In someplace far away from civilization and untouched by man, a space rippled high in the sky like a disturbed still water surface.
From it came a head belong to a young man, the rest of his body followed after slowly as if being push outward by an unknown unseen force behind the supernatural phenomenon, this goes on until every inch of his whole body emerge from it completely.
The barely conscious young man then immediately plummeted down from the star streaked void above, and finally breaking the ocean's surface without so much as a struggle.
*SPLASH!*
The water accepted his body without an ounce of resistance, embracing and swallowing him whole. No waves rose to contest his arrival, the only thing present was just the slow, inevitable pull downward to the seemingly bottomless ocean.
His limbs hung slack, drifting like discarded cloth in the void of stillness. His half lidded eyes registered only the fractured silver shimmer of the moon, bending and distorting on the surface above as it receded. Each heartbeat was weaker than the last, each breath grew thinner, as though the ocean itself was leeching life from him.
'What... happened?'
'Where... am I?'
'Am I... dead?'
Each thoughts came like a faint whispers, breaking and falling apart before they could solidly form. They slipped through his mind like sand between open fingers, vanishing before he could grasp them.
It was a maddening feeling, everything felt distant and sluggish, like being aware of getting cut open while laying down on a hospital bed in the middle of surgery, fully aware yet too sedated to scream.
'If I'm dead...'
He willed his fingers to twitch, but unfortunately they didn't obey his mental command. His whole body felt like forged from solid lead, the impossibly heavy sensation wrapped and encased all around him.
He could not tell where his own skin ended and the ocean began, usually panic would have bloomed now, well, that is if he had the strength to hold onto it.
Rather than forming a coherent thought, it instead flickered and dissolved into the same unseen force that smothered his mind.
'Is this... hell?'
A last desperate mental command jolted through his mind, a silent scream unto the void of his nerves. And yet, his body still didn't budge to answer.
'I... don't know anymore.'
The weight in his skull grew unbearable, his eyelids slid down lower, closing over the pale glint moonlight as his consciousness tore apart piece by piece, drifting away into the unseen currents like scraps of paper carried into a black horizon.
'I'm just... so tired...'
He sank deeper and deeper as time goes on, time became meaningless as it feels like an endless eternity.
The water present was a dark endless dense velvet, almost like a thick black ink. It pressed around his whole body like an embrace of some sort, it neither felt like overly kind of warmth or an unbearable beast grasp, it only felt oddly fitting. The silvery light above dimmed, shrinking to a pinprick, until it was only a memory.
And for a time, there was nothing.
There's no fear nor any attempt of pointless struggle, only the steady descent into a depth that no human sense was built to measure.
That is... until he stopped falling.
He didn't landed on the seabed, not caught between the teeth of a sea creature, he's just suspended in place like somebody flicked the stasis switch on him.
His body hung in the abyss powerless for a few moments as though the ocean had decided to keep him in place to deliver a judgement.
Then suddenly came a tremor, it was subtle at first, almost like an imaginary feeling. The weird thing however, there's not a single current nor a tide, instead, it was something else entirely.
The next tremor happen again and it was more terrible than before, what followed afterwards the tremor was a bone chilling scene, the pressure in the surrounding shifted outrageously drastic out of nowhere.
Suddenly an unrecognizable shadow formed a terrifying gargantuan silhouette, the shadow were much darker than the surrounding darkness, and it pressed closer than ever in each every second that goes by in a flash.
One thing was clear now: before, the ocean was no different than an empty vast space. but now, something has occupied that space.
From the void ahead, two faint discs of light blinked into existence. Then four. Then more, scattered like distant sun's smoldering light through a fog no wind could disperse.
The water then pulsed faintly alongside with their eerie and ethereal glow.
As Sam's failing awareness trying to adjust with the changes happening around him, his mind scream in an utter absolute horror, its frantically yelling at him to run away.
What he sees were the scale of the gargantuan alien creature that's nigh impossible to comprehend, each of the light orb was the size of a small building, and set into a hide so dark it swallowed its own light.
The body they belonged to was not entirely visible, but Sam's overclock mind could roughly trace the monstrous creature length, it stretched across the ocean with an absurdly long living flesh to the point of some of it disappearing into the shadow, like drifting cliffs beneath the waves.
These light orbs were not the eyes of a beast or any creature Sam ever seen before, it looks eerie and wrong, out of place kind of wrong that send chill on your spine.
