As Kyle rested, fidgeting and chafing to move, the aura of hate and rage surrounding him reached a pronounced crescendo. By then the feeling bordered melodrama, a laughable pretext projected by an overacting hack. That picture alone prompted a short chuckle from Kyle, who mustered enough energy to stand despite the ceaseless mental onslaught.

Kyle closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, turning his face toward the mottled sky in curt defiance. "Come get me, Fucker!" he bellowed, each word spat into the sky. "I'm tired of this shit! Stop breathing down my neck and do something, already!" Kyle defined giddiness at that moment. He was drunk with confusion and perhaps responding to the banality, not usually prone to utter profanity, desperate times required measured response. No longer tired, he wavered on his feet slightly, dizzy and simultaneously powerful after casting what would become the first stone in a long war.

Nothing. No, maybe a mere trick of the questionable light, but a change did apparently ripple through the fog and mist. The oppressive yoke vanished from Kyle's proverbial shoulders as if spirited away by benevolent magic. So surprised and elated was he, that he stumbled and nearly tripped though he'd still done nothing but stand. But every defiance has some hidden cost, and this proved no different. No sooner had Kyle begun his celebration, did his hastily worded epithet prompt drastic and perhaps overzealous consequences.

The response came not in words, nor did any foul creature directly accost Kyle. Instead, the already tortured and twisted landscape began to decay and rot as if composed of flesh. Some rocks bled and burst like gorged ticks, pelting the earth with muffled thumps instead of rigid clatter. Others opened like horrific disembodied eyes, looking about crazily before sizzling and melting into putrid gooey puddles that turned Kyle's stomach. Broken walls became an unsettling waxy skin, which flaked and fluttered to the ground, burned and blackened by unseen furnaces. Beneath each discarded scab of skin lay a steel mesh caked with gore and clumps of hair, finally revealing the facade as mere artifice. Inside these newly exposed frames slithered indistinct multitudes of endless entrails equipped with teeth which chattered and chewed themselves as they pulsed and churned in the tightly woven cages. They bled profusely and somehow wailed high-pitched agony imploring Death, who either ignored the piteous pleads, or somehow unable to respond. From these, Kyle covered his mouth with a shaking hand and retreated backwards by a single step, mentally pushed by the infinite finality of suffering rudely thrust into his unwilling brain.

And the sky. Who could forget the already obscured and foreboding canopy smothering the scene? That glowering maelstrom had impossibly degraded beyond black, and swirling ominously within was something darker still. Kyle gazed upon this in unhinged awe, falling backwards and landing with a whump he neither felt, nor remembered. So engaging was the sight, his mind became a total blank for several minutes as he witnessed the hypnotic oscillations and undulations distort the twilight and singe the boiling clouds. Though he was temporarily deranged, the scenery continued to transform and buckle around him, into nightmarish renditions of Hell at its most calamitous. Or perhaps even Hell would bow in homage to the new place where Kyle resided, for no book religious or otherwise presumed to describe torments so macabre.

Kyle began to realize he'd made a terrible mistake.