The sky above Thomas Hale was not a sky. It was a bruise, a wound stretched endless, the color of old iron and ash. There were no stars, no sun, no moon—only emptiness, thick and heavy, pressing down as though the void itself wanted to crush him into dust. He fell, though he could not remember leaving solid ground. One moment he had been walking along the cobbled streets of Brackenford, hauling water from the well, the next he had tumbled into nothing, and gravity had become a merciless hand.
Around him, others fell too. Men, women, children, all screaming as they plummeted into the abyss. Some collided midair, their bodies torn apart before disappearing, screaming swallowed by the emptiness. Others vanished silently, leaving nothing behind but a faint distortion in the air, like a ripple in reality. Thomas's stomach convulsed with terror and nausea; he tried to reach for something, anything, but the void gave him nothing.
The heat came first—not sunlight, not warmth, but a burning that clawed at his lungs, his chest, his bones. It seeped into him, invisible yet absolute, and every nerve in his body screamed. Panic twisted in his gut, a primal, helpless rage. He realized quickly: he would not die. Not yet.
Then came the ground.
It was no earth, no comfort of stone or soil. It was black rock, jagged as teeth, jutting from rivers of molten fire. Thomas's first impact tore through him like a blade. Bones snapped, flesh ripped, yet the pain was strange—it lingered, but did not end. Something inside him resisted the destruction, something alien, and he could feel his body reshaping even as it shattered.
When Thomas opened his eyes, the boy he had been was gone. His skin had darkened to a mottled, obsidian black, streaked with glowing veins of molten red. His hands—once soft, capable of lifting water or a plow—had become claws, tipped with jagged edges that scraped across the black stone. His legs felt foreign, twisted, yet somehow stronger. His chest rose and fell in unnatural rhythm, a heartbeat he could not recognize. The air around him shimmered with heat, yet he felt no suffocation—only the sickening awareness that he was no longer human.
Around him, the other survivors writhed, twisted into forms that reflected the worst of themselves. A man with dozens of mouths along his arms gnawed endlessly at invisible prey. A woman's body writhed with serpentine curves, eyes glimmering with insatiable hunger. Even the meek, who had survived the fall, had been warped into crawling shadows, whispering with voices not their own. The sight made Thomas recoil, yet a strange instinct drew him toward the center of the plateau.
There it was: the Circle of Runes. Etched deep into obsidian stone, it glowed with a sickly green light that pulsed like a heartbeat. The air vibrated with its power, resonating through the molten ground and into the bones of the fallen. The Circle did not merely summon—they transformed. Those who survived the fall, those who still breathed, were reborn here as demons, each shaped by the sins they carried in life. The greedy became gaunt, stretching to snatch endlessly. The lustful writhed in endless desire. The wrathful were encased in jagged black armor, molten veins flaring with eternal rage.
Thomas stumbled toward it, claws scraping against the jagged rocks. Every step burned him, yet he could not stop. A part of him—the fragment that still remembered Brackenford, his family, the water wheel and the cobbled streets—shouted to flee. But the instinct to survive, to adapt, to confront, drove him forward.
As he neared the Circle, he realized that the transformation was not complete. The molten veins pulsed faster when he tried to use them, and the jagged plates along his arms flexed almost independently, as if alive. Hunger flared in his chest—not the hunger for food, but a deeper, more primal craving: to dominate, to feed, to become. And yet, within that hunger, a spark of his former humanity lingered—a sliver of memory, guilt, regret, and fear.
He watched as a fellow survivor, a man who had been a farmer in life, collapsed at the Circle's edge. The runes pulsed, consuming him, reshaping his body into something grotesque. He emerged a demon with skin like cracked stone and claws tipped with molten fire. His screams were both human and not, a chorus of pain and rage that filled the plateau. Thomas shivered, recognizing in that scream what he himself might become if he surrendered completely.
Other figures approached. A woman with serpentine limbs slithered over the black rock, her eyes burning with desire that would never be sated. A boy, barely older than Thomas had been, crawled on all fours, mouth opening to whisper words in a voice that was his and not his at the same time. The Circle pulsed at the center of it all, ever-hungry, reshaping each soul in its image.
Thomas felt a strange sense of awe mingled with terror. The Circle of Runes was not merely a place; it was a force. It demanded obedience, adaptation, transformation. Those who submitted survived, but at what cost? Those who resisted were destroyed or twisted into permanent monstrosity. Around him, the newly turned demons obeyed its silent command, drawn like moths to a flame they could never escape.
He raised his clawed hands to the Circle, feeling the heat, the power, the unyielding pull. Fragments of his human conscience screamed at him to turn away, but he could not. Survival had become instinct, and instinct demanded engagement. He flexed his claws experimentally, watching molten veins flare as he flexed his new body. He was strong. Terrifyingly strong. And yet, beneath the armor, the claws, the heat and hunger, Thomas still remembered who he had been.
The empty sky loomed above him, vast and indifferent. There would be no help from above. No mercy, no god, no end. Only the bruise-colored void stretched infinitely, a silent witness to the fall, the transformation, and the Circle that now commanded his existence.
Thomas Hale, boy of Brackenford, human once, tenant's son, had fallen. But Thomas Hale, wrathful, jagged, molten, clawed demon now, would rise. And in that rising, he understood one terrifying truth: the fall was only the beginning. The Circle of Runes pulsed, hungry and eternal, and the real horror had only just begun