And the most alarming of all was it seems to be thinking and sentient, Sam couldn't describe how he knew about it but his gut feeling were practically howling at him that way.
The slow rhythm of its breath stirred the water around it, not in crashing waves, but in long dragging inhalations rhythm. The deep fissures along its hide opened and closed, exhaling cloud of pale fibrous matter that rose and dissolved like smoke in reverse.
Then as if it had enough sitting around, it moved.
The dense shadows peeled back, revealing a head so massive it took seconds for the mind to accept it as one thing. Its enormous jaws unfolded in layers, joint after joint clicking apart, revealing a spiraling tunnel of teeth and ridged cartilage.Then unexpectedly some light glowed from deep within its mouth, not blinding, but steady, like a false lighthouse in the middle of a stormy night.
Between its collosal eyes and that impossible mouth, something even more bizarre happened: on the beside of his neck, some kind of air sac expand bigger and bigger from each side, then translucent orbs bulged from within its sac.
In each one of the orbs floated a silhouette, to be exact it looks to be human shape. Their hair was drifting in slow motion, each limbs were limp. Some pressed against the inner surface with wide, soundless mouth. Whilst the others simply hung, motionless, as though they had been here frozen for centuries.
The creature's gaze fixed on Sam, this act alone made Sam's entire existence hanging by a thread and pressed down with a crushing weight.
But before it could do anything, the world above the ocean suddenly broke like a fragile glass shattered in pieces.
A low, resonant crack split open the ocean's ceiling, stretching from horizon to horizon like ice under unbearable weight. The star strewn across the night sky dissolved one after the other, as though retreating hastily from whatever thing that forced its way through into the world.
The moon swelled, darkened, and finally bled into a crimson color wound high in the sky.
Through the ruptured heavens, an eye looked down upon the world.
It was a crimson and lidless eye, its iris were like a twitching maze of molten gold and black. The sclera churned like storm clouds, streak with lighting veins that crawled across the firmament. Its gaze swept the vast ocean, probing, searching for something.
The abyssal giant turned its head and gaze upward, it did not retreat nor cower in fear. For now it did not charge at the intruder, it just watched silently.
Then tiny fractures appeared and spidered outward from the first, multiplying until the whole sky was webbed with cracks, shattering the invisible sky dome from holding back the inevitable.
Finally the deep's giant narrowed its eyes in displeasure, the sea roared in answer of the disturbance.
And somewhere between them, a discreet ripple in space tore open beside Sam. Two hands reached through, seized him, and pulled him into the dark between worlds—vanishing him from the ocean before the first blow of that ancient battle could fall.
##########################
Somewhere unfamiliar... yet strangely known.
A young man slept on a park bench, the kind that always seemed too cold in the shade and too hot in the sun.
Warm light filtered through the leaves above, brushing his face in flickers. A gentle breeze rolled past, carrying the laughter of children running through the park. Some chased each other in games of peek a boo, others walked their dogs, and a few sprawled on picnic blankets with baskets of food.
Sam stirred in place, his eyelids felt heavy, fluttering before finally parting. He raised a hand to block the sunlight stabbing into his vision.
"... What?" He mumbled, voice still thick with sleep.
Sitting straight up made his body ache all over, as though every joint had been rusted shut for years.
Blinking himself awake in bewilderment, he scanned the park, the sunlight grass, the familiar paths, the smell of weekend air. His chest lightened, he knew this place.
"This is... the park from back home..." he whispered in disbelief, he then stood slowly.
He couldn't be mistaken, he had been here countless times with his family on the weekends.
He pinched his arms hard. It stung. "I'm not dreaming right?!" He shouted, grinning happily.
Dropping back onto the bench, he buried his face in his hands in relief.
"God... I knew it was all a damn dream!" He laughed, shaking his head in disbelief. "What a ridiculous nightmare... holy fuck. Guess I won't be able to sleep the same now."
"Nightmare, huh? Interesting. Would you mind telling me about it?"
The deep and husky voice came besides him.
Sam turned his head and saw at the far end of the bench sat a man in his forties. He lounged easily, hand folded loosely in front of him as if gesturing an intrigue and amusement, one ankle resting over the other knee.
The black fedora hat he's wearing slanted forward over his brow, blocking some of the sunlight whilst his head tilted just enough to hide/obscure half of his face nose up. The brim caught the sunlight and turned it aside, letting only a thin light of brightness rest on his lips.
Those lips were faintly curved, the smile of knowing something intriguing. His skin was pale, smooth but not youthful, and the sunlight made it look almost paper thin.
