Darkness consud Arthur's world. The familiar sensation of his body dissolved into nothingness as his core finally ford. For what seed like an eternity, he floated in a void—formless, weightless, suspended between worlds.
Then, without warning, visions flooded his consciousness.
Civilizations appeared before him—one after another, each different in their own way. They flashed past like images on a frantic slideshow, too rapid for Arthur to discern details. Ancient stone structures. Gleaming tal towers. Strange dwellings suspended in misty air. Communities built into massive trees. Each glimpse revealed societies utterly foreign to anything from Earth's history.
The parade of civilizations gave way to scenes of conflict. Wars raged across unfamiliar landscapes—beings of indescribable forms clashing with weapons that defied comprehension. Death perated these visions, accompanied by profound sorrow and loss. Corruption spread like a disease through realms of beauty, darkening and twisting everything it touched.
As the visions began to fade, dissolving back into the void, a voice resonated within Arthur's mind. It wasn't spoken aloud but seed to originate from within his very consciousness, repeating with increasing urgency:
"You must reach the Seventh Tower. The darkness cos soon."
The ssage pulsed through his awareness, embedding itself deep into his mory before everything went black once more.
...
Arthur's eyes shot open with a violent start.
He found himself lying down, staring upward—just as he had been in the Tethering Chamber. But the pristine white padded ceiling of the Academy was gone. Instead, weathered, dirty stone stretched above him, cracks running through its ancient surface like withered veins.
His mind struggled to process the sudden transition, still fixated on the visions he'd experienced during transfer.
'That must be the "enlightennt" they ntioned in Realm Theory,' he thought, trying to make sense of what he'd seen. 'But what did it an about darkness coming soon? Hasn't it already arrived? The gates began opening almost imdiately after the first group of chosen returned from the Second Realm...'
Arthur might have continued this line of thought indefinitely, lost in contemplation of mysteries beyond his understanding. But reality intruded in the form of a wet droplet landing squarely on his forehead. Then another. The sensation pulled him from his ruminations, focusing his attention on the source of the moisture above.
As his eyes adjusted and his vision cleared, Arthur's stomach plumted. Suddenly, he couldn't speak. Couldn't scream. Couldn't even draw breath.
Suspended directly above him, staring down with hungry intent, hung a creature straight from humanity's most primal nightmares. A long, grotesque snout extended from what passed for its face, lined with row upon row of razor-sharp teeth. Thick, viscous drool dripped from between those fangs, spattering onto Arthur's paralyzed face.
The most terrifying aspect wasn't the monstrous jaws poised inches from his flesh—it was the complete absence of any other facial features. No eyes watched him. No ears frad the hideous visage. No nostrils flared with his scent. Just smooth, grayish skin stretched over a vaguely skull-like structure, with only that terrible mouth to indicate it was a face at all.
Arthur remained frozen, terror locking his muscles in place. The creature, too, seed montarily still, as though assessing its newly-arrived prey. They existed in this suspended mont of mutual regard—predator and prey in their first confrontation.
The mont shattered when the creature's jaws suddenly hinged open to an impossible ninety-degree angle, revealing a glistening red gullet beyond those serrated teeth. It unleashed a scream that pierced Arthur's eardrums like physical daggers—a sound that seed to exist at the precise frequency designed to maximize human horror.
The sound shocked Arthur's soul back into his body. Instinct took control where conscious thought failed, and he rolled desperately to the side just as the beast's massive maw slamd down onto the stone where he had lain a split-second before.
Arthur scrambled to his feet, heart hamring against his ribs with such force he feared it might burst. Now upright, he got his first full view of the monstrosity—and imdiately wished he hadn't.
The creature's appendageless face flowed unnaturally into a body that violated every principle of natural anatomy. Its torso bent at bizarre angles, a misshapen spine protruding through its sickly skin like a row of jagged mountains. It positioned itself on all fours, but these weren't the limbs of any earthly quadruped. Instead, it possessed what appeared to be hideously deford human hands and feet, the fingers and toes elongated to grotesque proportions and tipped with talons that clicked against the stone floor.
Its skin, a pallid gray color reminiscent of a weeks-old corpse, seed to struggle to contain whatever existed beneath it. In places, it stretched taut over protruding bones; in others, it hung in loose, necrotic folds. The whole abomination gave the impression of sothing cobbled together from mismatched parts—a mockery of life rather than a natural organism.
The beast raised its head from the impact crater its jaws had left in the stone floor. It swiveled toward Arthur with a motion too fluid for its patchwork anatomy, sensory organs he couldn't identify sohow pinpointing his position.
Arthur's eyes widened in disbelief as the creature gathered itself and then lunged—moving with impossible speed that belied its awkward form. The impact knocked him backward, but survival instinct guided his hands to the monster's face, desperately pushing back against that gnashing maw as it snapped repeatedly at his throat.
They rolled across the floor in a desperate struggle, neither gaining clear advantage. The beast's claws raked across Arthur's arms and torso, leaving deep, burning furrows in his flesh. Blood slicked his grip, making it increasingly difficult to maintain his hold on the creature's face.
Arthur fought with the frenzied strength of absolute terror, knowing that a single mont's failure ant death. His academic training—all those combat classes and survival scenarios—seed laughably inadequate against the reality of this nightmare made flesh.
Their violent struggle carried them across the chamber until suddenly, Arthur felt emptiness beneath him. In their combat, they had rolled to the edge of a stone staircase. For a suspended mont, they teetered on the brink—then gravity claid them both.
Locked together in their deadly embrace, Arthur and the monster tumbled down the rough stone steps. Each impact sent jolts of pain through Arthur's already battered body. The beast shrieked in rage or pain—he couldn't tell which—as they bounced and rolled down the seemingly endless stairway.
The fall separated them at last, their deadly dance temporarily postponed by the intervention of the ancient architecture. As they crashed to a landing at the bottom of the stairs, Arthur rolled away from the creature, desperate to put distance between himself and those terrible teeth.
Blood pounded in his ears as he scrambled to his feet, every muscle screaming in protest. The enlightennt's ssage echoed in his mind as he faced the monster that was already recovering its orientation:
"You must reach the Seventh Tower. The darkness cos soon."
First, he had to survive the darkness that had already found him.
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