"Ah!"

In the city, a creature suddenly woke from his sleep. His body was drenched in sweat, his breathing unsteady. Fumbling for the lamp on the bedside table, he lit the weak flame, casting dim light across the room. He turned to the window, staring uneasily into the dark sky beyond.

"All these years… and I still dream of it."

It had been three years since the fall, three years since the world was shattered and their city captured by the "Outer gods." Yet even now, the nightmares refused to leave him. Every time he closed his eyes, the old horrors returned.

"Is this… the shadow left behind by war?" he muttered, wiping his forehead again.

He had no way of realizing that his nightmares were not born of memory alone, Something that none of them could yet perceive was stirring.

Beneath the foundations of the city, shadow-colored fog was slowly, silently rising.

The truth was simple: his spiritual sense was sharper than most of his kind. That was why he dreamed first and why he had seen the mist before anyone else.

"But at the end of that nightmare…" he whispered, striking his pipe and drawing in the smoke. "Before I died, didn't I see… a cloud of dispersing smoke, off in the corner of the battlefield?"

He frowned. That detail never fit. He had lived through the entire war. He remembered every moment, and he was certain there had been no fog then.

He coughed hard, choking on the pipe smoke. Grimacing, he stubbed it out and set it aside.

"Forget it," he said, shaking his head. "It's just a dream, it means nothing."

With a weary sigh, he lay back down.

"The fall of our world… will always be a wound I can't escape."

Murmuring, he drifted back into uneasy sleep.

He didn't know how long had passed before another sound jolted him awake.

A scream.

"The fog… from the dream?"

He pushed himself up, but froze at once. His room was thick with it. Dark mist hung heavy in the air, curling in shadowed strands.

"What… is this?"

Heart pounding, he hurried to the window and forced it open. His worst fear was confirmed. The streets below were swallowed in the same darkness. The fog was so dense that he couldn't even see the building across from his own.

Another scream cut through the silence. This one came from the next room.

"The landlady?"

Recognizing the voice, he scrambled through the thick smoke toward the hall. The corridor was thick with mist, but muscle memory guided him to the familiar door.

It was unlocked. He shoved it open and staggered inside.

"Landlady! Are you okay?" he called.

"Help… help me… ah… ugh!"

Her muffled cries dragged him deeper. Tripping again and again on unseen debris, he forced his way to her room.

He shoved the door wide—and froze.

"Gods…"

The landlady, once a bright and lively woman, now hung from the ceiling by strands of black silk. Her body was bloated, her skin split and bubbling with white, wriggling eggs.

Her face had half-melted, her flesh sagging like a balloon filled with water. She convulsed, choking.

"Help… me…" she managed to rasp. And then she vomited.

What spilled from her mouth were spiders. Not tiny ones, but fully grown, slick and writhing things as they tumbled down the webbing.

"…"

He met her eyes for one terrible moment. There was no hatred there, only a desperate plea for release.

He turned and ran.

Terror consumed him. Every instinct screamed at him to flee, and he obeyed without hesitation.

"This is madness! The whole world's gone mad!"

He burst into the street, hoping to find help. But he wasn't the only one. All around him, people were crying, screaming.

"Help! Someone, help me!"

The voice drew his attention. Another man was stuck against the wall ahead. His body from the waist down was fused into the crack between the wall and the street.

His face was twisted beyond recognition, And his mouth distorted into a grotesque shape. Yet he was alive.

Alive and begging.

"Please… help…"

The sight nearly shattered what little sanity he had left. But it was only the beginning.

"Ahhh!"

More screams. He spun around and saw a group of his kin fleeing in terror down the street. Yet as they ran, they were devoured, consumed by massive, gaping jaws that appeared from nowhere in the mist. Others were seized by sudden tentacles that coiled from the fog, dragged away shrieking into unseen depths.

One man stumbled forward clutching a loaf of bread, only to scream as the bread itself came alive, teeth sprouting to devour him bite by bite.

Everywhere, across every street, it was the same. People were torn apart, not by demons, nor by soldiers, but by the very things they feared most.

The fog was dragging nightmares out of their minds and making them flesh.

"Impossible…" the creature staggered back, his voice breaking.

It didn't matter what the fear was, monster, disaster, curse, or nightmare. The fog gave it form, and now it was feasting on them all.

The creature collapsed to the ground as the sound of hooves echoed through the mist.

From the fog, a figure emerged. A warrior. His spear was strung with severed heads, a dozen of them at least, swaying with every step of his warhorse.

The creatures breath caught. He knew this man, he had seen him once before, on the battlefield, years ago. The most brutal invader of them all, he was the one who had haunted his dreams ever since.

"No… no…"

And then he noticed the heads.

Every single one was staring at him, eyes wide with hate.

"Why did you survive?"

"Why wasn't it you who died?"

