They came from the blood-red sky. In the cosmic distance, the ringed planet came unraveled like a great ball of yarn. The atmosphere cracked like glass, shattering apart as a deadly hail. In the stripped universe laid bare beyond, the inhabitants of the doomed world saw the stars bleed. That description was not metaphorical. The solar orbs all ripped open and streaked great waterfalls of living blood. Without earthbound gravity to make them fall beyond the stars' orbit, the crimson blood merely floated off into space that rippled like water, diffusing into the black expanse.

The entire planet shook. Every tree, every shrub, every last blade of grass withered yellow and died, disintegrating. Soil caved in, great sections of the continents split open, releasing dank plumes of plutonian wind below, belched from the bowels of a crumbling underworld that had infected the planet from the inside out like an apple rotting within, brown and mulched below the shiny red skin.

The dead were screaming in their crypts and in their graves, the damned voice of everything that had lived and died on that planet weaving together into a single, constant cataclysmic shriek. Spidery beings of pale light and dark shadow crawled up from the chasms of the crumbling earth, and dripped down from the bloody vacuum of space overhead. They exploded out of the frame of every shadow. They snatched up every man, woman, and child - one by one. The demons were undeterred by tears or pleas, and unrestrained by compassion or even the basic tenets of humanity.

At first, each victim was tackled and pinned, or carried off into the yawning darkness within the dying planet. Lost limbs, lost bones and organs, entire lost sets of skin. But as the final end drew nearer, the consumption of the flesh became less until it was ultimately discarded altogether. The inferno of fear and despair was self-propagating, like a nuclear fusion reaction of negative energy. Then the consumed weren't visibly dismembered or sucked dry - they just… stopped existing.

The wailing souls of those already departed became great twisters of ectoplasmic winds being funneled out of every grave, marked and unmarked alike. They all swirled together above the world, drawn into the vortex of a great, writhing maelstrom of indescribable malice incarnate.

The undulating tentacles, coils, and fanged maws of elder things dreamed up by some dead god moved in the distance between the bleeding stars. Then the stars went out altogether. The infinitely long, clammy skeletal arms of psychopomps sprouted from the Hades within the planet. Each grabbed part of the remaining skin of the planet - a blasted, lifeless wasteland - and tugged inward. They pulled the world inward, into itself, and existence as the last man alive on that planet - nay, in that entire universe knew it - was extinguished. There was only the cold deeper than Absolute Zero, and the darkness deeper than death itself.

…

That was the last coherent memory the man had of home, and of life as it was truly lived. How long ago was it now? How many years? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions, billions, trillions? How much time - if such a concept even applied anymore - had his incorporeal consciousness endured since that cataclysmic day? Had his organic body successfully shuffled itself into cryostasis before the very ground fell out from under his feet? And so what if it had? What protection was there in a deep hibernation on a plane of existence that had been erased? Perhaps bits and pieces of the ruined world had drifted away, to parts unknown, spat out from the spitting mouths of the Void like flotsam of a ship swallowed by a great maelstrom. It didn’t really make a difference one way or another.

The man with a name he couldn’t remember had fallen through the darkness, through an increasingly disjointed world of surreal visions and terror. He had mentally lived and died a thousand thousand times, had countless dreams and nightmares to fade in and out of. He spoke to God, he spoke to devils, he spoke to entire pantheons from Ancient Greece, the land of the Norse Vikings, and from historied India alike. He recounted, in real time and in first person, countless visions of Hell as they had been recorded in ages past.

Time and space rose and fell like ocean waves as his being unraveled, losing bits of itself with every frozen breath. All the while, he struggled to hold onto a sense of self, awareness, and cohesion. It was that determination to remain whole within the unfathomable that stretched these visions of Hell out to what felt like eternity. The worst of them that he remembered - and he no longer knew which memories were true and which had been dreams, or if indeed he had ever been real outside a dream - was that of Saint Bosco’s vision of Hell.

