Page 3217 -- CCLXXIII.

Chapter Two Hudred Seventy-Three: 'When thy Domain holds true...'
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Hector hit the ground with a rolling thunk and then slid for a long while. He didn't have the presence of mind for much of anything. His thoughts were too clouded, too amorphous, like he was half-asleep and just on the verge of waking up.

Man, he was tired. A bed sure would've been nice, right about now. Yeah. A bed. Not whatever this was beneath him.

Whatever this was? Mm. Didn't feel like dirt. Not rock, either.

No, it felt metallic, actually. Hard and flat and instantly familiar. Extremely familiar, in fact.

Ugh.

He tried to find his hands and feet, and while he was reasonably sure that they were there, everything felt off. He reached out with the Scarf for some semblance of awareness, balance, or anything, really--but no. It told him nothing.

Which was beyond strange.

He couldn't breathe, either. His lungs were not pleased with him. Panicking within his chest, they were struggling to make the rest of his body do the same. If he wasn't undead, he surely would've been freaking out already. It didn't take long for those same lungs to settle down, though.

As he suffocated to death, that was.

Hmm. His thoughts could settle on the peculiarity of that, at least.

At length, his palms found the ground and pressed flatly thereupon as he prepared to push himself up. Yeah. That was definitely metal under him. Moreover, it wasn’t just any metal.

It was iron. Somehow, he could just tell. The feel of it. The presence of it. As if it belonged to him. But he didn’t remember materializing it.

He sat up into a cross-legged position and looked around. He was not prepared for what he saw.

A vast, barren landscape lay before him in all directions, flat and shiny as far as the eye could see, beneath a pitch black sky, save for one blazingly bright source. So bright, in fact, that it had to be the sun. But how could the sun be up while the rest of the sky was so dark? What’s more, the sun even appeared to be in the middle of setting, as well. How could it still be that bright when half or more of it was already below the horizon? He had to turn his back to it before his eyes could fully cease squinting.

Hector could see his skin cooking under its brutal rays, too. Good thing he was already dead and hadn't noticed that pain while he was suffocating. That was really going to sting later, though, no doubt.

He tried to focus, though it was difficult. What in the hell was going on, right now?