Before the blackness, there were echoes. Jagged shards of moments flickering behind closed eyes. Sunlight glinted off the water as the sharp cry of a seabird cut through the air and the ship's deck pitched beneath unsteady feet.
In another flash, he saw the roar of a crowd with faces turned upwards, cheering in words he somehow understood.
Then came a woman's face with kind eyes crinkled at the corners, her gentle hand smoothing hair back from a forehead.
The vision shifted to the clang of hammer on steel and the searing heat of a forge slamming into his face.
These flashes came faster now, overlapping like rain on glass. They didn't feel like memories at all. In fact, everything felt foreign to him.
Then amid the swirling fragments, one vision solidified.
A farm stretched to the horizon under a sky heavy with storm clouds, lightning flashing within their depths. The wind whipped his hair as he squinted toward the distance, not at something but someone.
A woman ran toward him through rows of tobacco plants, her pace quickening with every step until she was nearly flying. She seemed angry and he couldn't understand why. Then darkness swallowed everything.
Pain arrived first as consciousness returned—not gradually, but all at once, like being slapped awake.
But all he saw was darkness.
His first real sensation was rough wood against his cheek, followed immediately by the discovery that his limbs struck solid barriers when he tried to move. In fact, these barriers seemed to surround him on all sides. He was trapped.
He gasped, but the air hung stale, thick with dust. When his palms slammed against the barrier inches from his face, it remained solid and immovable. He pushed harder, but his flimsy arms couldn't even budge the immovable surface.
Terror rushed through his mind. Why was he here? How had this happened? He searched desperately for anything before the flashes, grasping for a name, an identity, anything at all—but nothing came except that same terrifying emptiness.
Why can't I remember anything?
He punched at the barrier above him, the sound awfully muffled. It was like the darkness was swallowing it instantly, giving it no time to echo.
And why can't I get out? It's not like I've been buried alive or anything—
Wait...
The truth crashed down on him like a physical blow: he was underground, buried alive. The muffled sounds, the dead silence, the weight pressing on the lid he couldn't budge—all pointed to this conclusion.
He let out a terrified scream as he began frantically pushing in all directions, trying to force himself out in anyway possible. However, his efforts seemed to cause the air to thin, each inhale bringing in less and less oxygen.
Fuck! I'm running out of air!
He realized he had mere minutes left before he would die for real—whatever "real" even meant to someone with no memory. His desperation skyrocketed. He planted his feet against the bottom of his little box and pushed upwards with all his might. His muscled screamed as he used their full power, trying to get the barrier above him to move.
His lungs were burning now, failing to bring in any oxygen to supply his muscles. But he kept pushing. Then, suddenly, he felt a heat burning up within his chest. It moved, traveling from his chest towards his right hand, heating up as it did so.
He screamed out in exertion as the heat rushed through his fingers to his fingertips. Slowly, his fingers began digging into the wood above him, causing audible cracking sounds to be heard. He saw a brief flash of light encompass his right hand. Then...
BOOM!
The muffled sound directly above his head broke through the wood and overwhelmed the whine in his ears—a sharp, violent shattering followed immediately by a low rumble. The lid didn't merely break; it exploded outward as if struck by some powerful force.
Dirt, pebbles, and cold, damp clumps of earth rained down onto his face and chest, filling his mouth and clogging his nostrils.
He choked and gagged while thrashing wildly in the confined space, fighting against the debris and clawing at his face in desperate search of air.
Cool damp air suddenly washed over his skin like a blessing. He gasped it in between body-shaking coughs while spitting out dirt. A dim, grey light filtered down through the raining soil and splintered wood where the lid had been.
Ah... is that daylight?
After absolute darkness, even this faint illumination blinded him. He squeezed his eyes shut against the painful glare before forcing them open again, blinking rapidly as tears streamed from both the dust and sudden light.
His arms trembled violently as he clawed at the lip of the ragged hole, damp earth crumbling under his grip and sending small cascades back down onto the splintered remains of the coffin below.
He collapsed onto the cold, damp ground beside the hole, gasping with chest heaving. The fresh, cool air—so welcome moments before—now carried a metallic stench that made him gag. He recognized that smell, but couldn't identify it. He pushed himself up and looked around, his eyes widening as he did so.
He was in a field where rows upon rows of plants stretched out before him under an oppressive, flat grey sky. The layout seemed strangely familiar, like the farm from his vision, yet very wrong. The air was thick with a low-lying mist that clung to the ground and swirled between the rows like a living creature. No storm raged here now—only a silent, damp gloom.
These weren't tobacco plants eithr. They stood tall, higher than his head, bearing large, elaborate flowers with petals in disturbingly fleshy shades of pink and deep crimson that glistened wetly in the dim light. But the alien flowers weren't what made his blood run cold—it was the leaves.
He scrambled backward, a choked noise of revulsion catching in his throat. Dangling heavily from the thick stems where leaves should have been were... organs. Wet pulsing shapes that looked like livers, kidneys, even hearts grew obscenely from the stalks, connected by veiny, root-like tendrils.
Some were small and budding while others had grown grossly swollen, dripping a strange fluid onto the dark soil below. The awful stench intensified the closer he looked—an acidic rotting smell.
