Pain. That was the first thing Xavier felt—searing, suffocating, all-consuming. His lungs convulsed, drowning in air too thick, too alien. His skin burned as if the very world rejected him, and when he tried to move, his body refused to obey. He had nded, but where? How?

  He tried to stand. His legs buckled beneath him, and his stomach clenched violently. He colpsed to his knees and threw up, the bitter taste burning his throat.

  "I was in my dorm." His thoughts scraped against the edges of his mind, raw and scattered. "Lloyd was there… asleep. What happened?"

  His arms trembled as he pushed himself upright. Cold air prickled his skin. His head throbbed as he forced himself to lift his gaze.

  A pitch-bck sky stretched above him, broken only by the pale blue light of an unfamiliar moon. Massive leaves glinted under its glow, casting the forest in a haunting sapphire haze. Wind curled through the trees, cold and soundless.

  Xavier stood at the edge of a bluff. Behind him, the mouth of a cave yawned wide and dark. His blood turned cold.

  An unknown pce. Alone.

  His breath quickened. Panic flooded his chest as he stumbled toward the cave, heart hammering. He stopped just short of the bck void inside. The moonlight didn’t reach past the threshold. A darkness too deep, too deliberate.

  "What the hell is this pce?" His voice sounded small, brittle against the silence. He squeezed his hands into fists, grounding himself. "This doesn’t make sense."

  Ten minutes passed. Xavier sat at the cliff’s edge, legs folded, his head resting on his palm. He should have been searching for shelter, but the thought of navigating that forest made his stomach twist.

  His thoughts cleared—slightly. Forcing himself to be calm when he was anything but. Fragments of memory pieced together like shattered gss.

  "I was reading in my dorm. Then… that hallucination."

  He remembered sitting on his bed, daylight filtering weakly through the curtains. The edges of the room had warped, twisting unnaturally. His book blurred—the words melting into meaningless shapes.

  Then the air had shimmered.

  His hand…

  It had split.

  His fingers warped and multiplied, distorting like reflections in fractured gss. A pressure filled the room, rising to a shrieking pitch that bent reality around him. The walls folded inward like paper drawn into a singurity.

  "Lloyd!" Xavier’s voice had cracked as he stumbled toward the other bed. "Lloyd! Wake the fuck up!"

  Lloyd didn’t stir. His form flickered in and out of focus, his face unraveling at the edges. Xavier reached for him—his hand passed through Lloyd’s shoulder like smoke.

  No.

  "LLOYD!"

  A blinding fsh consumed the room.

  He saw shapes—colors—pulsing in impossible fractal patterns. He was falling—no, rising—through them. The sheer magnitude of what he was witnessing pressed down on his mind until—

  Nothing.

  Just cold dirt beneath his hands when he woke up.

  This isn’t the afterlife. Xavier’s hands curled into the dirt. Dead people don’t throw up.

  He y back and stared at the sky. The stars were wrong. Not a single familiar consteltion. His chest hollowed at the realization.

  Not Earth.

  A chill ran through him as the scale of it hit him. The sheer vastness of the unknown curled around his mind, making him feel no more significant than a bacterium under a microscope.

  "Why?" His voice cracked. "There’s got to be a way back."

  No answer. Just the vast silence of the night. His pulse quickened. He sat up, rubbing his hands over his face. His breathing had steadied—but his sense of wrongness hadn’t eased.

  And then—

  A low growl.

  His hands stiffened against the dirt. Subtle vibrations rolled beneath his fingertips. His stomach clenched. From deep within the cave, the growl sharpened into a rumbling snarl.

  Raw power and hunger radiated from the dark.

  'No. No. NO.'

  Xavier shot to his feet, heart smming against his ribs. His eyes widened as something **moved** in the dark. A heavy scrape of cws against stone. A sharp breath drawn through a throat too rge.

  "Shit—"

  Xavier turned and sprinted into the forest.

  Branches whipped across his face as he tore through the undergrowth. The forest floor was treacherous—roots and twisted vines hidden beneath leaves—but he ran anyway. His muscles screamed. His breath burned.

  Behind him, the growl sharpened into a bone-rattling howl. The ground trembled beneath pounding footsteps.

  Moonlight flickered between the trees as Xavier sprinted through the shadows, heart hammering, mind spiraling.

  No. No. No.

  He tripped—stumbled—hit the ground hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. He twisted around, gasping.

  'Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.'

  Nothing at all was going as Xavier wanted. Each desperate lunge fell short. Every breath was fire in his chest. He was out of breath much too soon.

  A shadow moved at the periphery of his sight.

