Your brain slams into fifth gear, chasing concepts and ideas through your mind. You know yourself well enough to know that, without a plan, a real approach to follow through on, you're lost, and you try your hardest to put one in place.
After a few moments of frantic indecision, you manage to take a breath, fighting down your rising panic. With or without Renault, your way forward is still clear. You need to find your way to the center of things. Doing it without Renault simply means having to be more cautious about what could be ahead.
With this approach in mind, you step forward, feeling relieved to have something to guide you.
You continue on down the rock-formed corridor. You're not sure whether you're heading in the right direction or whether there's even a right direction to head in: the architecture of hell isn't a subject that you've covered yet in school. Still, you're moving towards something, and as far as you can tell, it's not the exit, as pleasant as that would be.
After a few moments, the corridor turns in a lazy corner, and you follow the path around, edging cautiously around the turn, until you come to a dead stop, staring at what you find in front of you.
The tunnel has come to an end, the rock walls forming a mouth. On the other side of it, clearly visible through the opening, is the world outside: the tall, thick trees of the forest, the skies above, and its bright stars.
They're burning. Orange flames cling to the tree trunks, devouring their bodies with an unnatural fury. The heavens are wreathed in the same fire, ablaze with hell's inferno. Even the stars are burning.
As you stare at the scene, you hear the screams. They're distant, far enough away that they're on the edge of audible, but they still manage to come through.
It's the most terrible sound that you've ever heard. In the last twenty-four hours, you've heard shrieks of fright, yells of pain, and cries of fear. But this…this is true despair: raw, anguished, hopeless. If it wasn't for the hell they're living in, you'd never believe that the voices could ever be human.
It's clear enough what you're being shown, even as your brain races to comprehend the sight.
This is the fate that awaits the world.
This is what's going to happen if you fail.