Wind gently flowed through my hair.

  Not with the biting cold of winter, nor the humid heat of summer. More a faint touch that carried neither warmth nor chill, existing in that perfect threshold between sensation and absence. It left me suspended in a permanent peace - the kind that made breathing feel optional, unnecessary.

  It was nice.

  That was, until I opened my eyes.

  What met my eyes was the edge of a cliff.

  And an ocean.

  Vast. Endless.

  Familiar.

  Red.

  Not the red of sunset reflecting off waves. Nor the red of algae blooming. This was the red of opened veins, of bodies drained, of life spilled and left to pool under an indifferent sky. From this distance, I could see no evidence. But I didn't need to.

  Because on the cliff in front of me, the dead already lay.

  Hundreds of them.

  Bodies in military uniforms sprawled across the ground in positions no living person could achieve. Arms bent backward at impossible angles. Legs twisted beneath torsos. Heads turned to stare at the sky with eyes that had long since stopped seeing. Their weapons lay scattered among them - rifles with shattered stocks, swords snapped in half, bayonets driven into earth or flesh with equal abandon.

  I recognized the insignia embroidered on their torn jackets.

  A dove and crow intertwined, wings overlapping in eternal comradeship.

  The symbol of the Empire.

  Though that's not what caught my attention.

  My attention was stolen by one figure who stood among the carnage.

  A man cloaked in black, utterly still, facing the red ocean as if waiting for something to emerge from its depths. He didn't turn as I stirred. Didn't acknowledge my presence. Just stood there, a solitary monument to whatever had transpired on this cliff. The only other life on this cliff other than me.

  Despite the brutality of the scene before me, I felt no extreme emotion.

  I merely sighed, quietly in exhaustion.

  I wonder how long it's been since I've slept unbothered?

  I looked behind me.

  The contrast was obscene to put it lightly.

  Where death dominated the cliff, life flourished at my back. A white meadow stretched into impossible distance, untouched by the bloodshed mere tens of meters away. White flowers grew in wild abundance - petals pristine, stems strong, roots drinking from soil that had never tasted violence. They swayed in a breeze I couldn't feel, creating waves of pale motion that should have been beautiful.

  I shook my head, forcing my attention away.

  The meadow could wait. The whispers could wait.

  There was no point in gazing longingly onto such a place.

  I was seated, my back lay against a tree - ancient yet simple, its bark as brown as any other average tree. The only thing of note were the petals that fell from branches, each one dark as spilled ink, drifting lazily through air. They spiraled past my face, caught in currents I couldn't feel, flowing forward like a river toward something I couldn't yet see.

  I pushed myself upright, rubbing my eyes with the heels of my palms.

  I was standing upon a hill, where the lone tree beside me stood. The hill separated the grotesque cliff and peaceful meadow from each other, both being unable to see the other.

  Despite my reluctance, I gazed towards the meadow one more time - eliminating the lingering feeling that paraded my senses. I turned toward the cliff and started walking.

  The ground was soft beneath my boots. Each step made no sound. It felt sacred in a sense, which felt ironic considering the scene in front of me seemed to sully such sacredness.

  The closer I drew to the standing figure, the more details emerged from the carnage.

  The man stood exactly where the bodies ended - not among them, but at their terminus. A perfect circle of empty ground surrounded him, maybe two meters in diameter, unmarked by blood or bodies or any sign of the violence that had claimed everyone else.

  But beyond that circle lay chaos.

  The bodies lay in complete disarray. No battle lines. No defensive formations. No logical pattern that would suggest organized conflict. Some corpses faced the edge of the cliff, arms outstretched as if they'd died running toward it. Others faced away, expressions frozen in terror as they'd fled from the edge.

  They couldn't decide, I realized. Whether to jump or run. Whether the ocean below was salvation or damnation.

  So they died doing both.

  Tragic. I wonder why some were so hesitant?

  Or perhaps I should ask why these people were so desperate to jump off a cliff?

  I reached the circle's edge and stopped beside the man.

  For a moment, neither of us spoke.

  Very little was ever said between us, anyway.

  I doubted he was here for mere conversation.

  I looked down.

  The cliff dropped away in a sheer face of grey stone stained by centuries of that terrible ocean's touch. Waves crashed against rock far below, each impact sending up spray that caught light from an absent sun.

