Cold.That was the first sensation that crept through Cel's consciousness as his eyelids fluttered open. Not the familiar damp chill of his cell, but something far more alien - a bone-deep cold that seemed to seep from the very air itself.His vision swam, shapes bleeding together in a gray haze. Slowly, the blur began to clear, revealing a sight that made his heart stutter.A moon hung directly above him. Full, pale, and impossibly bright against a starless void. Its silver light poured down like liquid mercury, casting everything in ghostly relief.Cel's breath hitched.‘The moon?’Something felt fundamentally wrong about the sight. He'd spent the st year staring at stone walls and rusted iron bars. There had been no sky, no moon, no—He bolted upright, ash cascading from his body in gray streams. His hands cwed at the ground beneath him, fingers sinking into something soft and suffocating. Not the cold stone of his cell floor, but fine ash that clung to his skin like powdered bone."What...?" The word scraped from his throat, raw and broken.The ndscape stretched endlessly in every direction - a sea of gray-bck ash broken only by jagged obsidian stones that jutted from the earth like the ribs of some colossal corpse. Some towered above him, their surfaces gleaming dully in the moonlight, while others y shattered and broken, as if the world itself had cracked under some unimaginable weight.Deep crevices split the ground in pces, their dark mouths yawning wide. Some were narrow enough to step across, but others plunged into shadowy depths that seemed to swallow even the moon's light.On the horizon, barely visible through the haze of drifting ash, the skeletal remains of structures cwed at the sky - ruins of something that had once been, now reduced to crumbling monuments of a forgotten age.The silence was absolute. No wind stirred the ash. No insects buzzed. No distant sounds of life echoed across the wastend. It was as if the world had died long ago, and Cel was the st soul left to witness its grave.His mind raced, fragments of memory struggling to surface through the fog of confusion. The cell. The iron bars. The stench of decay and unwashed bodies. The purple hoods, their faces hidden behind masks as they dragged him from his cage for another session of their twisted experiments.And then... food.His stomach clenched at the memory. A piece of rotting flesh, green with mold and crawling with maggots. He'd devoured it without hesitation, the way he had every other rancid scrap they'd thrown him over the past year.‘Did they… drug me?’The thought felt distant and detached. His captors had subjected him to every conceivable torment. Perhaps this was just another experiment, another way to test what little remained of his sanity. But the chains were gone. The walls had vanished. For the first time in a year, nothing held him captive.He should have felt joy. Relief. Something.Instead, there was only a hollow ache where those emotions should have been, as if they'd been carved out of him along with everything else.Cel's legs trembled as he tried to stand. His body, reduced to little more than skin stretched over bone, protested with every movement. Months of starvation and blood loss had left him weak, gaunt, a shadow of who he'd once been.His vision blurred as he rose, blood rushing to his head in a dizzying wave. The cold air burned his lungs, thick with ash and decay. For a moment, he swayed on his feet, certain he would colpse back into the gray dust.But he held on, gripping his knees until the world stopped spinning.A sound shattered the oppressive silence - a low, rumbling growl that seemed to rise from the very earth itself. It was followed by the unmistakable scrape of cws against stone, each scratch echoing across the wastend as a promise of death.Cel's blood turned to ice.His eyes snapped toward the sound, scanning the maze of obsidian stones that surrounded him. Something moved in the shadows between them, a darker patch of bck that shifted and writhed with predatory intent.He wasn't alone in this dead world after all.The thing that emerged from the shadows made Cel's heart stop entirely.Twice his height, maybe more. A mountain of muscle and bone wrapped in scales that gleamed like bck gss, each one catching the moonlight with an oily sheen. The creature's elongated skull was crowned with jagged horns that curved backward like a cursed crown, and when it turned toward him, amber eyes bzed with an intelligence that made his blood freeze.This wasn't some mindless beast. It was something far worse.Each step was deliberate, calcuted. Massive forelimbs ended in cws that could gut a man with ease, scraping against the obsidian stones with the sound of nails on gss. The creature's hind legs flexed with corded muscle beneath its armored hide, carrying it forward with terrifying grace. A whip-like tail swayed behind it, studded with bony spikes that promised agony.Realization struck like lightning.The Hollow Realms.The desote ndscape, his sudden freedom, the creature stalking him - it all made terrible sense now. He was in one of the forsaken dimensions where life had withered and died, leaving only twisted things to crawl through the ruins. When rifts tore reality apart and spilled these monstrosities into the world, only one thing could seal a breach: a living human soul fed to the void.The cult hadn't killed him. They'd used him as a key, a sacrifice to lock away something that threatened their twisted vision of the world. Not for humanity's sake - never that. They had their own sick reasons.But understanding wouldn't save him now.The creature's amber gaze found his, and the hunt began.Time crystallized. Cel's muscles locked, his body screaming at him to run while his mind went bnk with terror. The beast's presence pressed down on him like a physical weight, and in that moment of perfect stillness, he understood a simple truth: there would be no escape.A rumbling growl rolled from the creature's throat, vibrating through his bones.