I walked through the devastated streets, trying to understand what was happening around me. The sky above was completely obscured, with no sign of light, just a blanket of thick black clouds, as impenetrable as a layer of ash. The air was heavy, almost as if it were a physical weight on my shoulders, making it hard to breathe. Ashes fell incessantly, like a cold, desperate rain, covering everything around me. It was a place where life had been torn out by the roots, where even time itself seemed to have stopped. There was no life, no sound. Everything was dead, consumed by darkness. I was walking on the rubble of a world that no longer existed, a city that had been swallowed by the abyss.

With every step, the feeling that I was being watched intensified. It was as if the very rubble was breathing, as if the air was charged with something invisible, yet palpable, waiting to swallow me whole too. But despite the fear tightening in my chest, I kept moving forward, driven by a need to understand, to discover what was happening. Something told me I couldn’t stop. I had to find answers.

Then something made me stop abruptly.

The sight before me looked like a scene straight out of a nightmare. A massive tree, completely dead, stood in the middle of the destruction. Its branches were dry and twisted, reaching for the sky like skeletal hands grasping for a final breath of life. It wasn’t just any tree. The feeling that it was not there by accident was undeniable. It seemed alive, pulsing with its own darkness, waiting to awaken.

I approached, and a wave of biting cold enveloped my body. It was as if the tree itself was emitting black energy, something that froze not just the skin, but the soul. And then, as if the air around me compressed, a deep, echoing voice made itself heard, coming from within the tree, like a whisper from a distant abyss.

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— From the abyss comes the all-seeing eyes, black is your color and dark is your being. Let darkness mold your body, and it manifests itself in you.

Those words sounded like a curse, something immortalized in time, lost among the shadows of the past. "From the abyss come the eyes that see all, black is your color and dark is your being. Let the darkness mold your body, and it will manifest itself in you."

A shiver ran down my spine, and before I could react, a freezing wind cut through my body. It was a deep, sharp cold that paralyzed me momentarily. Every cell in my being seemed to scream as if I were being pulled into the tree, as if I were being drawn into a place where time and pain no longer existed. My muscles involuntarily contracted, but still, I was forced to move forward.

It was then that the ground beneath my feet began to crack. The fissures spread, swallowing everything in their path, and a bottomless black chasm opened up before me. From that abyss, thick, dense smoke began to rise, spreading like dark tendrils, consuming everything in its path. The mix of falling ash from the sky and the smoke from the abyss created a suffocating mist, making the air even more impenetrable. The environment seemed to close in on me, compressing my breathing and making every second harder to bear.

With every breath, the air grew thinner, and I felt as if I were being pulled into that chasm. The world around me seemed to be crumbling, and I found myself fighting against an invisible force that was trying to drag me into the darkness that opened before me. Fear spread through me, but something stronger than fear held me back — a desperate need to understand, to discover what had caused this, to find an answer to the chaos unfolding before me.

I couldn’t let myself succumb.

The feeling that something was about to happen, something that would change everything, grew with each passing second. But what exactly would this "something" be? I didn’t know, but I knew it was the only path I could follow now. And, even in the face of the vastness of the abyss, I could not retreat. I had to understand.