Lucien's mouth was a graveyard.His tongue was cracked and sour, a slab of meat swollen against the roof of his mouth. Every breath scraped his throat like broken glass. His skin, slick with fever-sweat, clung to his shredded suit as if it too wished to suffocate him. His clothes clung like a second, suffocating skin, hot and rank and soaked through. His whole body screamed for water, for just a drop to cool the inferno burning inside.
But there was nothing.Nothing but sand.Nothing but smoke.Nothing but that thing—the river.
It sprawled across the cracked desert like a wound torn in the earth, a ribbon of dark, glistening red. The river of blood. Thick as oil. Reeking of rust and rot and something fouler still. The air itself bent above it, warping with the stink of it.
Lucien stared at it, hate and horror warring in his chest.
He would not.He could not.
He would not stoop so low.
But others... others were breaking faster.
Around him, the survivors staggered and swayed, mouths hanging open, lips peeling back from teeth in parched, animal desperation. One woman tore at her own arms as if the blood beneath her skin might quench her thirst. Another man moaned a child's name again and again, each rasping syllable weaker than the last.
And then one broke.
He was young—barely a man. His eyes had gone glassy and wild, his breath hitching in shallow, panicked gulps. Without a sound, he turned and sprinted toward the river, his limbs jerking like a puppet yanked by unseen strings.
"Don't," Lucien said, but his voice was a whisper, a dying breath lost in the swirling dust.
The others watched too—too weak, too afraid, too uncertain to move.
The boy dropped to his knees at the river's edge. Dipped his trembling hands into the thick, clotted blood. Brought it to his mouth.
And drank.
The world seemed to pause.
For one heartbeat.
Two.
Then the screaming began.
It was not the scream of a wounded man. It was the scream of a soul being unmade.
The boy clawed at his own face, nails tearing furrows through flesh already sloughing off like wet paper. His skin melted in rivulets, sliding from his skull in steaming chunks. His teeth were bared in a rictus of agony as his lips peeled away, exposing raw, wet bone.
The blood he had swallowed oozed back out, frothing black from his throat, burning through his insides like acid. His eyes—those frantic, human eyes—popped in their sockets, leaking ichor down his cheeks.
The other survivors could only watch. Frozen. Horrified.
One woman fell to her knees, sobbing uncontrollably. Another covered her mouth with shaking hands, a thin whimper escaping her throat.
Lucien watched too—cold, clinical. Memorizing.
Because this, he realized, was a law of Hell. As real and binding as gravity.
Take what you are not meant to have—and Hell takes you.
The boy's body convulsed violently one last time, bones snapping like dry twigs, and then even those bones began to dissolve, hissing and bubbling into the river like sugar in boiling water. Within seconds, there was nothing left. Not a shred. Not a trace.
Only the river, sluggish and indifferent, flowing onward.Unchanged.Unfeeling.Hungry.
A shudder ran through the survivors, rippling like a disease. They stumbled back from the river's edge, some weeping, some muttering prayers, most simply broken. The thirst still clawed at their throats, but now terror anchored them in place, more potent than any need.
Lucien turned his gaze back to the horizon.
No water. No sanctuary. Only the endless, bleeding sands and the unblinking eye of a merciless sky.
He wiped his cracked lips with the back of his hand, tasting nothing but salt and dust.
He would not drink.
He would not fall.
Not like that.
Not ever.
And somewhere, deep in the marrow of this forsaken world, he could almost feel Hell itself watching him—waiting—to see how far the hunger would drive him.
Lucien Virelli squared his shoulders.
Let it wait.He was not here to die.He was here to win.
They were breaking.
The thirst had hollowed them out, gnawed them from the inside like worms through rot.Every breath came ragged and slow, each movement an act of rebellion against their failing bodies.They clung to the ground, to themselves, to the thin shreds of sanity that hadn't yet been torn away.
Terror lived in their eyes—raw, primal, the kind of terror that strips a human being down to meat and instinct.But now even terror was muted, dulled by exhaustion so complete it felt like drowning in molasses.Their bodies simply... refused.Refused to run.Refused to fight.
The sands whispered around them, curling over their prone forms like a shroud. The air shimmered with heat, thick and distorted, every breath dragging grit into already-ruined lungs. The sky was a molten wound leaking red light, a fever dream that offered no end.
Lucien sat apart, perched on a crooked rock, his eyes half-lidded but still sharp.
He saw the fractures growing between them—watched the cracks split the group apart like dry wood under a wedge.Soft sobbing.Mutters of blame.A hoarse argument that fizzled into coughing fits before it could become violence.
And the thirst.
Gods, the thirst.
It was a beast now, gnashing its teeth inside every skull. Even Lucien's head pounded with it, every cell in his body screaming for water, his throat a scraped hollow that could barely squeeze out breath.