  'The beast is fast…'

  The thought sent his body into a complete frenzy. His muscles fred with a strength he never knew he had.

  His body, desperate to vanish into the darkness, pushed forward with a burst of speed he didn't know he had.

  He weaved through the trees, footsteps near silent. The rustling behind him faded. He forced himself to believe he was gaining ground. Maybe—just maybe—he had lost it.

  Relief washed over him.

  Then—

  A searing pain tore through his back.

  Before he could even scream, his arm was in the beast’s jaws. The world tilted. His feet left the ground.

  The creature jerked him violently, nearly tearing his arm off, then released him mid-swing. Xavier was flung through the air like a broken doll.

  He hit a tree. Hard.

  Pain exploded through his ribs, his lungs emptied with a brutal gasp. He slumped to the ground, vision swimming. His body refused to move. Blood pooled beneath him.

  The beast did not strike again.

  Instead, it let out a sound—a growl that twisted into something more. A deep, guttural reverberation that cwed at Xavier’s ears, yered with a sharp, unearthly resonance.

  It wasn’t just a snarl.

  It was disgust.

  Through several rays of moonlight that pierced the sapphire canopy, Xavier saw the beast—truly saw it. The moon’s pale light kissed its fur, revealing a deep crimson undertone—like dried blood hidden beneath a shadowed pelt.

  For an instant, Xavier’s fear was eclipsed by awe.

  The beast’s azure eyes gleamed. Each motion of its body was fluid, controlled. It wasn’t just powerful—it was majestic.

  Then, as silently as it had emerged, the creature melted into the shadows, leaving Xavier bleeding and alone in the dark forest.

  He couldn’t move.

  He could only lie there, staring up at the foreign sky, feeling the weight of the unknown press down on him.

  As the creature vanished, Xavier felt something unexpected—loneliness.

  The forest fell into dead silence. He resigned himself to stillness—not that he had a choice. Even if he could move, what would he do? Where would he go?

  Somewhere deep in his head, he hoped to die.

  The night stretched on, the cold creeping into his bones. His body trembled, fighting to keep warm, but the blood seeping into the earth carried his strength with it. The scent of the beast lingered on him, deterring scavengers that would have otherwise made quick work of his helpless form.

  At some point, consciousness slipped away.

  Hours passed. The sun rose.

  A faint warmth touched his skin, and his body stirred. Not because he had strength—because something in him refused to stop.

  If there were a clock in this world, it would be near noon when Xavier’s eyelids fluttered, his mind teetering between awareness and oblivion. The world around him was blurred, distant, like a half-forgotten dream.

  By te afternoon, his eyes cracked open fully.

  Pain.

  It wasn’t sharp or sudden anymore—just an overwhelming, bone-deep wrongness. Every breath was sluggish. His limbs felt distant, unresponsive.

  He turned his head slightly and froze.

  The ground beneath him was soaked red.

  He shouldn’t be alive.

  His skin was pale, almost gray. His fingers were ice. His thoughts flickered in and out, like a dying fire struggling for air. And yet, he was still here.

  Somewhere in his haze, he realized—he hadn’t bled out completely. The cold had slowed the bleeding. His wounds had clotted, barely. The dirt, the dried blood, the sheer colpse of his body’s functions had bought him time.

  But not much.

  If he stayed like this, death would come for him soon enough.

  And yet, for reasons he couldn’t expin, his body refused to give in.

  A breath shuddered from his lips.

  He was still alive.

  For now.

  Xavier gritted his teeth so hard his skull felt like it would crack. His body screamed for rest, but his mind clung to something stronger than survival—hate.

  "I’ll kill that bastard."

  The words barely made it past his cracked lips, but they burned in his throat like fire.

  But before vengeance, there was one problem. He was dying.

  His breaths came shallow, ragged, every inhale scraping against his ribs like knives. His skin was cmmy, his limbs hollow, his vision flickering at the edges. If he let go for even a second, he wouldn’t wake up.

  Step one—stop the bleeding.

  His right arm was shredded, but the wound near his shoulder had clotted into a crusted, ugly mess. He pressed trembling fingers around it, feeling the stiff yer of dried blood and—something else. His stomach twisted. The beast’s saliva.

  "You think that makes up for mangling my arm?"

  His lips curled in a humorless grin. Spite was good. Spite kept him awake.

  But his back—his back was worse. Four deep gashes carved into his flesh, splitting open with every movement. He could feel them. The wetness. The raw, sucking sensation of skin barely holding together. His body was losing the battle one slow drip at a time.

  He needed to pack the wounds. Now.

