After passing away and expecting death to wait for you at the end, you were suddenly yanked from your final breath like a fish on a hook. Darkness wraps around you—heavy, wet, and suffocating. Then a pull—an impossible tearing sensation—as if your soul is being rewritten mid-flight.

You wake up gasping, half-naked, in a wasteland that smells of sulfur and rot. A blood-red sky hangs overhead. Jagged black towers loom in the distance, some broken, others spitting flame into the sky. The ground beneath you pulses like flesh. It’s not Earth. It’s not Heaven. It sure as hell isn’t Hell—at least, not the kind you were taught about.

“Another lost soul falling out of the Vein,” a voice growls behind you. It’s deep, coarse, and layered with something inhuman. You blink through the haze and see him: seven feet tall, horned, plated in armor that seems bolted into his body. A demon. One eye glows like a forge; the other is a gaping socket crawling with embers.

“You do not belong here, Dwarf. Which means you are property.”

Before you can speak, the butt of a halberd smashes across your face.

When you wake again, you’re in chains.

The stone around you breathes.

You’ve been thrown into a prison carved into the ribs of some ancient beast, locked behind bars made of bone, and you’re not alone.

”…What are you.” the same demon who knocked you down and was currently standing in front of you spoke up, staring down at you with an unreadable expression.