A muffled sound seized his attention as he looked up. Through the swirling mist in the distance, outlines moved—massive, hulking shapes, vaguely humanoid but far too large, their forms indistinct and distorted by the fog. They shambled slowly between the rows, apparently tending to the harvest. The sight sent a fresh wave of terror coursing through him.
What the hell are those things?
He couldn't stay here. Scrambling back on hands and knees, he half-fell back into the hole he'd just escaped. The broken coffin offered no comfort but served as a shield—a hiding place from the reality above. His mind raced, grasping for any anchor amid the chaos. Who am I? Why am I here?
A thought came to his mind, the coffin itself might hold a clue, like a name or something. Ignoring the pain in his muscles, he began clawing at the dirt and mud caked onto the remaining sections of the broken wooden box.
After several minutes of painful, exhausting effort, his fingers brushed against something hard and uneven beneath the grime on a relatively intact side panel. He scraped harder, clearing away the mud to reveal letters carved deep into the wood. He traced them with trembling fingers, his heart pounding wildly against his ribs.
REST IN PEACE
His breath hitched as he uncovered more text below, another word carved larger and clearer:
HILLEL
And beneath that, a final inscription:
514 AA
Hillel. The name resonated strangely—a faint echo against the void in his mind. It felt not exactly familiar but somehow right in a way nothing else had since waking. "Rest in Peace" made a terrible kind of sense, but "514 AA" meant nothing to him—it sounded weird. Yet the name... Hillel... he clung to it like a drowning man to driftwood. It was significant in the chaos. It was his.
My name is Hillel.
Taking another shaky breath, Hillel hauled himself out of the grave once more. This time, the sight of the field didn't send him scrambling back. What good would sitting in a hole in the ground do? He needed to leave, to escape.
He pushed himself to his feet, legs trembling, and peered through the swirling mist. Rows of those organ-bearing flowers stretched away in every direction. Keeping low, trying not to brush against the abnormal flowers, he started moving perpendicular to the rows, hoping to find an edge, a wall, anything other than this hellscape.
He walked, then jogged, then almost ran between the rows, panic rising again as the field seemed to stretch on infinitely. North, south, east, west—just more rows, more mist, more of that soul-sickening stench. It felt as if the entire world had become this farm.
Then, through a momentary thinning of the mist, he saw it—a structure. Looming in the distance, stood a dilapidated farmhouse. Its silhouette warped and unsettled against the grey sky, roof sagging, wood dark and rotting. It was the only break in the uniform rows, but it was close to those massive figures.
Driven by the lack of any other landmark, Hillel found himself cautiously making his way toward it, using the tall stalks of the nightmare plants for cover. As he drew nearer, the fog thinned further, and he finally got a clear view of the beings tending this horrific garden.
His breath caught in his throat. They were giants, easily three times his height, but quite malformed. Each possessed two heads perched unsettlingly close together atop a thick, wrinkled neck. Worse still, each head bore only a single, massive, milky-white eye planted squarely in the center of its forehead. Their skin was a pale, almost translucent white, weathered and deeply wrinkled like used paper. Their thick, powerful fingers, ending in dirty, cracked nails, were stained dark crimson, slick with blood and other fluids.
They moved slowly. Hillel watched, frozen behind a particularly large stalk bearing a liver-like growth, as one of the two-headed cyclops-giants carefully plucked a heart-shaped organ from a stem, its bloodstained fingers surprisingly gentle. It placed the organ into a large, wooden bucket at its feet before moving to another plant. Several buckets stood near each giant, seemingly designated for specific organs.
Then he saw the rest of the process. One giant reached up toward the large, fleshy disk at the center of one of the crimson flowers—a part Hillel hadn't been able to see clearly from his lower vantage point. As the giant leaned the tall stalk over, Hillel saw that the disk wasn't pollen or seeds. It was packed tight, glistening wetly, with dozens of human eyes staring blankly in all directions. The giant lightly tapped the back of the flower disk with its bloodstained knuckles. Several eyes dislodged, falling with soft, wet plops into another specialized bucket below.
What the f—
The sight—the casual harvesting of eyes like berries—sent a wave of nausea so violent through Hillel that he couldn't suppress the sound. He gasped, the intake of air audible enough for a reaction.
Instantly, the work stopped. Every giant within earshot—three of them near the farmhouse—froze. Six massive, single eyes swiveled, fixing unerringly on the area where the sound had originated. On Hillel's hiding spot.
Oh shit. That's no good.
He dropped flat to the muddy ground, pressing himself behind the thickest stalk he could find, heart hammering against his ribs so hard he felt it shake his whole body. He held his breath, praying the mist would conceal him, that they hadn't pinpointed his exact location.
Heavy footfalls, like small earthquakes, began to shake the ground near him. They were searching. Shadows stretched long and distorted over the rows as the giants moved closer, their massive heads scanning the area. Hillel squeezed his eyes shut for a second, then forced them open, needing to see the threat.
A huge, pale foot slammed down only yards away, splattering mud. The stench of rot and blood intensified. The shadow fell directly over him. He didn't dare move, didn't dare breathe. Slowly, agonizingly, he tilted his head back, peering up through the grotesque leaves of his hiding place.
Two pale, wrinkled faces peered down from height, their expressions blank. And two massive, milky-white eyes—one set impossibly high above the other on the giant's twin heads—stared directly down at him, seeming to fill his entire vision. He was found.