Darkness came first, the same darkness, cold and bottomless, but Executos knew this darkness, had known it a hundred nights now, and he knew what followed it.
'no... no, no, not this, please not this again...'
Beneath him he felt wood, splintered and old, the underside of a carriage pressing close against his back, close enough that he couldn't have risen even if his legs had remembered how to move. He was there again. He was always there again.
The sky shimmered above him, fiery red dots blooming out of nothing, dancing in that same profane pattern he had memorized without ever wanting to, forming the outline of something that had no business existing yet existed all the same, hazy and dreamlike and somehow more real than the wood at his back or the dirt beneath his fingers.
He held his breath.
'..its the... same... it's always the same...'
He couldn't tremble, couldn't move, could barely breathe, terror had turned him rigid as a corpse, more rigid than a corpse, and somewhere close he heard Sergio, Roman Lucian and Falsus go still and pale, their profane laughter dying in their throats as the dreadful silence pressed down on the whole camp.
Then Roman Lucian screamed.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"
Executos flinched at the sound though he had heard it before, though some small distant part of him lying in a bed far from this place screamed along with it, a silent scream with no throat behind it. He watched, he always watched, as Roman Lucian tore off half naked into the trees and the magma began to fall.
'HOT. HOT. HOT. HOT. HOT. HOT. HOT.'
The word wasn't his to think and yet he thought it anyway, over and over, borrowed terror pressed into him by the vision until he could almost feel the melting armor against skin that wasn't his, the scimitar's slow terrible bisecting travel, the ground turning to molten light beneath it.
Such was the end of Roman Lucian. It was always the end of Roman Lucian.
He wanted to look away. He never could.
The towering shape approached Sergio and Falsus with slow, languid steps, its two red hot scimitars burning solemnly, and Executos felt his own chest constrict with their fear, an echo of a fear he had felt firsthand once and would apparently go on feeling forever.
The scimitars came down.
FWOSHHHH!!!
Torrid flames roared out from the bisected air, from the bisected men, consuming them alive, flesh and all, their screams braiding into one long unbearable note that Executos felt in the small bones behind his blind and sightless eyes.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"
'please... please wake up... please let this be the part where I wake up...'
It never was the part where he woke up. Not yet. Not for a long while yet.
The heat came next, the glowing pools of magma forming and spreading, and Executos felt it against skin he no longer possessed, remembered it against skin he once had, his own eyes widening beneath the carriage all those true nights ago as fluid he could not name leaked from him in his terror, as cold sweat soaked through him, as his hands quivered against the dirt.
'....no....'
He hadn't wanted to die then. He didn't want to relive it now.
The creature's fiery outline turned its head. It always turned its head, right at this point, right when the fear crested and there was nowhere left for it to go, and Executos knew what came next the way a body knows falling before the mind explains it.
The sky screamed.
SCREEEEEECH!!!
"AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"
It didn't matter this time that he already knew. Knowing changed nothing. His blood began to leave him the same as it always did in this vision, hot and endless, turning to feather, white feather slick red, and this time, this time, he felt it wasn't only memory, this time he felt it happening to him again, right now, in whatever bed his body actually lay in far from this place.
'no, no, not my eyes, not again, please not my eyes--'
He remembered what came next before it came, the strange symbols etching themselves into vision he no longer had, the burning that had no name because there was no name ugly enough for it, the sound tearing out of his own throat that wasn't language, that was never language, only pain given a shape it could escape through.
"IT BURRRRNNNSSSS!!! AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!"
He didn't know anymore, hidden beneath that long-gone carriage or trembling in whatever bed held him now, which voice was truly his and which one the memory had lent him. It didn't matter. The burning was the same burning. The dark was the same dark, closing in from the edges of a world that had, until that very night, still held light.
'I don't want to see this. I don't want to see this. I don't want to see this again--'
But he did see it, one final time, the way he always did, the exact single moment the vision returned him to without fail. His own small hidden shape beneath the carriage. His own two eyes, wide and unblinking, catching the last true image they would ever catch. The world going molten and red and then, all at once, going nowhere at all.
Darkness. Not the dream's darkness. His darkness. The only darkness he had left.
Executos woke choking, his sightless eyes flown open to a black that offered no dots, no shapes, no shrieking heavens, only the small mundane horror of his own trembling body, drenched in sweat gone cold, his throat raw from a scream he didn't remember starting.
Somewhere close a door opened. Slow, familiar footsteps approached across a wooden floor.
"...boy."
The old woman's voice, low and aged, found him in the dark the way it always did, and only then did his shaking hands finally still enough to answer,
"...I saw it again..."
A long silence. Then, quietly, almost gently,
"I know."