The first hint of dawn painted the eastern horizon with streaks of bruised purple and blood orange.
Nikolai barely noticed, drunk on the afterglow of the hunt, the feeling of absolute dominance.
Until the first blade of sunlight pierced the skeletal canopy—and touched his skin.
Agony.
It struck him like a hammer blow. Flesh hissed and blackened, blood thickening, muscles spasming. The acrid stink of burning meat hit his nostrils—sharp, inescapable.
His scream tore itself loose, primal and ragged, as he stumbled backward, shielding his face.
Sunlight.
Gods—it BURNS.
The trees—too sparse. The rocks—too shallow. No refuge, no escape. His gaze snatched the sight of a fallen log, charred and hollowed by some forgotten storm. He lunged for it, desperate.
But the sun was merciless. As he crawled into the shallow shelter, the light found him again, scorching his back, peeling him apart.
His strength unraveled instantly, faster than thought, his senses spiraling into chaos. He couldn't hear, couldn't smell, couldn't even breathe without inhaling the reek of his own ruin. The world dissolved into a boiling haze—and then darkness, at last, swallowed him.
Cold.
Rough stone beneath his cheek. Damp earth biting into his side.
Then pain—vast and roaring. A bonfire beneath his skin, each beat of his heart a drum of molten lead through ruined veins. He twitched, and fire exploded inside his ribs.
A thin, broken gasp rattled loose from his throat.
Breathe. The instinct surfaced, dim and staggering. Air rasped in and out—shallow, burning.
Water.
The hunger for it stabbed through the mire of agony.
He tried lifting his head. His neck shook violently, almost pitching him sideways. Colors bled across his vision—orange, purple, black.
Sky. Fading light.
Another attempt. His right arm responded sluggishly, a puppet dragged by broken strings. Pain lanced through the joint, raw and blinding.
His left arm hung dead. Numb from shoulder to fingertips. Heavy as lead. Alien.
Panic flared.
An insect-whine drilled into his ears, relentless and maddening. An itch bloomed along his thigh, unreachable and savage, another cruel torture layered atop the rest. A useless twitch reignited the fire in his flank, and he nearly blacked out again.
Where... Sun...
Memory convulsed—and something else broke through.
The Eye appeared.
Not distant. Not remote. It pressed in against the ragged edge of the world, monstrous and immediate.
A single vertical slit of burning red, vivid and raw, surrounding a pitch-black pupil that devoured light without mercy. The red wasn't solid—it pulsed, bled, breathed with impossible motion. Tendrils of black lanced outward from the core, spiderwebbing across the darkness like cracks in broken glass.
The Eye was close enough that he could feel it—not warmth, but pressure, a suffocating awareness.
It shifted. Not with a pulse, not with a throb—but with a slow rearranging of space itself, as if reality folded and unfolded behind its glassy surface. The air around him felt thinner. The ground seemed to tilt.
The Eye watched.
Not in judgment. Not in hatred.
In amusement.
Its pleasure seeped into him like poison, colder than the frost biting into his burned skin. There were no words. No voice. Only the feeling that it was peeling him open, layer by layer, with exquisite patience.
It reveled in his suffering the way a child might watch ants drown.
Nikolai's heart hammered weakly against his scorched ribs, a hollow, frantic rhythm trapped inside a body half-dead. Not like a rabbit caught beneath a predator's gaze—something worse. Like dust caught in the gravity of a collapsing star, unable to resist, unable to matter.
Under that terrible gaze, something deeper stirred.
Not his mind. Not his body.
The void.
The endless, gnawing hunger roared to life. Torn flesh knit, blackened skin twisted and bubbled back into raw meat, muscle spasmed and locked. The pain was unbearable, a thousand blades carving him apart and stitching him back together.
He endured because he had no choice.
And above him, the Eye watched.
Silent. Amused. Waiting.