"What is this? I feel so light... Am I flying? Where... where am I?" His thoughts tumbled, frantic and unsteady. "Darkness... everywhere, dark to dark. I can't see, can't move. Who... who am I?" A flicker of light pierced the void, distant at first, but rushing toward him with terrifying speed. "Light... coming closer... too fast, too fast! No! I can't stop it! No! AAAAAAAAA!"

—Twitch...

—Twitch...

A finger jerked, then another, until the whole body was twitching, spasms rippling through lifeless limbs. "Where am I?" he thought. "I remember... the light. That blinding light, and now... nothing. But I can move!" He tried to rise, but his head hit something hard, the impact jarring him back to his senses.

Confusion thickened. His hands felt along the edges around him. "Walls... I'm surrounded by walls. I can barely move." Panic set in. He started pushing, hitting, desperate to break free. Finally, one of the walls gave way and fell with a dull thud.

"Finally," he breathed. "But where is this place?"

He looked around, but there was no warm sunlight, no cool glow of the moon. Instead, he saw a sickly greenish sky, gritty with smoke, rising from who knew where. The air reeked of decay. At his feet lay a small severed hand, bits of flesh torn from it, a ghastly sight that made him recoil in shock. Instinctively, he raised his own hand in defense—and froze.

"How... how can this be?" His hand was nothing but bone. No skin, no muscle, no flesh. Only now did he fully grasp it—he was nothing but a skeleton.

"What happened to me? Why am I like this?" He looked down at his bony limbs, the absence of life startling in its cold finality. "Why... why do I feel like everything is... bigger than it should be?" The world seemed enormous, like he had been shrunk or the land itself had grown. But the biggest question weighed heavy in his mind: What am I now?

He felt no pain, no hunger—just an eerie sense of emptiness and confusion. Deep within him, however, there was a pull, an unexplainable connection to something, or someone, far away, tugging at him like a thread tied to his soul.

He wanted to scream, to cry out, but no sound escaped his jaw. The curse of his new existence—life, but no voice. Whatever force had brought him back didn't care for words. Frustrated and lost, he stumbled out of the place he had been born into, some kind of grim graveyard, and set his gaze on a distant, crumbling castle on the horizon. That strange pull within him was drawing him there, like a rope winding him toward a purpose he couldn't yet understand.

As he trudged through the bleak landscape, a bone-chilling howl echoed across the sky, making the very ground tremble beneath his feet. His empty eyes turned upward in time to see a massive, winged serpent descending from the filthy clouds. Its wings were vast, each flap sending gusts of wind strong enough to lift him off his feet, casting him into the air like a rag doll. Fear—or something like it—gripped his mind as he tumbled back to the ground, the pull toward the castle stronger now, as if something far more dangerous was waiting for him there.