You open your eyes in an empty abyss. A veil of blackness shrouds your vision, and your mind feels hazy.
You examine the surrounding area.
The boundless empty stretches as far as the eye can see. Your only sense of distance comes from how far your arms can stretch.
Odd, you think to yourself.
You begin your trek forward, your cautious steps echoing across the void-like plane. The solidity of the floor eases your mind as you traverse through the darkness.
…
…
Panic sets in as curiosity begins to fade.
I’ve got to get out of here.
You break into a sprint, charging deeper into the void. You try with all your remaining energy to escape whatever fate awaits you, but your dash is cut short when you feel your feet sink into the ground. You feel as if you’re walking on a pillow, but much more dense and deep.
As you frantically attempt to retract your shoe from the strange mass, you hear a voice inside your head. It coils around your mind, writhing like a nest of vipers.
At least, you think it’s a voice. You can’t make out any rhyme or reason to the haunting noises. It’s almost like someone speaking backwards with the pitch turned all the way down. It all makes one thing abundantly clear:
You shouldn’t be here.
You rip your shoe out from the ground, and an intense chill runs through your body.
You whirl around to see… nothing. Just the unchanging void you’ve been locked in since the start.
You feel cold. Was it always this chilly?
You fold your arms, trying to warm yourself up. Your hands are so cold, that you can't even feel them contacting your skin. You look down at your body to try and make sense of the situation.
All you see is empty space.
You feel yourself sinking into the floor again. This time, you aren’t able to move as your consciousness is pushed down into the depths of the endless nightmare. Your chest presses up against the moving ground, and it threatens to burst like a water balloon.
But that shouldn’t be possible. You don’t have a chest.
You reel in horror as the truth begins to sink in. You never were running in panic, you were never folding your arms, nor were you sinking through the floor.
In fact, you haven’t moved at all.
You try to take a deep breath to calm yourself down, only to find that you have no lungs. The breath you cannot take plagues you, tantalizingly out of reach. The pressure continues to build and build, until it reaches a breaking point.
And then it builds some more.
You want to scream, but you can’t. You want to thrash about, but you can’t. You want to claw at your face, to dig your fingernails into your flesh simply to have the privilege of feeling.
But you can’t.
You’re locked in a paradoxical existence— trapped in a prison without walls. You lack any and all forms of sensation, and yet pain is your entire being. The absence of sound screams throughout the vacuum, and yet your presence is overwhelmed by a tidal wave of groaning wails. You can’t see, and yet the edges of the inky-black void seem to contract and expand as strange figures slip in and out of view.
No.
Wait.
You definitely saw something move.
You’re certain.
Deep in the blackness, you’re just barely able to make out two pinpricks of white light.
Two pinpricks that are watching you.
Two pinpricks that begin to approach you.
You desperately want to run— to turn tail and sprint for your life.
But.
You.
Can’t.
The pressure continues to build to degrees you never could have imagined. The figure grows closer. The noise in your head gets louder. You’re being overwhelmed with stimuli, but you’re prevented from feeling anything at all.
Until a blinding light breaks open your prison