Separate Nightmares

The horizon circled him. He knew that was impossible. He knew the jagged ridge to his left had been behind him a moment ago, because he had seen its broken teeth when he woke. Now it stood ahead, low and distant, while the skeletal remains had shifted to his right.

Kai wiped grit from his eyes. His fingers came away streaked with grey.

“Move,” he told himself.

The shadow jerked.

Pain opened along his spine. Kai dropped to one knee as the darkness behind him stretched thin, pulled toward a point beneath the earth. His body leaned with it. For one sickening instant he felt himself dividing - not flesh from flesh, but weight from weight, the part of him that occupied the world peeling away from the part that remembered how.

He slammed both hands into the dirt.

The heat climbed through his wrists.

Something clicked nearby.

Kai turned.

A white mask lay half-buried a few feet away. It had no features except shallow hollows where eyes might have been and a narrow split for a mouth. Dust had collected inside it. The surface was cracked from brow to chin.

He stared at it.

The mask stared back.

Not with eyes. With attention.

Kai crawled toward it, keeping his body low. Every movement made the ground shimmer. The air above the dust bent in thin vertical waves, and through them the plain seemed to rearrange itself. A mound became a hollow. A distant stone appeared close enough to touch, then slid away.

The mask’s mouth opened.

Kai heard his own voice.

“Find a way forward.”

He froze.

The mask repeated him, but the words arrived with a delay, stretched and hollow.

“Find a way forward.”

Kai reached for it. His fingertips hovered above the white surface.

“Where is Sora?” he asked.

The mouth opened wider.

“Where is Sora?”

The answer should have comforted him. Instead, the question came back carrying something he had not said aloud.

Where did you leave her?

Kai snatched his hand away.

The mask tilted in the dust.

A tremor passed beneath the ground. The fissures around it widened, black and narrow. They did not spread randomly. They bent toward his feet, then away, forming angles that suggested a route before twisting into a shape like a hooked finger.

Kai rose too quickly. The world lurched sideways.

His left ear filled with a high metallic whine. His right heard nothing at all. He slapped the side of his head and shouted, but the wasteland gave him no echo. His voice had become a movement in his throat, visible only in the vibration of his fingers.

The shadow pulled again.

This time, it took something.

Kai felt a strip of cold leave his back. His skin remained, but the sensation of skin did not. He could see his shirt pressed against his shoulders, yet the cloth no longer touched him. His body was becoming an outline of itself.

He staggered away from the mask.

The dust ahead bulged.

At first Kai thought the ground had collapsed. Then a hand pushed through. It was pale, jointed wrong, and covered in the same grey grit as the plain. A second hand followed. The thing pulled itself free without making a sound.

It had no head that Kai could see. Its upper body was a knot of damp flesh, folded around a vertical mouth. The mouth opened and closed, tasting the air.

Kai backed toward the ribs.

The creature answered the mask.

“Forward,” it said.

Its voice came from beneath the ground, from inside Kai’s teeth, from the hollow between one thought and the next.

Kai grabbed a broken length of bone. The heat had made it slick. He raised it with both hands.

“Stay away.”

The creature unfolded another limb. It was not an arm. It had too many elbows, each one bending as if searching for the correct direction.

Kai swung.

The bone struck the thing’s side and sank halfway in. There was no impact, only resistance like wet cloth. The creature folded around the weapon.

Kai let go.

The mask began laughing with his voice.

He ran.

The plain offered no straight line. Each step carried him toward a different horizon. His boots struck hard ground, then loose grit, then a surface that flexed beneath him like buried muscle. He stumbled past scattered masks - white, grey, some blackened at the edges. Their mouths opened as he passed.

“Left.”

“Right.”

“Behind.”

“Sora.”

The voices overlapped until they became a single rasping command.

Kai chose the ridge.

It shifted away.

He ran harder. Heat crawled up his legs. His calves vanished beneath his own gaze, not disappearing entirely but losing their boundaries, the edges dissolving into wavering dust. He could still move them. He could still feel the effort in the muscles, though the feeling arrived from somewhere beside him.