  And floating in those waves...

  Were bodies.

  Thousands of them.

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  They covered the water's surface, bobbing gently with each surge and retreat of tide. Arms. Legs. Torsos. Heads. All rendered anonymous by distance and decomposition.

  I felt nothing. No sorrow. No shock. Nothing in the sense.

  Only... curiosity.

  How many more lay beneath. How many have sunk into these red depths to join whatever else lived in this vast sea of blood?

  More importantly, what for?

  I lifted my gaze to the horizon.

  Half a moon hung there, balanced on the edge of the world.

  But this moon carried no light.

  It was black.

  Not the black of absence, but the black of presence - a solid thing that devoured illumination rather than reflected it. A perfect circle of void pressed against the sky like a seal, casting shadows that moved wrong, that stretched and contracted with rhythms that had nothing to do with the passage of time.

  A solar eclipse.

  Appearing in permanent totality.

  I didn't stare directly at it. Couldn't.

  I'd made that mistake before.

  Instead, I sighed - a sound that seemed to carry too far in this place of muted acoustics.

  "Are you going to say anything different this time?"

  The man didn't respond.

  He didn't even move an inch.

  Almost as if I didn't exist in such a lonely world.

  Of course you won't.

  I was more than a little annoyed. How many times had we stood here? How many times had I asked the same questions and received the same silence?

  Too many to count. Yet, unfortunately, too few to stop trying.

  "I'm trying my hardest," I continued, speaking to the ocean, to the black moon that watched us both. "To stop it. You show me so many images. Visions. Dreams that bleed into waking hours until I can't tell which world is real anymore. Yet this one..." I gestured at the cliff, the bodies, the red ocean that lapped at corpses with obscene gentleness. "This one remains constant. This is the future you keep showing me."

  A laugh escaped me - broken, tinged with something that might have been hysteria if I let it grow.

  "Sometimes I think I'm going crazy. That none of this is real. That you're just a hallucination born from stress and divine heritage." I turned slightly, looking at him from the corner of my eye. "But there's only one way to find out, isn't there? To keep following the path you've laid."

  With those last words, I swallowed a bit. The first true emotion I felt in this reality consumed my mind.

  Fear.

  I forced myself to face him fully.

  And immediately regretted it.

  His face blurred at the edges - features shifting, refusing to solidify into anything comprehensible. I could see the general shape of a head, the suggestion of a nose, the impression of eyes and mouth. But the details slipped away whenever I tried to focus, like trying to remember a dream upon waking.

  Nausea rolled through my gut.

  Voices erupted in my head.

  My voice. My thoughts. But unleashed. Uncontrolled. Screaming things I'd never consciously considered, whispering truths I'd buried, laughing at jokes that weren't funny, crying over losses I couldn't name.

  The cacophony threatened to drown me.

  I gritted my teeth. Forced my eyes to stay open. Refused to look away even as every instinct demanded me to.

  "I have a theory." I smiled through the mental noise.

  The man didn't reply.

  My smile twisted into something mocking, bitter - my composure cracking at the edges like ice over deep water. But I wouldn't stop. I was arrogant, and I refused to be a mindless puppet.

  Especially to something like him.

  "I think you're a god." The words came out steady despite the chaos in my skull.

  "One of the Veil. An eldritch entity with incomprehensible power. One who graciously chose me to inherit some fragment of your power. I never truly believed that I might be a descendant of some saint, or a bastard son of a frivolous Noble. No, nothing that easy."

  My eyes grew narrow, as the voices in my head grew louder.

  I think I'm merely a tool. Some tool to prevent whatever future you're so determined to show me."

  I paused, drawing breath that tasted of copper and ash.

  "But according to history, your kind tried to destroy humanity. Eldritch horrors beyond comprehension. Beings that drove entire civilizations mad with a whisper. Yet here you are."

  My voice rose slightly, carrying over the whispers in my head.

  "Which begs the question - who are you really?"

  Around me, the world began to shift.

  In my peripheral vision, the corpses moved. Not rising - nothing so dramatic. Just small movements. Eyes that had been staring at the sky now tracked my position. Mouths that had been frozen in silent screams now worked soundlessly, forming words I refused to read on their lips.

  Some of them started speaking.

  Whispers at first. Then louder. Voices layering over each other until I couldn't distinguish individual words, just a rising tide of accusation, pleading, rage and despair.

