Child of Doom

Cursed Terror.

'Something is not right.'

From the moment Kiyo stepped onto the bus, he felt on edge. Someone was watching his every move, judging him.

A very unpleasant feeling.

But it didn't stop there. For some reason, opening his eyelids seemed like a more difficult task than surviving the White Room. Every ounce of his body felt as heavy as lead.

'Had I been drugged? No, I haven't eaten or consumed any drinks, and the possibility of any drug having an effect on me is close to zero. So why is my body acting this way?'

'I am certainly not ill.'

'Agh! Just thinking is a burden on me; everything is painful. I should just go to sleep.'

He closed his eyes and laid back on the bus seat, not caring about missing the bus stop.

Soon darkness enveloped his vision.

And, in the darkness, a voice rang:

[Aspirant! Welcome to the Nightmare Spell. Prepare for your First Trial...]

'Huh? Whose voice is that? Why does it sound so familiar?'

His questions went unanswered and Kiyo had no time to think about it.

For he was distracted by the sight of what appeared to be an undeveloped landscape. It was a forest, to be precise, and at the end of the forest, on either side, were two fortresses.

One was taller than the other, at least 27 meters tall, as tall as the Tower of London.

On the other hand, the other fortress seemed small, and behind it stood a large temple. Kiyo felt fascinated just looking at the temple.

'Such complexity.' he thought.

The design of the temple was unlike anything he had seen before. Hidden deep within the mountain, the temple is atleast 50 meters in height more than both fortresses combined.

From a distance, Kiyo could see a large draw of a man with a beast-like head, carved on the wall with such elegance and precision that it put all the bas-reliefs he had seen before to shame.

The walls were made of a material not from this world, and glowed softly with an ethereal radiance suggesting a divine origin. Running through the white stone were veins of gold and silver, faint but perceptible.

A simple word to describe this temple would be 'otherworldly.'

It wasn't just the temple that caught his attention, but the sky too, or rather the marble that humans called 'sun', shining in an eerie color - red.

Finally, his attention fell on a silent black sea of nothingness at the edge of this strange land. It's as if the land is surrounded by nothingness.

It wasn't long before his attention shifted back to the sun as it dropped below the horizon.

The moon rose in its place, and it was something Kiyo had never seen before: a red moon of the same color as the sun, it is as if the sun and moon were painted with blood, yet one shone while the other radiated darkness.

In an instant, time moved faster than Kiyo's eyes could follow and hundreds of years passed. Kiyo stood motionless, shocked for a moment, but immediately regained his composure when he remembered that it was only a dream or a nightmare based on that voice.

'Eerily beautiful for a nightmare,' he thought.

Time slowed, stopped, and then resumed its usual pace.

[Aspirant! Welcome to the Nightmare Spell. Prepare for your First Trial...]

Again? Now that he wasn't studying the landscape, he tried to decipher the meaning of the voice's words, but came to no conclusion.