In it, the dreamer was in the shoes of the saint himself as he descended a rocky slope into a great, everlasting pit. Upon its lower rims, students he had taught over the years growled and foamed at the mouth like wild rabid dogs, tearing at each other with teeth and claws in feral violent rage, ripping off great chunks of flesh and throwing them high into the air like streamers. Within the cauldron of the pit bottom itself, Bosco passed yet more students and other people he had known throughout his life, laying motionless, alive but irretrievable like human vegetables, worms wriggling in their eyes. After what felt like many days spent spanning the length of the chasm floor, he came to a great steel wall that rose as high as his eyes could see.

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And now - yes, he was sure of it - there was a guardian angel beside him. To look upon it, he could not glean details of its form, only that it was ethereal and shrouded in white, with a halo of sun. It spoke to him that these condemned souls would suffer this living death for all eternity, with absolutely no reprieve. And then it gestured him to the great wall that stood before him.

“There are a thousand walls like this, nested in a concentric circle. Each is a thousand miles wide, and a thousand miles apart, and only within the center wall will you find the true fires of Hell. Before you depart, touch your hand to the outermost wall, and take with you a memento of what you have seen here, so that you may warn the others.”

And when Bosco, in a trance, touched the outermost wall, it scorched his hand. Scorched it so badly, even this far from the raging flames deep within, that he awoke, sheened in sweat, in his bed. His palm was still a rosy red and stinking of sulfur as it began to blister and crack.

The man falling through the Void was all the more confused when he woke from that bedroom to find that that had been a dream as well. Perhaps some phantom biofeedback of his true body passing by something too warm somewhere out there, outside the infinite depths, or perhaps a heat conjured only in his imagination. He had heard elsewhere that the only thing that burns in Hell are your memories. Whether you see demons eating your life, or angels freeing your soul from the earth, death is only ever the severing of your ties that bind.

But in the end, there were no demons nor angels, no Heaven nor Hell. No Zeus, no Shiva, nor any other gods and idols - eventually, the man simply ran out of alternate lives to live, and then he was well beyond the umbral rim of the undershadow where the Void bridged the underside of worldly skins.

Now that he was only a disembodied, bare bones sensation of awareness, he had nothing to do but float without any control or way to express himself, and wait. There had been others, of course, who had fallen into the Void with him. A few managed to phase through the layers into other worlds where they might restore their damaged souls, but the rest - by far the majority - faded away. All who had not been consumed by the soulless to join their ranks had lost all sense of perspective. Without the ability to recognize themselves in the formless realm, without physical attachments to anchor one’s being, they simply became part of the fabric of the darkness itself.

One could sometimes survive long enough to escape the Void - sans certain memories, or abilities, or aspects of the self - but no one could survive inside it. The only variable was how long their willpower held out.

So, how long had it been since the man fell? There was no way to know. He couldn’t even count the beats of a heart that no longer lived with him.

…

Then - light. Blue light that was blinding but didn’t hurt to look at. Even after all this time in purgatory, the reduced entity tried to cup a phantom hand to eyes that did not exist. But this ingrained reflex of a living body was proof that he still clung to something of his past self. He saw the shape of the light - it was a cool, shimmering aura of cobalt now that he could look closer past the initial glare, and it was in the outline of a person. Someone was walking along.

Walking was something that the being had almost forgotten had once been a thoughtless action. He could reach out, but he could not interact with this halo of dark blue. That was because it did not occupy this empty space with him. He passed over or under, or possibly even through the silhouette, and felt his heart sink as they passed on into the distance. But then, by increasing interval, there were more and more of them.

People.

Multitudes Laughing, playing, eating - smells and sounds and phantom sights warped by distance drifted to the entity in the Void as he passed under the skim of some other realities revolving overhead. But they were people!

He must have drifted toward the ‘edge’ of the nightmare realm between worlds. The walls between them were thin, and fluttered like fabric. In this place of transition, where souls died, he suddenly felt an influx of synesthetic feelings surge into his being.

He smelled roses, felt the mellow heat of a winter fireplace, heard the whistles of a distant train - he perceived many blue outlines - auras representing other souls besides himself, he realized - all around him now. For the briefest fraction of a second, he felt a unified connection between them all.

When this honeyed dream was gone from his senses, his heart ached that he was alone in the dark again.

But this was followed by a declaration.

I won’t disappear. Not yet. I will escape.

Some survival instincts simply refused to die.