  The black moon on the horizon began to rise.

  Not slowly. Not gradually.

  It climbed the sky like a predator emerging from hiding, growing larger with each heartbeat. The shadows it cast deepened, spread, reaching across the red ocean toward the cliff with fingers of absolute darkness that consumed everything they touched.

  The darkness was coming.

  And it was coming fast.

  My teeth ground together, jaw muscles screaming under the pressure. But I didn't look away from the blurred face. Wouldn't.

  "Some of the visions you've shown me have already come to pass. So I dare not question its validity. But no matter what, I remain confused."

  "Why would you help humanity if you're truly such an evil existence?" The question came out strangled, forced through a throat that wanted desperately to shut up instead. "But what else could you possibly be? You're not an apostle, despite..."

  I stopped.

  "...You don't match any of their descriptions. The twelve apostles, the saints - none of them match even your basic stature." My hands clenched into fists. "If I had the choice, I'd be smart and have ended my life long ago. If the things I've read throughout history were to stand in truth - death is much more preferable than what your kind is capable of."

  The man didn't respond.

  Which just made me even more pissed off.

  "Yet all you've done is help me. Guide me with these visions. Give me power to prevent... this."

  I gestured wildly at the cliff, the ocean, the approaching darkness.

  "So that begs the question-"

  The corpses were screaming now. Yet no sounds came from their mouths. Hundreds of voices raised, screaming silence into a void of nothingness.

  The black moon swelled to impossible proportions, devouring the sky - and with it, the horizon.

  Darkness raced across the red ocean, consuming it in endless abandon.

  My eyes never left his visage. My eyes narrowed in a mix of anger and determination as I demanded an answer.

  "Who are you really?"

  As I finished the question, the darkness consumed everything.

  The ocean vanished. The cliff vanished. The corpses vanished mid silent-scream.

  The world became void.

  And in that void, pain erupted.

  My right eye felt like it was being torn from its socket. Like something was trying to claw its way into my skull through the soft tissue, using my eye as an entry point. I gasped, hands flying to my face, fingers digging into the socket as if I could somehow pull out whatever was burrowing inward.

  The voices stopped.

  The screaming stopped.

  All sensation ceased except for the spike of agony drilling through my eye into my brain.

  I couldn't see. Couldn't think. Could barely breathe through the pain.

  Then, gradually, it began to recede.

  The stabbing pressure eased to throbbing. The throbbing faded to aching. The aching dulled to groggy awareness.

  I stood in darkness, breathing heavily, hands still pressed against my face.

  Slowly - so slowly - I lowered them.

  Opened my eyes.

  And saw it.

  An eye.

  Staring directly at me.

  I couldn't comprehend its size. My mind refused to process the dimensions, the scale, the impossible geometry of what I was witnessing.

  Was it larger than me? Smaller? The same size? Distance and proportion had no meaning here. It simply was, existing in a space that couldn't contain it, looking at me with attention that felt like weight pressing down on reality itself.

  Where an iris should have been, there was only void.

  Not empty void. Not absent void.

  Void filled with things my eyes weren't designed to see.

  Seals. Symbols. Patterns that writhed and shifted like living things, swimming through that impossible blackness in formations that suggested meaning just beyond my comprehension. They moved in rhythms that made my divine blood sing and scream simultaneously, recognizing something fundamental and forbidden.

  Words began flooding into my mind.

  Incomprehensible at first - syllables that made no sense, phonemes that couldn't exist, concepts that shattered against the limitations of human language.

  But slowly, agonizingly, meaning emerged from the jumbled mess.

  Individual words began to crystallize. Sentences formed. The flood organized itself into something almost comprehensible, almost bearable.

  Until finally, only one sentence remained.

  Clear.

  Undeniable.

  Burned into my mind with the weight of an absolute truth I couldn't yet comprehend.

  The Empire must survive, or everyone will die.

  The eye didn't blink.

  Didn't look away.

  Just stared at me with that terrible, knowing attention while the words echoed through my skull.

  My consciousness was fading.

  And with it, the same sentence followed.

  Over and over again. Unending. Uninterrupted.

  The Empire must survive, or everyone will die.

  The Empire must survive, or everyone will die.

  The Empire must survive, or everyone will die.