Dark Earth (Male Reader)

2: Valley

Stepping away from your own grave, you attempt to gather your thoughts and figure what is happening. First you need to figure out why you're not dead. You can't remember anything from your past life; your name, your home, your backstory. You're a clean slate of a man. You think of all the different possible reasons you may have come back to life.

Becoming a zombie? You look down at yourself. From what you can see, there aren't any patches of rotting or decaying flesh. In fact, you look rather fit for a dead man. While you examine yourself, you find a strange tattoo on your left arm. It's a simple black line that goes all the way around your wrist like a bracelet. You're dressed in simple clothes with no shoes. Also, you're not craving flesh.

Becoming a ghost? You don't look like a spirit. You're not giving in the air or walking through things. Plus, you've never heard of a ghost being able to shoot lasers from their eyes that can blow holes in the sky. Or maybe you have, but you don't remember.

Becoming an undead warrior servant. Racking your brain for any information, you don't think you were resurrected by an outside force. You have no desire to fight for someone or follow orders. You don't see any other people riding up from their graves or evil wizards barking orders.

You're just alive.

"Damn... Hello?! Is anyone out there?! Hello!?"

You call out across the land, hoping for an answer of any kind. It's just then that you realize your surroundings. The graveyard you just stepped out from is vast. The hole you crawled out of was at the edge of the huge area. Sitting on the side of the mountain, you looked back in awe as the entire side of the mountain is covered little grey tombstones and planks of rotting wood. It stretches as far as the eye can see and probably farther beyond that. You stagger back from the final resting places of countless millions, not wanting to view the wave of dead stone any longer.

Instead, you get something worse. The dead grass goes downhill for a ways before coming to stop when the grass finally vanished into dirt. The flat valley spans outward, farther than the mountain. However, the valley isn't empty.

There are bones. Lots of bones. Bones of every single creature. Beasts of all kinds. They're piled up around you. The valley is full of several small mountains of bone. The empty eye sockets stare at you as you slowly make your way in between the neatly stacked piles of dried bones. It looks like they were stacking in a deliberate way, like something had spent time making sure everything was in its place. However, there were more bones than you could count sitting in more piles than you could see. Something very big or very old must have been doing the stacking.

You stop in front of a massive pile of bones. It stands well over fifty feet above you, staring down out you with its thousands of empty eyes. A single human skull rests at the bottom, sitting nicely amidst a bouquet of ribs. You reach down slowly and pick it up. As your fingers touch it, the skull cracks and pieces of it fall away into dust. It's a lot older than you thought. Everything around you is old. Old and dead. There's no life to speak of. As far as you know. You're the only living soul on the earth.

A rumbling noise comes from a mountain of bone behind you. You spin around just in time to see a gross hand jut out from the side of the monstrous pile. It shakes around and grips onto the plain dirt ground, pulling out whatever it's attacked to. The thin arm drags out an equally thin body from the bones. The grey skin of the creature is thin and covered in loose teeth that had gotten stabbed in. It's limbs are long and lanky. A gross white tongue hangs from its gaping mouth. You're not even sure it has a jaw. It turns to face you, staring at you with three empty white eyes.

It looks hungry.

"Son of a..."