Orin Kael had long stopped believing in good days, but this one was particularly terrible.
Blood trickled from his split lip as he staggered through the alleyway, the distant sounds of pursuit fading behind him. Three ribs cracked, maybe broken. His left eye swollen shut. Payment for a job gone wrong—or rather, for trusting the wrong people in a city where trust was currency no one could afford.
"Should've known better," he muttered, spitting crimson onto the cracked concrete.
Night was falling over Ashcroft City, the dying sun painting the smog-choked sky in dirty oranges and reds. Like everything else in this place, even the sunset looked diseased. Orin checked his pocket—two crumpled bills and a handful of coins. Not enough for a doctor, barely enough for a drink.
He chose the drink.
The Sunken Barrel was exactly the kind of establishment where a man covered in blood wouldn't raise eyebrows. Dim lights, sticky floors, and patrons who had the decency not to remember faces. Perfect.
Orin slid onto a barstool, ignoring the flare of pain in his side. "Whatever's cheapest," he told the bartender, sliding his pitiful funds across the counter.
The whiskey burned going down, but it was a better burn than the one in his knuckles, in his ribs, in his pride. He drank slowly, making it last. The television mounted in the corner flickered with static-laced news. Something about unusual atmospheric disturbances. Scientific babble that meant nothing to someone just trying to survive another night.
Three sips in, the floor trembled. Glasses rattled. No one looked particularly concerned—earthquakes weren't uncommon in Ashcroft.
But then it happened again. Stronger. The lights flickered.
"That ain't normal," the bartender said, eyes fixed on the ceiling as dust rained down from ancient support beams.
The third tremor knocked Orin from his stool. The entire building groaned like a dying animal. Around him, patrons scrambled for the exit, sudden panic replacing alcohol-dulled complacency.
Orin pushed himself to his feet, instinct overriding pain. Outside was chaos—car alarms wailing, people shouting. The sky... the sky was wrong. Fractures of purple light split the darkening heavens like shattered glass.
"What in the—"
The ground beneath him ripped open. Not like an earthquake—more like reality itself was being torn apart. Concrete, dirt, and asphalt peeled away into an endless black void. Orin scrambled backward, but there was nowhere to go. The tear spread faster than he could run.
All around him, people were falling, their screams vanishing into the nothingness below. Buildings collapsed, not down but inward, as if being consumed.
Orin's back hit a wall. Dead end. The void spread toward him, hungry and unstoppable.
No way out. No escape. Just the cold certainty that this was it—the inglorious end of a life that had never amounted to much anyway.
"Fine," he snarled at the approaching darkness. "Come on, then."
The void reached him. The wall behind him disintegrated. Gravity betrayed him.
And Orin Kael fell.
He fell for what seemed like eternity through absolute darkness. No wind, no sound, nothing but the endless sensation of dropping. His mind cycled from terror to disbelief to a strange, hollow acceptance.
Then, impact.
Pain exploded through every nerve ending as Orin crashed into solid ground. Cold, hard stone beneath his palms. The air—if it was air—felt thick, wrong in his lungs. He forced his eyes open.
This wasn't Ashcroft City. This wasn't anywhere.
He lay on a vast stone platform floating in what could only be described as twilight given physical form. Purples, blacks, and deep blues swirled in the distance. Above, below, all around—there was no sky, no ground, just endless, shifting nothingness punctuated by other floating fragments of land.
Some nearby, some impossibly far. Islands of reality in a sea of void.
Orin pushed himself up, wincing as his injuries reminded him of their presence. The platform he'd landed on appeared to be part of a ruined structure—crumbling columns, shattered stone, all arranged in a pattern that felt deliberately wrong to the human eye.
"Hello?" His voice sounded flat, dampened by the strange atmosphere. No echo, no return.
Movement caught his eye. About thirty feet away, another figure lay crumpled on the stone. As Orin watched, they stirred, rising unsteadily to their feet. A woman—tall, dark-haired, wearing what looked like office attire, now torn and dirty. She turned, saw him, and froze.
Before either could speak, a sound cut through the unnatural silence. A high, wavering note that raised the hair on Orin's arms and sent ice through his veins. Instinct screamed danger.
Something was coming.
From behind a fallen column, it emerged—a thing that had no right to exist. Vaguely humanoid in shape, but too tall, too thin, its proportions all wrong. Its skin, if you could call it that, rippled like oil on water, iridescent and ever-shifting. Where a face should be, there was only a smooth, featureless expanse that somehow still gave the impression of hungry observation.
The woman screamed. The sound jerked Orin from his paralysis.
"Run!" he shouted, already moving toward her. "This way!"
The creature's head snapped toward them. It didn't walk so much as flicker, suddenly closer than it had been a heartbeat before.
Orin reached the woman, grabbed her arm, and pulled her toward the far edge of the platform where a narrow stone bridge stretched to another floating island.
"What is that thing?" she gasped, stumbling alongside him.
"No idea," Orin replied. "But I'm betting it's not the welcoming committee."
They reached the bridge. Behind them, the creature made that terrible sound again—not a roar, not a scream, but something that existed in the space between noise and silence.
Orin knew, with cold certainty, that if that thing caught them, death would be the best possible outcome.
"Don't look back," he told the woman, his hand still locked around her wrist. "Just run."
And together, they fled into the heart of the impossible landscape, the Hollow Rift claiming its newest prisoners.