A fissure snapped shut behind his heel.

Kai fell forward and struck the ground with his shoulder. His arm went numb from elbow to fingertips. He rolled onto his back and saw the sky spinning without motion, a fixed grey vault turning inside his skull.

The creature was coming.

He could not hear it, but dust rose in a line across the plain. Masks shifted as it passed. One cracked open beneath its weight, revealing darkness where a face should have been.

Kai pushed himself upright.

The skeletal remains stood ahead.

They had not moved. He understood that now. The landscape had moved around them, hiding and revealing the landmark like a hand covering an eye. The ribs rose from the earth in a crooked arch, and beneath them lay a half-buried skull, its jaw split open.

A shelter. A marker. Anything.

Kai crawled toward it.

His shadow dragged behind him, stretched so thin it looked painted on the dust. A dark strand ran from its edge toward the creature. Kai reached back and seized it.

The shadow had texture.

It felt like cold hair soaked in oil.

Something pulled from the other end.

Kai screamed and hauled himself forward. The sound returned in pieces, delayed and broken. He heard the beginning of it from the sky, the middle from the ground, the end whispered by the mask nearest his hand.

“Don’t let go.”

Kai looked down.

The white mask had followed him.

It lay beside his wrist, clean now, its cracks filled with a faint yellow light. Its mouth moved in time with his breathing.

“Don’t let go,” it said.

“Shut up.”

“Shut up.”

“Tell me where Sora is.”

The mask’s eyes deepened.

“She is already - ”

Kai drove his fist through it.

The shell broke with a sharp, dry snap. Fragments cut his knuckles. Beneath the white surface there was no hollow interior, only a warm darkness that pulsed once against his skin.

The instant it broke, every mask on the plain turned toward him.

Kai felt the turn rather than saw it. Pressure gathered along his face, his throat, the back of his eyes. Hundreds of empty features fixed on him.

The creature stopped.

For the first time, it made a sound.

It was Sora’s voice.

“Kai.”

He nearly answered.

The name came from beneath the ribs, soft and frightened. His body leaned toward it before his mind could intervene.

“Kai, please.”

He clamped his teeth together.

The creature repeated her, closer.

“Kai.”

He seized the broken mask fragment and pressed its sharp edge into his palm. Pain flashed bright and real. Blood surfaced, dark against the dust.

The voice faltered.

Kai drove the fragment into the ground.

The fissures lit beneath him.

They ran outward in branching lines, crossing and recrossing until a narrow path appeared through the wasteland. It led beneath the skeletal arch. For one moment, every direction agreed.

Kai moved.

The creature lunged.

Its limbs struck the dust behind him, close enough to spray his back with hot grit. Kai threw himself beneath the ribs. The skull’s broken jaw hung above him. Its teeth were worn smooth, each one pointing inward.

He crawled into the hollow beneath it and pulled his shadow after him.

The darkness resisted.

Kai wrapped both hands around the thin black strand. It burned cold, a pain that reached past skin and into memory. He pulled until something inside his chest tore loose.

His shadow snapped beneath the skull.

The creature recoiled.

Kai collapsed against the buried bones, gasping. His legs were still there. His hands were still attached. But when he looked down, his body seemed unfinished. The heat had erased the fine certainty of him: the boundary of his wrist, the shape of his knees, the exact place where his skin ended and the dust began.

He had found the landmark.

He had not escaped.

Across the plain, the masks began to move.

One slid into the fissured path. Then another. Then another, arranging themselves nose to mouth in a pale procession that led directly beneath the ribs.

Their empty eyes faced Kai.

The first mask spoke.

“Kai.”

He covered his ears.

The second spoke with Sora’s voice.

“Kai, look.”

He shut his eyes.

Behind his lids, the path brightened. He could see it without sight, feel each mask taking its place. The voices thinned until they were no longer sounds but directions inside his skull.

The landscape had learned where he was.

And now it was teaching him how to follow.

End of chapter one. 14 more chapters in the full book.