But he endured.He endured because he had to.Because he knew—Hell punished weakness faster than it punished evil.
A sound—a skitter, a rattle—broke the heavy silence.
Heads jerked up, slow and sluggish, as though pulled by strings from some cruel puppeteer.
Across the dunes, something moved.At first just a shadow.Then a shape.
It came over the horizon, black against the bleeding light.It moved low to the ground, a gliding blur of limbs and tail.
Closer.Closer.
Lucien's breath caught in his ruined throat.
It was a scorpion—but no scorpion the living world had ever known.It was the size of a full-grown man, maybe larger, its shell dark and wet as fresh oil. Its legs moved in horrible, staccato rhythm, clicking against the sand, the sound like bones tapping together. Its claws were massive, wicked things, serrated like butcher knives. Its tail arched high, barbed and dripping with something thick and black.
And it was hungry.
The survivors saw it too, but this time... no one ran.
They couldn't.
They barely even moved.
Only widened their cracked, bloodshot eyes as the thing bore down on them, silent but for the obscene clicking of its limbs.
The first victim didn't even scream.The scorpion pounced, swift as nightmare, and drove its tail through the man's chest with a sound like a wet rag tearing.The man spasmed once—twice—and then hung limp, skewered like meat on a spit.
The others watched. Frozen. Doomed.Some tried to crawl away, clawing feebly at the sand, but the beast was quicker, meaner, inevitable.
It seized a woman by the waist, its claws snapping shut with a crunch of shattered bone.She screamed—a raw, animal wail that curdled into gurgles as her ribcage was crushed inwards like paper.
Another tried to rise, to stumble away, but the scorpion caught his ankle and dragged him back across the sand, his nails carving desperate furrows behind him until the tail lanced down and pinned him, thrashing, to the ground.
Blood soaked the sand. Steam rose from where it hit the ground, as if even death here was an abomination.
Lucien watched, his heart hammering dully in his ears, and for one blinding moment, he considered running.
But where?
There was nowhere left to run.
He dropped lower against the rock, making himself small, insignificant, praying the creature's black, faceted eyes would pass over him like a stone.
The slaughter went on.Quick.Efficient.
The scorpion killed because it could, because this world birthed monsters not for hunger but for cruelty.It carved through the survivors until the air was thick with the stink of blood and burning hair.
And when it was finished, when there was nothing left but the broken and the dying, it scuttled back into the dunes, dragging two limp bodies in its jaws, leaving a trail of blood that steamed and sizzled in its wake.
Silence fell again.Not peace.Never peace.Just the absence of screams.
Lucien remained motionless for a long time, waiting, willing his own breathing to slow, his mind to silence the thundering panic trying to claw its way out of his chest.
Around him, a few survivors still lived, but barely. Huddled, sobbing, leaking from wounds they would not survive.
Lucien licked his lips, tasting blood and dust, and stared up at the endless, bleeding sky.
Hell did not forgive weakness.Hell did not reward mercy.Hell did not want you to survive.
If he wanted to live, he would have to do more than endure.
He would have to conquer.
The scorpion's trail bled into the dunes, a slick black stain that steamed in the burning wind.Its monstrous shape vanished over the horizon, and with it, the last illusion of safety.
Lucien lay still for a long moment, tasting copper and grit on his cracked tongue, feeling the slow thud of his heart like a drumbeat at the end of the world.
When he rose, it was slow, deliberate.The landscape around him was a graveyard of broken bodies and broken minds.
The survivors—if they could still be called that—were scattered like discarded dolls.Some huddled into balls, weeping without sound, their eyes glassy and vacant.Others crawled weakly in the sand, like worms trying to burrow into nothingness.One man knelt in prayer, whispering to gods that had never listened and would not start now.
Lucien stood alone, his clothes glued to his skin by blood and sweat, his throat a dry wound that refused to heal.Pain gripped his body with iron fingers.Fear gnawed at his mind.
But something colder moved beneath the fear.Something sharper.
Purpose.
There was no more waiting. No more hoping. Hope was dead here.If he did not bend this nightmare to his will, he would break like the rest of them.If he did not move now, he would be meat.
Lucien wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing it across his face like war paint.
And then he began the gathering.
He walked among them—those few broken souls too weak to flee, too scared to fight.He kicked one man in the ribs to get his attention, hard enough to make him groan but not enough to kill.He grabbed another woman by the shoulder, shaking her until she blinked the stupor from her red-rimmed eyes.
"Move," Lucien rasped, his voice like sandpaper dragged over bone."Move or die."
Some obeyed without thought, instinctively drawn to the only thing that still resembled strength.Others hesitated—and Lucien knew hesitation was death.
