So now, you know. Shivers through the dream. Words without sound thrumming in his mind.

Kyle was still utterly stunned by the wanton destruction that blazed through and around him while the town burned to cinders. "How could you kill all those people," he said, choking back tears.

They made her wish for death.

He could hardly argue. He read the diary. He watched her, crushed of will, dive headlong into jagged debris, saved presumably by Rue's otherworldly providence. But he couldn't condone it. Not nearly. "What about me?!" he demanded. "I haven't done anything!"

You have the power, it countered. Die, and she has peace.

He knows! Is that why Rue kept plaguing him since he moved to Tammond Dale? Because of his thrice-damned powers? "Fuck you!" he roared. "I never asked for this! You're the one that's killing people! How about your magic? Hypocrite!" Kyle spun a quick circle, not quite sure where to yell.

You're not worth—the ground split like broken scab—the universe.

No getting out of this, buck-o. That hare-brain is gonna kill you. "Shit," muttered Kyle. He glanced at the remains of Old Town. They were as he remembered: cold and lifeless, old brick and wind-swept detritus—no sign of the fire that sterilized it. But a chill slithered into his gut and stiffened his spine; the change comes.

Kyle had been to a play once as a child of five. Every time the curtain rose, a new wonderland was revealed, and he never understood how so many places could coexist upon the stage. As the landscape itself wicked away like heated ash, he imagined a veil being pulled away, changing the scene for another Act. Before, only the buildings and crumbling walls yielded barbed-wire cages, woven to entrap and torment organs and nightmarish masses of flesh and aborted creatures disfigured and skinless. This time, the ground itself melted, oven-broiled liquids dripping into industrial retrograde pipes and rusty gratings spiraling into a searing caldera far below.

Kyle could not hold back the sickness, and vomited profusely into a writhing bundle of viscera bearing chattering teeth, which drank greedily, shredding tongues on too-sharp fangs, and relishing that liquid as well. He dry-heaved, but there was nothing left.

A churning vortex formed overhead; swirling with tar-blackened clouds laced with burgundy lit the corroded steel a glistening crimson, a natural extension of the gore undulating within. The mesh where Kyle stood sagged beneath his weight, groaning a creaky anguish. Not wanting to plummet to his death, he slid his feet sideways to rest on the supports instead, though that brought his legs closer to the slithering horrors.

He scanned the horizon, looking for a stairway or ladder to climb—anything to escape the yawning chasm that replaced Old Town.

But there was nothing.

The broken buildings, now replaced with bent facades of chicken wire and pulsating flesh, were part of his prison; walls of jagged bone, serrated steel, and tortured things penned him within the maelstrom. There was nowhere to go, but down. Besides, a multitude of ticks and tacks rung along the steel, like an army of hungry rats, and the sound intensified the longer Kyle remained idle. The landscape was terrifying, but whatever approached him was mobile and unconcerned, apparently, with admiring the scenery.

Kyle Ran. Unfamiliar with the moving gracefully on deck-plates, his sneakers snagged numerous uneven junctures, nearly tripping him over and over again. Worse, some of the mesh restraining the various tendrils and flailing intestines leaked, spilling writhing hazards that actively grabbed for his legs.

This ain't no playground, chum. Keep movin'! Get away if you can, die if you can't. There was no other rule, so far as Kyle was concerned. "Fast as fast can be, you'll never catch me!" he quipped. He was being chased by faceless scrabbling varmints down a spiraling ruin of decayed iron into Hell—why not have a little fun? Truly, how could things possibly degrade further?

Inevitably, he tripped. Whether vine or a mis-timed leap over a missing grate, Kyle fell headlong into a rather gruesome pillar of gibbering mouths, slamming his head into a circle of dull teeth that regardlessly gashed his forehead and smote his balance. He staggered backwards and fell from the rickety trail, plunging toward the reddish-orange maw of magma yards, or even miles below.

He sighed, even as he fell. Shit! Oh well. It's been a good life. It was easy to be resigned to fate, with nothing left to lose.