‘Move, you damn body! Move! Move! Move!’The command exploded through his paralysis and Cel's legs finally obeyed, carrying him in a stumbling sprint across the ash-covered ground. His weakened body protested with every step, vision blurring as months of starvation caught up with him. But raw survival instinct drove him forward into the formation of obsidian stones.The earth shook.Behind him, the creature charged with impossible speed for something so massive. Its cws gouged deep trenches in the ground, sending up clouds of choking ash. Each thunderous step brought it closer.Cel weaved between the towering stones, lungs burning as he sucked in air that tasted of sulfur and death. His muscles, wasted from captivity, screamed in protest. The ground shifted treacherously beneath his feet - sometimes solid, sometimes giving way to loose ash that sent him stumbling over jagged rocks.His heart hammered against his ribs as if trying to escape his chest entirely.A sharp turn around one of the bck monoliths gave him a moment of hope. Perhaps the creature had lost him between the obsidian formations. Perhaps—A roar split the night.The sound rolled across the wastend like thunder, shaking the very ground beneath his feet. Loose ash rained down from the stones above.It was close. Too close.Cel's gaze swept around in desperation as he moved further. Ash. Jagged stones. And endless darkness. Every direction offered the same promise of death.His mind screamed that it was hopeless. But he wouldn't stop. He couldn't stop. Not after everything he had endured.The rhythmic thunder of the creature's footfalls grew louder. Each scrape of cws against stone drove ice deeper into his veins. His lungs burned, his legs trembled, his vision blurred at the edges.His foot caught.The loose rock sent him sprawling face-first into the ash, the world exploding in a cloud of gray dust. He cwed at the ground, scrambling to rise, but…A shadow swallowed the moonlight above him.The strike came faster than thought.White-hot agony erupted across his torso as massive cws pierced his back. The world tilted, spinning as he was lifted into the air like a broken doll, then hurled with bone-crushing force.Stone. Air. Stone again.His body crashed into the obsidian surface and tumbled into the hungry mouth of a ravine. Sharp edges tore at his skin as he fell, the walls of the chasm scraping past in a blur of bck stone and spurting blood.Then, with a sickening thud, he hit the ground.Silence.For a heartbeat, there was nothing - no pain, no sound, just the terrible stillness of the ash-covered world. But reality crept back in, wave after wave of liquid fire spreading through his shattered body.Cel y motionless at the bottom of the ravine, blood pooling beneath him from the holes in his torso.

  After a while of unimaginable pain, the searing agony had faded to a distant throb, as if it belonged to someone else. He tried to move, to sit up, to turn his head, to do anything - but his body no longer responded.His limbs felt like lead. The world blurred at the edges, floating somewhere between life and death. All he could do was stare up through the narrow gap above, where the pale moon gazed down with cold indifference - the only witness to his impending death.At least the creature was nowhere in sight. The monster that had hunted him, torn him apart, had simply vanished.But it didn't matter.Each breath grew shallower than the st. His heart stuttered against his ribs, fighting a losing battle as his life leaked into the ash beneath him.Yet even as his body failed him, his mind was clearer than it had ever been.‘So this is how it feels to die...’The thought drifted through his mind with strange detachment. But beneath that cold acceptance, something else cwed its way to the surface - a desperate voice screaming against the darkness.‘I don't want to die... not like this. Not yet…’But why? Why should he cling to this miserable existence? The answer came like a lightning strike - not because he valued his life, but because they didn't deserve this satisfaction.What consumed him in those final moments wasn't fear or regret. It was rage. Pure, unbridled fury that boiled in his blood and seared through his veins like molten metal.He wasn't just angry at his fate - he was enraged at everything. His pathetic life. His cursed family that had abandoned him. The Sun Cn that had never wanted him. The cult that had tortured him for an entire year. He had given them everything - and for what? To be left bleeding in the dirt, abandoned by the very people who were supposed to protect him.‘They're probably sleeping peacefully in their warm and comfy beds right now... while I bleed out in this cursed realm.’But it was his father's face that surfaced clearest of all - cold, disgusted, disappointed. The man who had beaten him senseless when the Moon Goddess chose him instead of the Sun God. The man who had handed him over to the cult without a second thought, deeming him worthless the moment he didn't fit into his perfect pn.‘I gave them everything - my life, my loyalty - and this is how it ends…? I won’t accept that!’The hatred pulsed through him, keeping him anchored to life when everything else had failed. Not hope. Not love. Not survival instinct.‘I want to kill them... I want to tear them apart, destroy everything they hold dear! They deserve nothing but suffering!’The fire in his chest fred brighter, pushing back against death's icy embrace.‘I will make them all pay!’"Do you like the moon?" A voice cut through his rage like a bde through silk - calm, soft, almost casual. As if they were discussing the weather.Cel's thoughts ground to a halt. He hadn't heard anyone approach. No one could possibly be here, in this cursed, dead pce."What?" The word scraped from his throat like broken gss."Do you like the moon?" The voice asked again, as if it were the most natural question in the world.His rage fred. Here he was - body shattered beyond recognition, blood pooling beneath him like spilled ink, life draining away drop by drop - and someone had the audacity to ask him about the moon?"Why does that matter? In this situation, of all times?""It matters." The voice replied calmly, unaffected by his anger.Silence stretched between them like a bde's edge.The absurd question echoed in his mind, fury still burning in his chest. Yet slowly, something else crept in - a strange curiosity. He didn't know why, but something about the voice felt... different. Familiar even.After a long pause, he answered, his voice hollow as wind through bone. "I don't know. Never really thought about it.""Well, that isn't a no." The voice hummed, as if pleased by his answer.