It hits him all at once. The veil over his eyes is ripped off, and the cold sweat on his back doesn’t feel quite as real as it used to. Ziun is distinctly aware at how his home looks more and more like a prison; the walls purposely painted a dull shade of beige for him to easier overlook — and suddenly the blood is back.
Almost absentmindedly, he wipes his nose with the back of his hand. Ziun doesn’t have the time to spare worrying about the mess, nor does he care about the trail left on his cheek from the thoughtless action. But then he spies the smudged blood on the back of that same hand and blinks.
Ziun hauls the sullied hand up to his eye-level, waves it across his eyes, and it… lags? There’s blurred motion, of course. That's just his eyes being unable to keep up with the speed at which he moves his hand — but that doesn’t explain his unhinged fingers and parts of said hand that stay still in the air.
The disconnect lasts for a split second, and when he goes to blink again, his hand has already been restored to its previous appearance.
“… shit.” He sucked in a cold breath. His hand begins to shake where he still holds it at his eye level, and Ziun’s not sure if it's from fright or something like excitement.
‘This is a clue,’ he thinks, almost giddy as he fists his hand before returning it to his side. He can’t stop his eyes from restlessly flitting around the space, wanting to see any more abnormalities were present.
However, he's left sourly disappointed.
‘I need to find more clues.’
Determined to search, Ziun takes slow, purposeful steps towards the wall made of books. Unlike the rest of the furniture, it hadn’t just up and disappeared, so it was either suspect or held structural purposes. Just as he goes to pluck a nondescript book off the shelf, at the very moment he slides it out from between the neighbouring books — his fingers slip through its spine.
The book’s pages flutter as it drops to the floor.
Ziun’s heart once again thunders in his chest. He’s on to something. He just knows that he’s painfully close to having an answer for all of these oddities that just keep on piling ontop of one another. But he can’t— something… something’s not connecting. There’s a distinct lack of sense to it all and he doesn’t know—
—why?
Ziun blinks.
"Why... am I even here?" He says aloud as he stares down at the unmoving book he’d left on the floor. The open page that stares up at him is blank. "When I should be.. where?"
Talking to himself is nothing new. Sometimes his head gets too crowded to think and the only way he can process things is by saying them aloud.
"No." He suddenly said. "It's really not right after all." And for some reason he doesn’t have the excess energy to think about, his eyes turn upwards.
The night sky innocently blinks back at him.
… Where the hell is the ceiling—no, the whole goddamn roof?! Ziun begins to panic. Abruptly though, a sound much like a bow harshly scraping against a violin's taut strings manages to break him out of his quickly spiralling mind.
The noise was loud and grating; giving birth to the imagery that it was instead his bones being played like some morbid fiddle. It penetrated him straight down to his core.
The blinking stars and glittering cosmos started fading in their brightness, and it was with bated breath that Ziun watched as the once beautiful night sky turned into one of horror as it bled down onto the same walls that surrounded him.
Ziun’s pupils were blown wide as he half-expected giant hands to tear through the melting sky and scoop him out of this lifeless box they’d kept him in. All too quickly he was reminded of how frail and exposed he was— that there was nothing he could do to defend himself if anyone or anything decided they wanted him dead.
Too easily did this raining curtain of stars replace the previously beige walls, staining it anew with its own terrifying darkness. When the walls are eventually fully encased in this inkiness, the stars begin to lose their glitter and instead become dull shards of glass that scraped across any surface it touched as it made its way to the threshold of the floor.
Ziun’s head spun at the unnatural phenomena. Maybe in another setting the sight would’ve been fascinating to watch had it not been him at its mercy — had it not then continued to frighteningly swallow up the floor he stood on and threaten his whole livelihood.
In the end, Ziun manages to run to.. well, nowhere. Every direction he turned to had already been compromised, every crevice, every nook and cranny was splotched with that same inky darkness he had once found so beautiful.
Now it was just terrifying—more so at the silence of it all.
There was no dripping, no sound of glass scraping or breaking as it dragged itself across any available surface— nothing. Ziun was left to stand in an encirclement of wood, the last piece of flooring to be left untouched by the encroaching sky.
Curiously, he tentatively extended his foot and stroked the abyssal ocean before him with the tips of his toes. He tries not to think about how sultry the act is. The midnight sky pulls at him and quickly climbs up from his toes to his ankle before he manages to pull his foot out.
With little fanfare he got the viscous substance off. Ziun watched as it abruptly sprung back into place, the surface rippling before it stilled — as if it had never been disturbed. His heart jumped to his throat.
This new.. floor, was obviously made of a different material to what he thought it was, with how it plastered itself to his skin like tar. Ziun is horrified at how invasive it felt, despite the liquid never making it anywhere close to either one of his orifices.
After what felt like a century, he takes a deep breath. Frankly, Ziun knows that what he’s about to do is a very bad, not so good idea. But for the life of him—he just couldn’t figure out what else he was supposed to do in this kind of situation.
Does he wait? But for what— and who? Besides, it was only a certain amount of time—literal seconds— before he’d lose all footing; what was the harm in doing so earlier? That way at least he had some sort of… initiative over what was to come.
“Ha!” The self-deprecating scoff was swallowed almost as soon as it had left his lips. The noise didn’t echo, barely reaching his own ears. There was nothing encaging him anymore, just an endless sea of black. The shards of broken stars that melted from the fake cosmos had fully faded away into nothing.
He couldn’t even see his own hand in front of him, let alone tell if it had broken apart again.
For reasons unknown even to him, Ziun sends a silent prayer up above to where he knows no God lies. It was laughable, actually, how freeing it was to take a step forward into what could only result in his death. Perhaps it was his own illusion, but Ziun could’ve sworn that this was the most in control of his own fate that he had ever been.
It doesn’t matter in the end though, because willingness or not, the abyss doesn’t hesitate to swallow him whole.
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