Jay stumbled through the gray expanse, a child lost in a land without landmarks. His sobs were swallowed by the oppressive stillness, leaving only the scrape of small shoes on unseen stone. Then, a sound pierced the void: chanting. Low, guttural, resonant with a fervor that vibrated in his bones. Not words, but pure, desperate need.
He looked up.
Figures knelt in concentric circles, draped in hooded robes the color of dried blood. Their faces were hidden, heads bowed low. The air thickened with their devotion, but Jay heard nothing from their minds. Not thoughts. Not prayers. Only a suffocating, physical pressure radiating from them – a hunger so vast, so ancient, it felt like the vacuum between stars. It wasn't for food. It was for oblivion, for an end to the gnawing void inside them, a void they worshipped.
His small body buckled. He crashed to his knees, hands clawing at his own stomach, trying to tear out the phantom agony echoing their starvation. "Make it stop… please…"he whimpered, the child's voice cracking. "It hurts… it hurts…"
The chanting ceased.
Silence. Thicker than before.
Then, a hiss. Not from the air, but inside his skull. Rhythmic. Hypnotic. Scalding.
He forced his head up.
Above the circle of worshippers, coiled in impossible dimensions that hurt his mind to perceive, hung the Serpent. Black scales drank the light, reflecting only bottomless darkness. Its body stretched into eternity, vanishing into the gray. Its head, larger than a cathedral, lowered slowly. Twin eyes, slitted pupils glowing with cold, indifferent emerald fire, fixed on him. Not malice. Not rage. Boredom. The look of a fat cat finding a particularly dull mouse.
The sheer, alien majesty of it was paralyzing. This was the god they worshipped? This was the source of the hunger? The terror was immense, yet laced with a horrifying sense of… scale. Of his utter insignificance.
But Jay felt it. The lie.
The scene cracked.
Like glass struck by a hammer, fissures spiderwebbed across the vision. The majestic serpent rippled, its form destabilizing. The scales dissolved into pallid, writhing flesh. The obsidian sheen became the sickly white of a drowned corpse. And beneath that translucent, pulsating hide – faces.
Dozens. Hundreds. Pressed against the inside of the serpent's colossal body like flies trapped in amber. Human faces, contorted in silent, eternal agony. Mouths stretched wide in soundless screams, eyes bulging with madness and despair. They pushed against the membrane, fingers clawing uselessly at the slick inner surface. The monstrous thing was no god. It was a prison. A writhing, bloated abomination made of consumed souls.
The Devourer's true form.
Jay's eyes exploded with searing pain. Twin rivulets of hot blood streamed down his cheeks, mingling with his tears. He tried to scream, to shatter the nightmare with sound, but his throat produced only a choked, airless rasp. The sheer, blasphemous horror of it – the infinite suffering trapped within the pale worm – was tearing his mind apart.
Then, warmth.
Calloused, scarred hands – impossibly familiar – gently covered his bleeding eyes, shutting out the abomination. The stink of gunpowder and trench mud filled his nostrils, cutting through the psychic rot.
"Forget." Tom's voice, strained but fiercely tender, whispered directly into his soul, bypassing his ears. "You don't need to remember this. You must never remember this."
The hands pressed softly, shielding him.
"Wake up, Jay."
---