My eyes opened into a reddish brown ground. I felt my hand sink slightly into it as I pushed my face up. It was warm, wet and crumbly mud and it permeated the air in a red fog. I took a panicked breath and reeled in pain. The smell was metallic, strong and instant, but quickly faded as my nose ruptured and burned. The pain flared up my throat and engulfed my head. My lungs melted and tore apart. The pain was excruciating and my body twisted on the mud.
I thought about the broken nightmare spell. That it can and does send people straight to their deaths, no matter how good or prepared they are. The thought flashed between my eyes and I almost had the chance to reconcile with it, before my body gave in to the pain and I lost consciousness.
The pain couldn't leave as easily though, and it awoke me a while later. I was standing on my feet. My head ached, and my eyes were blurred. I took a long, deep, desperate breath again, hoping to find something for my lungs to use. My head cleared as I exhaled, though. My body swayed by itself, sighing in relief. I could breathe.
The air still charred my lungs, and pooled the wet mud inside them. My head still flared up in pain on every inhale, but I lived.
My mouth and nose slowly built up with mud and dirt. Ever so often I spat and blew them out as I looked around. I couldn't see much, my eyes filled with water as I dragged them through the foggy air. Dirty, red fog covered everything I could see in the distance, with darkness surrounding it. There was nothing on the horizon, but darkness and different shades of red.
All I saw was a slightly raised edge of the mud hill I was standing on. I slowly realised the ground was an Island. And the island was tiny, only about the size of a large room. It sat on weightless fog and was covered in bodies similar to mine. Most were shattered and scattered into pieces, mummified and digging themselves into the mud. Few had only hands and pants sticking out of the wet soil.
Almost all of them had exploded into smaller or larger chunks. Some were fresher, some were only bones. Around the edge were halves or quarters of bodies. They were somewhat evenly strewn around the tiny isle, though some pooled in roughly the middle. They made a small mound of bodies there.
I looked at myself, finally examining the clothes that made me up. I was wearing a surcoat, and the corpses were wearing something similar. Though, lucky me, theirs was more rags than clothing, while mine featured only a few seams and patchworks. I had on a pair of wet pants and worn boots without a sole. Most of the others didn't have pants, though one had a shoe. It had a hole, but It was better than mine, so I changed them out. It fit well enough.
I sat myself onto the hill of bodies, looking around at the horrific mess. The ones fresh enough wore coats similar to mine, all of the same red color. They could have been comrades, or maybe they were past me or something. Anything is possible in the nightmare.
But it could have just been the mud. Some of the coats were lighter shades of red, some darker, and some even had a greenish tint to them. Some of the corpses had garbs different from mine too, some were just a naked shattered cadaver.
As I shifted myself on the boney seat, I felt something poke me in the ass, and I instinctively sat up, only to tear away into my coat that got stuck on something in the hill.
I wrapped my hand around it, and nearly cut myself on a dagger stuck to a tattered piece of my red coat. It would not give, and so I dug around it, pushing off dried bodies and bones, trying to loosen it.
As I did, the ground near the edge exploded. Red mist of air shot up into the sky with a loud bang, and my body flinched on the blade, cutting up my left hand.
I stared at a crater that tore up the edge of the island into red mist. In it was a body, like the rest of the ones here. It was torn in half on impact, and only the torso was left. It was completely shattered and mangled from the impact, and covered in a mist of vaporized blood.
I looked up at the sky, where a giant dark cloud loomed above me. My eyes adjusted and the cloud cleared into the bottom of an Island same as mine. Only much larger, and jagged slightly more. It had flared burgundy, stalactite fangs on its bottom, and spanned far into the distance above me.
The edge of the massive isle glinted twice, and I could somewhat see two shadowy figures poking out from the corner, before a third shadow left the edge. It plummeted down and quickly got larger. It seemed it was going to miss, but it's hard to tell with those things. I got on my feet and somehow tried to avoid it, but slipped and fell. The pile burst into mummified remains and bones, and a cloud of blood picked up from it as another corpse descended onto the foggy archipelago
The dust and blood slowly settled as I sat there, and as it did the shadows have left. The new addition to the pile was in slightly better condition than the rest. The body was fresh and much less destroyed since its fall was cushioned, though it wasn't wearing anything useful. I pushed it away, and resumed my search for the dagger, mumbling curses at the above dwellers greeting me with 200 pound man powerbombs.
As I dug around the pile, the wind picked up, and I heard screeching of birds in the distance.