He didn't hesitate.He slapped a man across the face, a sharp, cracking blow that left a bloody handprint.He stared into hollow, frightened eyes and whispered, "If you don't stand, you'll be the next thing that bleeds into the sand."
And somehow, impossibly, they listened.
A handful. No more than six.Filthy, broken, trembling things that once had been men and women.
But enough.
Enough to build something from.
Lucien herded them into a loose knot near the shattered remains of a boulder. A feeble shelter against the sun and the horrors that roamed this cursed land.
They clung to each other, murmuring prayers or curses, or nothing at all.They didn't look at him directly.They couldn't.
Good.
He didn't need their trust.He didn't want their love.
He needed their bodies—moving, breathing shields against whatever hellspawn would crawl from the dunes next.
Lucien stood over them, his shadow falling long and crooked.
"You listen to me," he said, voice low and sharp, cutting through the dry wind like a blade."This place wants us dead. It will send worse things than that scorpion. It will tear us apart, slowly, if we let it."
He paused, letting the silence press in, heavy and suffocating.
"But together," he continued, savoring the lie even as he spoke it, "we have a chance. Alone, you're nothing. With me... maybe you live another day."
He saw it in their faces—the flicker of desperate hope, the pathetic, cringing thing inside them that still wanted to believe.
It made him sick. It made him powerful.
The sand shifted.
Far off in the distance, a ripple.Movement beneath the dunes.
Lucien's mouth twisted into something like a smile.
"Something's coming," he whispered, and they stiffened as one, like cattle smelling the butcher.
Something worse than the scorpion.Something older.Something hungry.
He felt it in the earth beneath his feet, the slow, tremoring pulse of something vast and malevolent.
And he would be ready.
He would use these broken things—bleed them dry if he had to—before he let Hell claim him.
Lucien knelt down among them, huddled close, smelling their fear, feeling their shivers, whispering poisoned promises into their ruined ears.
"We will survive," he lied, voice soft as death.
Above them, the sky split with a long, low groan.A crack running through the blood-red clouds.A new nightmare was being born.
And somewhere deep inside Lucien, something black and grinning stirred to life.
The sand moaned.
It was not the wind—it was the ground itself, trembling with something foul, something alive.
Lucien felt it first in the soles of his feet, a slow, buzzing vibration, as if a thousand insects crawled beneath the surface of the world.
He turned sharply, his makeshift herd of survivors pressing tighter together, their faces pinched with terror.
Across the endless dunes, something was moving—no, emerging.The white sand broke apart like scabbed skin splitting over fresh wounds.
First came the priest—the one who had died screaming hours ago, gutted by invisible teeth, his insides painted across the sky like butcher's art.
He was whole now.But wrong.
The priest's skin was stitched with dark veins, pulsing in rhythms too foul to name. His eyes glowed like embers buried deep in the ash of a dying fire. His mouth hung slack, leaking black foam that hissed where it touched the sand.
And he was not alone.
Behind him, clawing and thrashing, came the others—the ones who had perished in agony.The woman who had melted in the river of blood.The man torn to ribbons by the scorpion's jagged pincers.
All of them.Risen.Malformed.Maddened.
The desert belched them up, vomiting corpses made anew, staggering forward in endless, mindless hunger.
The survivors began to scream—thin, hopeless keening that barely carried over the wailing sands.
Lucien stood frozen, his heart hammering against the prison of his ribs.
And in that moment, with a terrible clarity, he understood.
There was no death here.There was no release.There was only suffering without end, without mercy, without escape.
Hell was eternal.
To die here was not to find peace. It was to be reborn in pain, endlessly recycled by this cursed land for fresh agony.
The priest lifted his arms, bones cracking wetly, and from his ruined throat came a howl—something between a prayer and a curse.
And the dead surged forward.
Lucien did not hesitate.He could not.
"Move!" he barked, grabbing the nearest survivor and shoving them forward."RUN!"
The small group staggered into motion, stumbling like drunkards, clawing at the sand, gasping in the burning air. Their limbs shook with exhaustion, with terror—but some primal thing inside them, some rotting instinct, forced them onward.
Lucien ran at their head, teeth gritted against the pain, his muscles screaming, his vision swimming with heat and thirst and horror.
Behind them, the dead chased without fatigue, without fear, without hope.
Lucien dared a glance over his shoulder—and wished he hadn't.
The priest was gaining.And he was smiling.
A ragged, lipless grin that split his face wide, revealing the rotten blackness inside.
Lucien ran faster, dragging the others with him, heedless of the dunes that tore at their feet, heedless of the blood that splattered the sand with every raw step.
Above them, the sky cracked again—spiderwebs of darkness crawling across the blistering sun.
