On the evening of October 17th, the brand-new VRMMORPG was launched, developed by the “Aeternae” video game developer and publisher and carrying the name of “Immolation Online”.
The first server to be launched was European and the only one to ever be running. Thirty minutes into the launch, the exit button disappeared from the players’ in-game menus. All possible lines of communication with the outside world were shortly cut off. It was now impossible to either leave the game, log into it, or connect to the Internet from inside of it. Approximately thirteen thousand people were entrapped inside the virtual reality that day.

A field, a field of ocher light, a field of matured rye, lay infinite across the endless vast. The yellow grass dead-ripe, the golden column of the monochromatic skies. Themselves, the heavens dyed in virgin blue, an empty void untouched by nothing but the light of absent, missing sun's unconquered hue. Stillness innate, cemented inside, the wall of time, unpleasant warmth, the roof is not the sky.


The tower amidst the hay, the spire of flesh, of deformed existence. Throbbing as a whole, as a whole of carved-out loins, bone, organ, joints and sinew, as a whole it was deranged in structure. Rib cages protruded to the sides, the fly wings, lung dangled on a strap of vulcanized marrow, the gills. The spire oscillated, thirteen degrees amplitude. On its head, squash-color, grimy, four eyes, one, filled, on the left, three, hollowed, on the right, double vision, twenty-twenty.


Smell of roses, stench of corpses. The tower pulsated, the sludge of life circulated inside. The extremities raw, skinned, alloyed inside the wall of pulp. Its mouth, thirty-two creases, a hole. Hair, rye stems, randomized, dangling in futility.


Chapter 5 - Intermission I