Their gaze burned into him.

He had no time to answer. The next moment, his own head joined theirs, skewered on the invader's spear.

The warrior turned, riding off into the endless fog.

⸻———x——————

The city stood whole. The buildings were untouched, the streets intact. But its people had been broken, consumed by their own fears.

And in the heart of the mist, something vast stirred.

A collective consciousness, born from terror, fed by every scream and every death.

It was awakening.

It was not a devil nor a god, but the prototype of something new .

"Does the secret truly exist?"

Cillian opened his eyes within the endless abyss and gazed upon the city now swallowed by the rising fog. What had once been a bustling stronghold of intelligent life was now nothing more than a trophy, claimed entirely by this strange, idealistic plane.

The buildings still stood untouched, their towers and streets unchanged, but their inhabitants were gone. Every creature that had once lived there was dead, or worse.

Those who appeared to survive were not alive in any real sense. They had been assimilated, their bodies hollowed out, their spirits devoured, until they became parasitic extensions of the fog itself.

Cillian studied them closely. Their new forms were grotesque, shadows of their old selves, twisted together from fragments of nightmares. They looked less like individuals and more like clusters of primal fears, stitched into being by the mist.

"There is no master consciousness," Cillian muttered, frowning. "No mind to speak with. It works only on instinct…"

The realization left him unsatisfied. He had found no way to communicate, perhaps the entities within the fog had not yet developed far enough or perhaps they needed time, or contact with something greater, before they could evolve.

Even now, he had not unraveled the true laws that governed these planes. They remained strange, their nature half-concealed from his eyes.

"And yet," Cillian continued to himself, "each one is different. This fog-bound world is only one type. The others… they carry their own forms, their own rules."

If he was to uncover their essence, he needed more data.

He raised his hand, and the next experiment began

This time, he pushed the boundaries further. Unlike the smaller trial before, he cast whole populations into the abyss. He pulled in different races, different cultures, more varied lives. And for the first time, he even cast demons themselves, an entire territory drowned in divine fire, into one of the idealistic planes.

The results came swiftly, and they were nothing short of horrifying.

⸻———x——————

Images unfolded before him.

A sprawling metropolis, its skyline jagged with spires, suddenly writhed as the buildings themselves began to change.

Under the influence of the plane, ordinary walls sprouted fangs, doorways became gaping maws, streets rippled like tongues. Homes, shops, temples, every structure became a predator.

A nightmare city where to enter a building was to be devoured alive.

Another settlement fell endlessly downward. Its foundations crumbled into a void without end. The people screamed as the ground itself gave way, dragging them into a descent that never ceased. They fell and fell, twisted and transforming as their bodies warped in the infinite plunge.

In yet another plane, the laws of life itself collapsed. No one there could die, All forms of life fro. people, animals, vermin, and even parasites, fused together into a single mass.

Cillian narrowed his eyes as he studied it. The mass crawled across the city, a writhing fusion of flesh, bone, and thought. Every scream echoed from countless throats at once. And as it moved, anything it touched was absorbed, folded into the whole.

It did not matter who or what resisted, the strength of the victim did not matter nor did their powers or skills, once caught they were consumed. The mass ignored strength entirely, it devoured by concept.

"Even hidden beings could be caught," Cillian whispered. "Unless… unless one carries divine fire, there is no escape."

The experiments continued. Each plane revealed new forms of torment, new patterns of madness.

But through it all, one truth grew clearer.

These planes, existing at the lowest dimension of the abyss, were the opposite reflection of the divine worlds above. Where the gods held realms of stability, order, and matter, these idealistic planes were worlds of pure instability, matter collapsing into chaos.

Time fractured, repeating itself without end.

Space twisted, pinning actions into infinite loops.

Memory and soul unraveled, stripped of meaning.

Only one thing held any weight in such a place: spirit.

The sea of mind.

Cillian observed it again and again. No matter the form of the nightmare, the spirit remained the deciding factor. The stronger the sea of mind, the more chance one had to resist. A blazing will could hold back the fog, delay transformation, preserve identity even as the plane tried to unmake it.

But delay was all it could offer. Unless one held divine fire resistance would always be temporary.

The thought stirred something deep within him.

"Idealistic plane… sea of mind…"

The words whispered through him like lightning. His experiments had shown enough to confirm the pattern. Spirit was the benchmark.

And then, a memory surfaced.

Moira.

He remembered the day she had stood before a demigod creature, attempting to ignite its sea of mind. He had watched, once, as she struggled to kindle thought where none should have been. At the time, he had assumed it was only her endless pursuit of truth, another attempt to pierce the mysteries of the infinite.

But what if there was more?

What if her experiment was not merely curiosity… but preparation?

Cillian's eyes narrowed.

"What was it you saw, Moira?" he murmured. "What truth were you reaching for?"

The thought lingered.

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