The Calm before the Storm

Chapter 1

His throat was drier than the Gweataran desert. Every gulp of breath felt like he was swallowing razor blades. Ivan forced open his eyes, sticky with blood and swollen with bruises. Around him was darkness.

It took a moment for him to rid the numbness from his body, come to his senses, and realise that this wasn’t a dream; some fictional hell he’d conjured in his head. He reached out an arm, trying to scope out the depth of his surroundings, but found himself shackled to a wall.

He sat back, closed his eyes (although it made no difference to what he saw), and took a deep breath. In one lunge he charged forwards with every remaining ounce of strength, hoping to break away from his prison, but the shackles held firm. His arm would come off before the shackles did. Ivan let out a shout of frustration, but it came out as a craggy crackle.

As he attempted to shout out, his jaw awoke from its insensibility and retaliated with a stab of piercing pain. Ivan attempted to remember what had happened. Racking his brain hurt more than shouting had. He could find himself remembering only fragments of what had occurred.

The flail! Ivan recalled the moment just before he'd passed out, when his jawbone had been shattered. Tentatively using his tongue, he worked his way to see what damage had been done.

His jawbone, however, wasn't ruptured or fragmented. Instead, it felt... cold. After a few more moments of inspection, he realised that it seemed to have been skilfully patched up with some sort of steel splint. But why? From somewhere outside of his cell, Ivan heard sounds of life. The numbness returned. His head swimming in the blackness, he fought a losing battle and slowly faded back into unconsciousness.

Ivan awoke to a noise. It was a thin, high-pitched scratching noise, audible from both inside and outside his head, constantly wavering in volume and frequency. Trying to distract himself, he focused in front of him, where he could barely make out the faint outline of a pallid shape; withering and writhing like the two men he’d killed earlier.

The more intently he stared in his morbid fascination, the more clearly the shape before him took form. What had once started as an amorphous blob on the border of his mind and vision started to twist and spiral, growing out into thin, wiry tendrils of colourless leather. Slowly, the tendrils took the shape of limbs, and along with a harrowing shriek that shattered the walls around him, it became… human.

Ivan opened his eyes to see that the foundations around him had crumbled, all but the wall he was chained to. But he wasn’t in Gweatara any more. Strange shadows and indiscernible shapes danced around him, staring with fictitious eyes; windows to the void. As he watched, his vision began to contort and stretch, as though some greater being was pulling at the fabric of reality. The sky was an eldritch concoction of purple and black, swirling into a raging tornado, yet not causing the slightest breeze. With an involuntary lull, his stare was aimed back at the humanoid thing before him.