A hint of dark stubble traced his jawline, too deliberate to be neglect, as if it had been place there like an artist's stroke.
The suit he wore was perfectly tailored, the kind of black that swallowed light instead of reflecting it. The jacket hung open just enough to show a crisp white shirt beneath, it's top button undone, the collar slightly bent from use. His trousers held a razor crease, and his polished shoes—black as obsidian rested neatly on the dust streaked pavement without picking a single grain of dirt.
Suspicious? Maybe. But Sam was still too giddy from thinking he'd woken up from a horrible nightmare to care.
"Ah, you know, the usual creepy mumbo jumbo," Sam replied vaguely, leaning back.
"I see. Good thing you woke up, then. Dreams like that can leave you sweating out of your mind." The man chuckled lightly.
Sam eyed him again.
'That suit in this kind of weather looked ridiculous as hell, I mean—if I wore that, I'd surely be cooking alive inside it.'
'This guy either enjoy sweating his ass inside or used to it. Still, I gotta admit he looks like a badass gentleman. But there's no way he dressed like that just to hang around the park... Is he waiting for his friends to go to an anime convention or something?'
"Gotta say, that outfit really works for you, man," Sam said at last. "If you don't mind me asking—what's the occasion? Or is this just your usual park attire? No offense, but in this heat, that's gotta feel like a sauna."
The man smiled faintly. "Haha, thank you, young man. I appreciate the compliment." He adjusted his hat slightly. "As for the suit... well, I just felt wearing it today. I came here because I have business with someone."
"Oh? Business? In the park?" Sam chuckled. "That's new. But hey, what do I know? I've never work in an office."
"Neither have I, believe it or not." The man reached into his jacket and drew out a cigarette. Lighting it with a small click, he exhaled a slow stream of smoke. "It's not work in the usual sense. It's... business born from curiosity."
Sam shrugged. "Well, good luck with that then." He stood. "I should get going now, thanks for the chat."
"Oh? Where are you going, Sam? Home?" The man casually called out Sam's name.
Sam froze mid step, his thought short-circuited for a moment.
'Wait... did he just call me Sam?'
Turning slowly, he saw the man still seated, smile as before.
"What's wrong, Sam? Why the rush?"
Sam's mind churned. He was certain he hadn't told the man his name, wait, had they met before? No. Impossible. He'd remember, or at least felt familiar.
"...Sorry, this might sound rude," Sam said carefully. "But... have we met before? I don't think I mentioned my name. How did you know it?"
The man shook his head. "No, we've never met before." He rose to his feet. "In fact... I didn't know you existed until recently."
"Uh... okay? Then how? Wait—are you like... one of my online friends or something?"
The man shake his head. "That's not it either, Wanderer of Farland."
"...The what now?" Sam blinked. "Alright, look. You seem like a good guy, but talking in riddles at times like this is not cool. It's weird and creepy as hell dude."
The man didn't respond, he just stood there smiling without a care in the world.
"Riiight... well, i'm out. May we never see each other again." Sam turned to leave hurriedly.
Then the world stopped.
The colors drained from the park the breeze vanished. Sound died.
"...What the—?"
"How rude of you to walk away before I'm finished, Samuel." The voice was suddenly right at his ear.
Sam spun around—and leap back in shock. "Ahh! Goddamn it! What the hell?!"
"You scared the shit out of me! What's your problem?!" Sam snapped.
"Don't be too eager to get home now boy, we still have plenty of times to talk" the man said, ignoring his protest.
"Anyway, let's get straight to the point," he then look at the document that appeared out of thin air in his hand. "Your name is Samuel. Twenty years old. You appeared in this world without a warning or even invitation in that matter, as if you pop into existence from nothing."
He flipped the next page casually and continue. "you're either a newly born anomaly or something else entirely, well, normally that's the case. But it says here is that you're just an ordinary young man... who strangely enough carrying a fragment of universe's Law inside his soul. Recently, you died from shock due to blood loss."
The man flipped over the last pages, he then waved the paper in a mocking manner. "And yet... even in death, you nearly caused a catastrophe in the forbidden realm just because those ancient relics fought over for your drifting soul. I mean I get it but still."
Sam stared at the man, stunned from the bizarre situation.
"So," the man asked, his voice grew serious, "familiar with any of that, young man?"
Sam's shock hardened into hostility in an instant. "You... Who the fuck are you?"