Before the Fall

Kairo Vale hated mornings.

Not because of the cold, or the noise, or the forced rituals of school.

He hated them because they started. Because they kept starting.

Like the world was stuck on repeat and no one had noticed but him.

He muttered.

"People say the flower of youth is beautiful, but in my eyes, it is a pile of dog shit." 

The same gray light bleeding through the blinds.

The same squeal of the water pipes groaning through the walls.

The same forced conversation from people who didn't mean what they said.

"Morning, Vale."

Kairo didn't answer. He passed the teacher with a nod and walked straight to the back of the classroom, bag slung over one shoulder, earphones in.

They weren't playing anything.

Just silence.

He liked silence more than people.

He didn't have friends. Not really.

People didn't talk to him unless they had to, and even then, they kept their distance like he might cough up a gun.

He didn't dress edgy. He didn't fight.

He just... existed. Quietly.

Like a crack in the floor no one noticed until they tripped over it.

"He's weird," someone whispered.

"He never talks. Probably a freak."

Kairo leaned back in his chair and stared out the window.

Clouds crawled across the sky. Dark. Heavy.

He could already feel it in the air.

Something was off today.

The day dragged.

Classes melted into each other - numbers, dates, diagrams, voices that said nothing and meant less.

By lunch, half the school had vanished into their screens.

By dusk, the halls were empty.

Kairo didn't go home.

He never rushed home. There was nothing waiting for him there.

No mom. No dad. Just a room and an old ceiling that cracked louder every winter.

So he walked. Past the station. Past the overpass.

Out toward the edge of the city where the buildings thinned and the streetlights flickered like dying stars.

That's when it happened.

It wasn't loud.

No thunder. No lightning. No portal splitting the sky in anime fashion.

Just a hum. Low. Deep. Like someone whispering behind his skull.

Then the air cracked.

It didn't glow. It bled.A seam tore open in the pavement slow, deliberate. Not light. Something darker. Older. Like an old wound reopening.Kairo stepped back. The air was thick, humming behind his eyes.And then, it pulled.Not like gravity.Like a hand yanking a puppet string buried inside his brain.

His legs buckled. His arms flailed. The concrete split under his feet like wet paper.

"This isn't happening."

He never got the chance to finish the thought.

He fell.

Not through space.

Through existence.

There was no sky.

No ground.

Just pressure. Heat. Sounds without source. Shapes without form.

Hands that touched him without touching. Screams without mouths.

His lungs burned. His eyes wouldn't close.

His body stopped belonging to him.

"You are not the Witness."

"Then why are you here?"

"Error. ERROR. ERROR."

He didn't understand.

But the world around him did.

And it didn't care.

Somewhere in the distance - or maybe inside him - a name echoed.

Not his name.

Not Kairo Vale.

A different name. One he didn't recognize.

And then something looked at him.

Not a creature. Not a god. Just... an intention with teeth.

It saw him.

And it screamed.

When he hit the bottom if there even was a bottom he was alone.

His body ached. His throat was raw.

He coughed black smoke that didn't fade.

He bled something thicker than blood.

He was somewhere.

Someplace wrong.

The air pulsed with hunger.

And he heard them.

The Hollowdeep, or what we used to call Hell, wasn't fire. It was silence.

 Sniffing. Crawling. Whispering.

Already coming.

And Kairo Vale, the quiet kid with no friends and no future,

sat up in the dust and said nothing.

Because even then

even as the first claw scraped against the bone of his soul..

he refused to scream only thing he felt was pain at that time.

That was the first thing Kairo felt.

Not the sharp kind that made you cry out. This pain was quiet. Endless. Like his soul had been dragged across rusted blades, then stitched back together with barbed wire. 

The ground beneath him pulsed. It wasn't soil. It was warm and wet too soft, too rhythmic. It breathed beneath him, a steady thud like a heartbeat. Each beat rattled through his spine.

His eyes fluttered open.

The sky was red.

Not crimson, not ruby. But an overbearing, soul-choking red. It stretched forever, like someone had cracked the sky open and poured blood into the void. There were no stars.

Kairo coughed - a dry, retching sound. The air was toxic. Metallic, sulfurous, acrid. Every breath tore at his throat. It smelled like rusted iron, scorched stone, and something unholy he didn't want to name.

"W-Where… am I?"

His voice came out like a whisper dragged over broken glass.

He tried to stand. His limbs betrayed him, twitching and trembling. When he finally rose, his knees nearly buckled.

Around him stretched a landscape torn from nightmares.

Towers of bone—actual bone—jutted from the crimson earth like the ribs of some impossibly massive corpse. They spiraled upward in ways that hurt to look at, defying every natural law he'd ever known. Made his stomach lurch just seeing them.

Rivers of liquid gold and molten rock carved through jagged canyons, but they moved wrong. They pulsed. Like veins. Like they were alive, carrying the lifeblood of something vast and terrible sleeping beneath the surface.

His chest tightened.

Trees stood like sentinels throughout this wasteland—if you could call them trees. Leafless. Twisted. Their bark wasn't just blackened; it was weeping, peeling away in long strips that revealed raw, red flesh underneath. They swayed without any wind, their branches reaching toward him.

Beckoning.

