The epiphany was a death sentence. Zac understood. He understood that the Shroud wasn't his prison, but the last membrane protecting him from a far worse hell. But understanding brought no peace, only a new layer of terror. His soul was a sponge wrung dry of all will. Exhausted, empty, he gave up. He gave up on understanding, on fighting, on resisting. In a final surge of primal despair, he did the only thing he had left: he started to run.
A frantic, aimless run carried him far from the circle of pale light where he had been judged. He plunged into the darkness of this cursed place, not to flee toward freedom, but to escape the silence of his own head. He ran until his spiritual lungs burned, until the phantom pain of his chains became the very rhythm of his escape.
It was then that he saw it. In the distance, at the edge of his perception, there was a change. Wavelike movements in the air, a trembling in the very fabric of reality, like the distortion caused by intense heat whipping across a dilapidated horizon. It was a landmark. An anomaly. A goal.
Without thinking, he rushed toward it, the senseless hope of a change propelling him forward.
The closer he got, the more a strange sensation crept into him, rising from the soles of his feet to the base of his skull. The viscous stone floor wasn't stable. It was moving. First a slight undulation, barely perceptible, then a broader movement, like the skin of a monstrous beast stretching beneath his weight. His run became difficult, he staggered, but he kept going, his eyes fixed on the heat mirage dancing before him.
Soon, the surface of the ground began to blister. Skeletal, bony fingers pierced the membrane of the ground like necrotic roots. They writhed in the air, clawing at the void, searching for a grip. Fear chilled his blood, but he didn't stop, leaping over the spectral hands. Their touch was that of cold bone and damp earth, and each brush slowed him, burdening him with a deathly weariness.
Then entire arms began to emerge from the ground, rising like a forest of decaying limbs. They gripped his ankles, his legs, slowing him again and again. Each step was a struggle, a desperate swim through a molasses of damned limbs pulling him down. He was so close to his goal. The heat of the mirage began to lick his face, a promise of fire that was better than this creeping cold.
After an eternity of struggle, tearing his spiritual body from the earth's clutches, he finally reached the edge. The ground stopped short. He was at the top of an endless cliff.
The sight tore out what was left of his soul. His mind shattered into a million pieces.
As far as the eye could see, a landscape sculpted from suffering stretched out. Millions of souls, grey, twisted figures, were subjected to tortures his brain struggled to process: wheels of fire, rivers of acid, mountains of broken glass. Grotesque creatures, amalgams of flesh, metal, and hatred, patrolled plains of ash, their cries tearing through the air. Geysers of lava illuminated with a blood-red glow citadels carved in the shape of screaming faces. A cacophonous symphony, made from the screams of a billion damned souls, rose from the abyss. It was a sight more monstrous than any vision of hell humanity had ever conceived. This was not an imitation. It was the original.
The skeletal hands finally caught him. They no longer tried to hold him back. They pulled him. Downward. Through the ground.
His mind, already in tatters, shattered. And in the final second of his consciousness, a mad and perfectly lucid thought pierced him. He saw the countless mass of souls, their anonymous, industrial, and eternal suffering. He understood then, in a flash of horror, that his personal punishment, his burdens and psychological torments, were nothing. It was preferential treatment. A prologue. A private room in the antechamber of the abyss. His case wasn't the worst.
He was sucked into the ground, as if pulled by quicksand made of nightmares. Then nothing.
Blackness.
Silence.
The total absence of sensation.