  His fingers were useless—tingly, sluggish, almost detached from him entirely. He fumbled with the forest floor, scraping together a mix of dried moss, grass, and brittle leaves. His coordination was slipping. Twice, he dropped a handful of moss, his hands shaking too hard to grip properly. Every second wasted was another ounce of blood lost.

  When the mixture was finally ready, he forced himself onto his side. The motion sent fire licking up his spine. He gasped, his vision blotting bck, but he couldn't afford to stop. With a final, jerking movement, he rolled onto the mixture.

  A strangled, guttural sound tore from his throat. His whole body arched violently, nerves igniting like raw wires. The wounds screamed, torn flesh pressing against the coarse forest debris.

  He could feel it—every jagged edge of dried moss grinding into his open wounds, dirt rubbing against the bleeding slits like sandpaper. The pain was beyond burning, beyond anything human. He was being fyed alive by his own hands.

  His breathing hitched, body convulsing on instinct, but he clenched his jaw and stayed down. Seconds stretched into eternity. His body trembled violently against the ground, his head pounding like it would split in two.

  But he didn’t pass out.

  Not yet.

  With what little coordination he had left, he tore at his already-ruined shirt, wrapping the makeshift bandages around his torso. His fingers barely obeyed. The knot was weak, his movements jerky, but the pressure was enough to hold.

  His body sagged. He had stopped the bleeding.

  But now came the real fight.

  Step two—restore fluids.

  His tongue was sandpaper. His lips cracked with the faintest movement. He swallowed, but his throat was dry—so dry it felt like shards of gss scraping down.

  He had lost too much.

  He wasn’t sure how long he could st.

  But as long as his heart still beat, he would crawl, he would suffer, he would fight.

  Xavier forced himself to his feet, dragging his body forward with stiff, halting steps. He didn’t have the luxury of resting—not yet. He had to find water before his muscles locked up entirely.

  A faint sound reached his ears, barely cutting through the dull roar in his skull. Flowing water.

  He turned toward it, stumbling through the underbrush, legs threatening to fold with every step. His vision blurred and sharpened in waves. The scent of damp earth thickened as he neared the edge of the bluff. Below, a thin river carved its way through the forest like a silver scar, the sunlight reflecting off its surface in blinding glints.

  Xavier didn’t hesitate. He half-climbed, half-slid down the slope, nding hard on the muddy shore. The world tilted. He gritted his teeth, braced his trembling arms against the damp ground, and lurched toward the water. His hands plunged in first—**freezing.** His fingers barely registered the temperature, numb and slow, but he didn’t care.

  He cupped his hands and brought the water to his lips, drinking deeply. It was warm from the sun and thick with an earthy tang. He forced another gulp down. Then another.

  The taste hit him like a punch to the gut. Rot. Metal. Something sour and alive.

  His stomach twisted violently. He gagged, bile rising in his throat. His arms shook as he tried to bring up another handful, but his body lurched, rejecting it outright. He spat it out, gasping. The moment he tried to swallow again, his stomach clenched and he keeled over, dry heaving.

  He couldn't drink it.

  Xavier let his head hang, chest rising and falling in ragged breaths. The world was mocking him.

  His throat ached with thirst, his body already running on borrowed time. He pulled himself away from the shore, forcing one foot in front of the other. There had to be another way. Something. Anything.

  Fruits.

  The thought surfaced through the haze, bringing a flicker of hope. He searched the trees, his gaze nding on a cluster of hanging bulbs. They looked safe—red, like apples, their smooth skin reflecting the light. If anything could kill him, it wouldn’t be a goddamn fruit.

  He plucked one and bit into it. The flesh was juicy, bursting with tartness. He swallowed—and immediately his stomach revolted.

  A violent spasm wracked his body. His throat tightened. His chest heaved, and before he could stop it, he was on his knees, vomiting out what little remained in his gut. He coughed, choked, his vision swimming. His hands trembled as they gripped the dirt.

  Nothing would stay down.

  Xavier wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, panting. Each effort to stay alive was mocked by this world, as if it enjoyed watching him suffer.

  He exhaled, a bitter ugh rasping out between his lips. Then again, he was an anomaly in this ecosystem. A stain on something pure.

  His legs burned with every step, but he couldn’t stop. He knew—if he stopped now, he’d never move again.

  Through the thinning trees ahead, a view opened before him. His breath caught.

  The shore stretched out in the distance, endless and untouched, the horizon bleeding into a sky too vast, too surreal to belong to reality. The waves pped gently against the sand, shimmering under the golden light. A world unspoiled, a paradise that felt almost unreal.

  Xavier stared, lightheaded, his thoughts unraveling into something distant, something detached.

  “This world must be paradise. One that only I’m exempted from.”