages of neglect and disrepair who shuffled forlornly forward into another truck. Some of them were barely grown, teenagers that had spent their whole lives in the bowels of this place, now doomed to die broken and alone somewhere else.

The other children stared at you as you passed, some of their eyes burning with hatred and fear and in that moment you knew that your little stunt had put everybody else in danger. The purge had always been coming, but you'd gone and made everything worse.

It… it had all been for nothing, hadn't it?

A woman watched you from afar, and though she was out of your line of sight you could still hear her every word. Doug sidled up to her, arm in a sling, a bruise slowly blooming from just beneath the collar of his shirt. "Doctor Ramirez," he said with a slight nod, voice reduced to a painful croak.

"Doug," said the woman with such apathy it felt like she'd sucked all the warmth from the room. She refused to make eye contact with the scrawny little man that barely came up to her shoulders on a good day, and that day was not a good day.

Doctor Extravaganza "Anza" Ramirez watched your progression through the loading bay with interest. She pointed at you with her lips, "What's up with Conejito? Why the Hannibal Lecter treatment?"

Doug took a long pull from his vape, the cartoonishly green smoke leaking from his nose before he exhaled, filling the room with the stink of artificial caramel apples and CBD. "Oh I'll be glad to see the back of that one, fuckin' hell. Phipps' little pet project. He's an absolute freak if you ask me, doesn't talk, doesn't cry, bites seemingly at random. Just look at what he did today!" He pointed at his shoulder for emphasis, "And he punched my fuckin' dog.

I mean of course, I don’t wear clothes here I’m really fond of-- I’m no noob, but this shirt just started feeling really comfy and broken in and now he’s fucked up the shoulder and its going to fuck up the whole thing."

"Is the dog ok?" Anza asked.

"Well yeah he’s just got a little nose bleed, but now he’s all gross and shit and I gotta clean him up on top of everything else I gotta do today like this kid just wants to piss me off!

It's like he exists to make my life difficult. And he stares like he gets fucking paid for it and he doesn’t make any fucking noise despite being so heavy like how the fuck does he even MANAGE--"

The other staff members eyed Doug with varying levels of disgust and second hand embarrassment, scooting away from him as subtly as possible while he smoked and spluttered like an overfull tea kettle.

"...I'll take him." Anza said.

Doug turned as white as a ghost and promptly choked on his vape. "E-EXCUSE ME!?"

"I said I'll take him, it's not like you're using him anymore and you DO owe me a new specimen after you lost one of mine." Her tone turned dangerous as she fixed Doug with a glare.

Doug seethed. "You're doing this to spite me, aren't you?"

Anza smiled at him, like a cat would. It was less a genuine expression, and more like the right amount of bared teeth to be mistaken for one, "Oh please, I stopped doing things to spite you after I won all your Pokémon cards in the divorce."