A man lay at my feet, dying. Groans come from his lungs with long pauses between them filled with gasping breaths. His face is weathered from time and eroded from toxins. Cracks ruin him, running over him like branching pathways in a dark forest. Leather coats his flesh and muscles.
Who is this man?
I do not know him, but I see something in him as he opens his eyes. Yellow, with chaos and horror, they hold back a lifetime of pain and sorrow. They burn bright as the sun reflected off ice and snow. There is no peace in them. Only malice that is waiting to be unleashed. He has no pupils in the yellow sockets that fill his cavity, no way to know where he is looking as he stares into my soul with a lifeless gaze.
We are covered by a dense fog that is inescapable, in a place that is unfamiliar to either of us. Two strangers meeting for the first time on another plane of life. I kneel beside his body. I see no marks of battle. He is cleansed of that horror shrouded by white, washed of sin. It is as though pure light makes his clothing, for I cannot make it out with my sight. All I can see is his face and those chaos gems that he has for eyes.
The man coughs, and smoke is expelled from his lungs in heavy spurts like plumes of clouds expanding across the sky. Each cough is more likely to be the last, his last breath, the end of his life.
An end to his horror.
"You hunt?" he whispers between coughs. His voice is hollow, broken, frail, and fragile. Each vowel is long and drawn out to closure. Words move through a filter and break apart with the air of each exhale.
I nod.
He coughs and begins to wheeze. His breaths come closer, drawn into a tight pattern like that of angry bees.
"You will die." There is no question. No statement. It is a plain fact that the man speaks.
As the words linger and dance through my thoughts, I begin to see myself devoured by a blazing inferno. An inescapable calamity, like the sun falling from the sky, colliding with the earth, and bringing the destruction of everything. It is, though, that I am taking the power from a great power and then being consumed by it.
Unexplainable.
I continue to see it, as I fall from the grace of god and am cast into the shadows. Nothing more than a servant to be used and thrown away by a god that cares nothing for me. I hear laughter coming from the angels that watch from heaven as tears fall from the demons that pull my feet.
I'm dragged away.
"Noone has ever survived this hunt. No one ever will." As the man exhales, his eyes close and he comes to rest. Drifting away to another plane, far away from this pain, horror, and chaos.
The fog thickens and swirls around me like an unnatural storm. I feel the smoke begin to fill my lungs, and I cough from the pain that burns away at me. There is nothing I can do, I'm helpless, unable to move, as I'm paralysed and transported away to another plane like the dead man.