The ground beneath his feet shifted. Not like an earthquake. Like it knew he was there. Like it was watching.

Kairo's breathing quickened. His heart hammered so hard he was sure it would burst.

Shadows moved in the distance. Too large. Too fluid. Too wrong to be human.

And then—

Oh God.

Oh God.

He saw it.

A creature hunched over a pit, its massive form blocking out what little sickly light filtered through the ash-choked sky. Its body was a mockery of everything—limbs bent at impossible angles, skin blistered and split open like overripe fruit. Yellowish pus oozed from wounds that never seemed to heal. Fangs jutted from its maw in crooked, broken rows.

It was feeding.

Tearing into something that had once been flesh. Something that still moved. Still twitched.

The wet sounds of ripping meat carried across the hellscape. Kairo's stomach heaved. Bile burned his throat.

Then it stopped.

The creature went perfectly still.

Slowly—so slowly—it lifted its grotesque head.

Sniffed the air.

Its eyes—hollow pits filled with sulfurous yellow fire—locked onto him.

Kairo felt his soul freeze.

Run.

He didn't think. His body moved on pure instinct.

He ran.

The world exploded behind him.

The ground cracked like breaking glass, and boiling liquid hissed up from the gaps. Something that screamed as it flowed. The very earth seemed to buckle and twist, trying to trip him, trying to drag him down.

Jagged rocks sprouted from nowhere, reaching for his legs. He leaped over one, rolled under another. His lungs burned. His legs felt like lead.

But he kept running.

Had to.

The whispers started then. Slithering into his ears like poisonous snakes, speaking in languages that predated human speech. But somehow—he understood every word.

"Fresh meat..."

"Heaven's little lamb..."

"Run, run, pathetic Apostle..."

His foot caught on something. He glanced down and immediately wished he hadn't.

Not a root.

A tentacle. Thick as his waist, covered in pulsing veins, coiling around his ankle. The texture was wrong—too warm, too wet, too alive.

"No, no, NO!" He yanked his leg free, stumbling backward.

The world tilted. He tumbled down a slope that wasn't made of dirt or rock.

Bones.

Thousands of them. A mountain of crushed skulls and shattered ribs that crunched and snapped under his weight. Some still had hair clinging to them. Some still had faces.

They seemed to watch him fall.

He hit something solid. Pain exploded through his shoulder. When he looked down, his sleeve was dark with blood—soaking through the fabric.

He barely felt it.

The creature was still coming.

Not running. Not even hurrying. Just walking with the patient, inevitable pace of death itself. Because it knew this world belonged to it. That he was trapped.

Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

Panic clawed at his throat. He scrambled up the bone-slope, his hands slipping on surfaces made slick with ancient marrow. His nails broke. His palms split open.

There—a crevice between two towering cliff faces. Narrow. Almost too narrow. But it was dark, and right now, darkness felt like salvation.

He squeezed himself inside, gasping as the jagged walls scraped his back raw. The space was suffocating, pressing in from all sides. But it was safe.

For now.

For the first time since the sky had torn open and swallowed him whole, it was silent.

He sat there in the crushing darkness, his whole body shaking. His breathing came in short, panicked gasps that echoed off the stone walls. His thoughts scattered—fragmented, useless, terrified.

What was this place? How had he gotten here?

Just this morning he'd been in trig class, bored out of his skull, doodling in his notebook margins. Ordinary. Safe. Normal.

Then the sky broke.

Split open like an egg, revealing something vast and terrible beyond. And he'd fallen—no, been pulled—into this nightmare where physics went to die and hope was just another word for suffering.

The wall beside him began to vibrate.

At first it was barely noticeable—just a tremor in the stone. But it grew stronger. Deeper. A resonance that seemed to come from the very bones of this world.

Ancient. Purposeful.

He turned, pressing his face against the rock.

A faint glow was emerging from the stone itself. Lines of burning white fire traced themselves across the surface—delicate as spider silk, bright as stars.

A wing. Spread wide.

A sword. Raised high.

A crown.

The symbols pulsed with their own inner light, too pure for this place of shadows and suffering. They waited, patient as eternity.

Apostle.

The word came from nowhere and everywhere at once.

He looked down at himself.

His chest was glowing.

Beneath his torn and bloodied shirt, something pulsed in time with his hammering heartbeat. The exact same symbols, burned into his skin like a brand. He yanked his shirt aside, tried desperately to rub the marks away, to claw them from his flesh—but they were part of him now.

His heart felt like it might explode.

"What the hell is this?" The words came out as barely more than a whisper.

The whispers returned then—not slithering this time, but surrounding him. Louder. Closer.

"The Apostle walks among us..."

"Heaven's chosen has come at last..."

"Does the throne send its blade... or its bait...?"

Eyes opened in the walls around him. Dozens at first, then hundreds, then thousands. All sizes, all colors, all burning with malevolent intelligence. They watched him with the focused intensity of predators sizing up prey.

And they were smiling.

Kairo pressed himself back against the stone, his whole body trembling. The truth hit him like a physical blow.

He hadn't fallen here by accident.

He hadn't stumbled into hell by chance.

Hell had been waiting for him.

Hell had been expecting him.

And now that he was here, it had no intention of letting him leave.