The land itself seemed to breathe, hot and fetid, a foul whisper at the edge of hearing:"Forever... forever... forever..."
Lucien felt it wrapping around his mind, a cold hand sinking claws into his sanity.
But he fought it.He had to.
There would be time for despair later—if later ever came.
Now was only survival.
He dragged his broken army across the dunes, their shadows long and twisted behind them, racing against the nightmare that never needed to rest, that would never stop coming, that would feast on them again and again for all eternity.
Hell was not a pit.
Hell was a circle.
An endless, blood-slicked circle of death and rebirth, of suffering unbound by time, of hope slaughtered and resurrected just to die again.
Lucien ran—and knew, with every gasping breath, that he was already lost.
But he would not be lost alone.
Not yet.
The sand swallowed their footsteps as they fled, stumbling, gasping, half-blind with thirst and terror.Lucien led them, if it could be called leading—more like herding cattle toward a cliff they could not yet see.
Behind them, the dead came howling, their broken bodies tireless, their shattered hands clawing the dunes, their guttural cries boiling the blood in the survivors' veins. The priest's laughter—wet and gurgling—cut through the howling wind like a blade drawn across tender flesh.
Lucien's lungs burned. His vision blurred. Every step was a war against collapse.
The survivors—ragged, hollow, reeling—barely held together. A woman stumbled, fell; a man tried to lift her, but the priest's gaze snapped to them like a striking whip, and the last thing Lucien heard was their twin screams being torn apart by the sand.
He didn't look back.
There was no mercy left.
Ahead, the dunes shifted, rippling like some great beast's back, and through the veil of heat and dust he saw it—a break in the endless white. A tear. A wound.
A cavern.
The mouth of it yawned open, jagged and black, swallowing the cursed sunlight in its teeth.A hole in the world, gasping for air.
Lucien's heart slammed against his ribs.
It could be a trap. It could be worse than death.But it was shelter.
"Down!" he barked, his voice more croak than command.
The few who remained obeyed without question, minds broken enough to trust anything that wasn't the howling dead behind them.
They slid, stumbled, clawed their way toward the cavern's mouth.The sand, dry as bone dust, gave way beneath their feet, dragging them down in avalanches of fine white grit.
Lucien hit the cavern floor hard, rolling, tasting blood.He was on his feet in an instant, dragging the others inside.
The priest and his horrors were close now—Lucien could hear the wet slap of their feet, the crunch of bone grinding against bone, the whispers like knives being sharpened on stone.
He pushed deeper into the cave.
The air inside was colder. Thicker. It smelled of iron and old decay.A darkness that felt alive slithered around them, coiling up their legs and crawling into their mouths and nostrils.
Lucien didn't care.
It was cover.
It was survival.
They pressed deeper into the narrow, winding passage, the walls slick with something that wasn't water. The light from the surface dwindled to nothing, leaving them in a tomb of their own making.
Lucien groped forward, one hand on the wall, feeling his way blind.
Behind him, someone whimpered softly. Another sobbed.The sound echoed grotesquely, growing larger than it had any right to, as if the cavern itself breathed it back at them, mocking, twisting it into something monstrous.
Then—
A sound ahead.
A whisper.
No... a scraping.
Lucien froze, blood turning to ice in his veins.
Something was moving inside the cavern. Something that had been here long before they arrived. Something that belonged here.
A survivor—too terrified to think—rushed past him, stumbling toward the sound.
There was a wet crunch, a gurgle, and then silence.
Lucien did not move.
He waited, breath held like a blade to his own throat.
Out of the dark came a dragging noise, slow and steady.And then a shape—bulky, slick, wrong—lurched into the faint ambient light bleeding down the tunnel.
It wasn't the priest.It wasn't the undead.
It was worse.
A mass of flesh, stitched from a thousand different corpses, with too many legs, too many arms, too many screaming mouths sewn into its writhing hide.It dragged itself forward on ruined limbs, its body weeping blood and pus with every movement.
One of its mouths opened and spoke—not words, but wet syllables that skinned the mind raw:
"H-u-u-u-nger..."
Lucien stepped back.
The survivors—what few remained—stood frozen in place, paralyzed between the dead they had fled and the new nightmare that now beckoned them forward.
The desert had not spared them.
It had only fed them into deeper jaws.
Lucien's mind raced.
This was Hell.
There was no end.
No mercy.
Only deeper darkness, deeper thirst, deeper horror waiting just beyond the next heartbeat.
And as the stitched horror slithered closer, Lucien realized:
Running would no longer save them.
Only dominating this pit—this endless, festering pit—might give him the slightest chance of surviving one more cursed day.
He gritted his teeth, clenched his fists, and prepared for the next circle of madness to begin.