Saint Eater

I

"You do not belong here."

At first, the words reached me in fragments, distorted and distant, like something trying to speak from beneath deep water. I could not understand them clearly, nor could I tell where they were coming from, but instinctively I tried to answer. The moment I opened my mouth, panic gripped me. No sound came out. Not even a breath. It was as though my voice had been taken from me entirely.

Then the thing spoke again.

This time, I heard it more clearly, and with that clarity came a deeper fear, because I realized it was not truly a voice at all. It sounded wrong — a mixture of wet gurgling and sharp, unnatural screeching, like something inhuman attempting to imitate speech.

"You do not belong here."

The words echoed through the darkness around me, louder now, closer now, and when I failed to answer, the thing began repeating them over and over again. The screaming grew unbearable. Each repetition felt like it was digging into my skull, tearing through my thoughts until I could barely hold onto them. I could feel my mind beginning to fray beneath the sound, as though something inside me was slowly breaking apart.

The darkness around me seemed to shift and tremble, though whether it was the world shaking or my own sanity slipping away, I could no longer tell.

Still, the screaming continued.

It consumed everything — my thoughts, my senses, even my sense of self — until the world around me slowly began to fade. The sound became distant. The darkness deepened. And before I realized what was happening, I was falling once again into a vast and silent void.

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A chill crept slowly up my spine as the smell of damp earth filled my senses. For a moment, I struggled to open my eyes, my body feeling unbearably heavy, but when I finally forced them open, all I saw was red. The metallic scent that followed turned my stomach almost immediately.

Disoriented, I tried to push myself upright, only for a sharp pain to tear through my body so suddenly that it nearly knocked the breath from my lungs. I froze where I was, trembling as the agony pulsed through me, raw and merciless.

When I reached for my eyes, my fingers brushed against a rough, cracked crust that had dried over them. Panic stirred inside me as I clawed desperately at it, tearing away the brittle layer until my vision slowly began to clear. I blinked several times, trying to steady myself enough to make sense of my surroundings.

A thick fog hung heavily in the air, too dense for me to see very far, but beneath me I could feel the muddy ground soaking through my hands, and somewhere beyond the mist came the soft rustling of leaves shifting in the wind. A forest, I thought. It had to be.

Yet nothing about the place felt familiar.

I did not recognize the twisted shapes hidden beyond the fog, nor did I understand how I had come to be there in the first place. The realization sent a cold unease through me because the harder I tried to remember, the more my thoughts seemed to slip away. My memories felt distant, fading into something shapeless and unreachable. I could not remember my past. I could barely even remember myself.

Only a single name remained drifting through the emptiness of my mind.

Maximillian.

Whether it was truly my name or merely a fragment of it, I did not know. But it was the only thing I had left.

"This is not real."

I repeated the words quietly beneath my breath, over and over again, clinging to them as though they alone could keep my mind from breaking apart. The sound of my own voice, faint and trembling, became the only thing grounding me in that place. After some time, the panic inside me dulled enough for me to breathe properly again, and with what little strength I had left, I forced myself onto my feet.

Pain immediately surged through my body, sharp and relentless, but the fear coursing through me was stronger. It drowned the ache beneath a rush of adrenaline and carried me forward into the thickening fog.

The deeper I walked, the stranger the forest became.

The trees around me were split and twisted, their bark cracked open like rotting flesh, while the ground beneath them was littered with damp leaves and splintered wood. At first, I thought the uneven terrain was nothing more than loose earth and tangled roots, but as I moved closer, I realized the forest floor itself seemed warped. Large roots rose from the ground in swollen mounds, spreading in every direction like veins beneath diseased skin.

And their color was wrong.

They were neither brown nor black, like ordinary roots should have been. Instead, they carried the dark reddish shade of rust — as though the forest itself had been left to decay from within.

Even with my fractured memory, I understood one thing about roots.

They all lead somewhere.

To a center.

The thought alone made my stomach tighten.

Where that center might be, however, I did not dare to imagine.