The darkness hung heavy around Rakesh, cloaking him like a drape of death.

He reached out, attempting to feel something, anything, that would guide his next step.

Cast out in The Nothingness, he thought in disbelief. Beaten almost to death. Jiro ran away. This can't be happening.

The inability to reconcile all that had happened made his head spin. He murmured Jiro’s name over and over. His fingers raked through the thick air, lost in it as he groped around, blind even though he blinked.

"Come back. Jiro. Jiro."

But Jiro didn't come back.

The more he moved across the land, the more Rakesh emerged from a state of disbelief and an inability to think rationally.

"Must survive," he murmured. "For her. For her."

Rakesh maneuvered past yet another dead tree stump and swallowed, schooling his heart into a calmer staccato. The rush of his blood inside his veins eased, no longer obscuring his hearing. Pain, sweet and lingering, tore through his body with every movement, reminding him of his inevitable – possibly pending – mortality.

He'd survived so far. He'd just have to keep going.

He thirsted, dreaming of sweet cool water, while alternately wondering what creature of the darkness would find him and destroy him.

No doubt the scent of his blood was drawing the predators close and closer.

Did it matter whether he stumbled himself into an exhaustive death or something more sinister claimed him instead?

Wait…what was that? There was …a flicker in the darkness!

Ahead of him, a glowing mass illuminated the ebony air for a moment, pulsing with a bright light. He turning away from the mass with a grimace; he had been in the utter darkness so long, it bothered his eyes!

When he looked back to the same spot, a ring of light remained in his vision, fading slowly over the long seconds.

Suddenly, the strange light returned, as oddly shaped and incorporeal as before. A cry of fear lodged in his throat. What strange madness could this be? There should be no light in this land of darkness!

He turned to flee, but his legs gave out beneath him. He frantically crawled along the ground, grabbing fistfuls of rocks and dirt as he pulled himself away from the strange being that still burned bright in his eyes.

When he checked back over his shoulder, the strange aura had disappeared. He pressed on anyway.

The top of his head collided with something. Hard.

Blind in the complete darkness, he groped for it. And found it.

Something rough. Covered with a slimy sort of plant. No, a sort of moss.

A tree. He'd found a living tree, if the smooth bark and strange, silky leaves meant anything.

Beneath his knees were knobby protuberances.

Roots, no doubt.

It didn't make any sense, and for a moment, he thought he'd gone mad.

No tree could grow where sunlight didn't pierce. The lands of The Nothingness couldn't hold life – not life that wasn't somehow full of terrifying evil.

But Rakesh didn't have the luxury of time to analyze. He rushed around the tree, feeling frantically with his fingertips – grimacing against the pain in his lopped-off appendage – until he found a wide groove in the bark, a dip in the wide, massive roots at his feet. With a relieved cry, he curled himself up within the roots, his body weak with exhaustion.

Once there, he waited. The bright, glowing thing didn't reappear.

Slowly, his heart calmed. Still, he startled at every sound, jerking out of his half-sleeping murky thoughts. Every crack in the stillness convinced him of some new terror – but nothing happened.

A strange cycle of half-dreams commenced until his awareness of himself and the world blurred into something fuzzy. He slid into sleep, unable to fight off the waves of exhaustion.

A crack in the distance startled him back to reality. He jerked, then cried out. The dried scars on his back tore as he moved. Tears filled his eyes at the sting that resulted, but he swallowed them back.

The cracking sound didn't repeat itself.

"Not now," he murmured, just to hear something. The sound of his own voice gave him comfort.

There was no way to know how long he'd dozed. Perhaps hours, if the strange, groggy feeling of his mind meant anything. Despite his rampant fear, something burned a little brighter inside of him. Though small, his respite had restored to him a modicum of strength.

But the very idea of living in this hellish place all by himself sent terror streaking through him all over again. He had to get out of here – to find some form of life outside of himself. The idea that this could be the rest of his existence, this scrabbling from one tree to another, catching sleep where he could, praying for water, slowly succumbing to death in this hellish darkness, nearly overwhelmed him.

"Jiro," he murmured. "I must find Jiro."

Taking courage, he straightened, one muscle at a time. Shuffling forward, he let his toes feel out the next step. He swung his hands around him as he moved forward, for protection.

Vague, grayish shapes occasionally appeared in his vision. The darkness, while intense, wasn't complete in all areas now. The air thinned a little as he moved, giving him pockets free from the damp, heavy texture and opening his vision to the silhouette of dead trees, the eerie living ones with limp leaves like hanging strands of silk, and the occasional sharp bush with spikes.

"Jiro?" he called under his breath at first. "Where are you? Jiro?"

When nothing came after him with the intent to kill, Rakesh grew emboldened.

Perhaps nothing at all existed in The Nothingness. No toothy creatures ready for their next meal. No evil spirits seeking the body of another.

"Jiro?" he said. "Jiro, I am here. Find me. Call out. Bring me to you. We need not wander in The Nothingness alone. JIRO?"

He carefully scrambled over fallen trees. High boulders. Mossy embankments that may have once held water.

Jiro didn't respond. Rakesh's cries grew more frantic. His strength waned.

"Jiro!"

Would he be sentenced to a lonely, terrifying death? After all he'd endured, would this be his ending?

The temptation to collapse, to give into the clear truth – no one could live out here, much less in his condition – nearly overwhelmed him.

The spark of him that refused to give up pressed him forward.

He couldn't give in now. If he had to die, he'd die trying. Fighting. Struggling against whatever force would keep him from . . . from her.

With dogged determination, he gritted his teeth and stumbled on. A few steps later, he dropped to his knees after stumbling over a rock. Rakesh drew in a long breath and glanced back.

It was no rock.

A scream ripped out of his throat.

Jiro lay dead on the ground, his skin a ghostly, terrifying pallor. Crimson dots flecked his forearm, as if someone had punctured it. Drips of blood littered the ground around him, dotting his clothes and neck.

Rakesh scrambled to his feet, still screaming. The silence seemed to absorb the sound, drawing it into itself, as if The Nothingness took power from the agony of others.

Rakesh rushed back, concealing himself behind a boulder so Jiro’s corpse would be out of sight for the moment.

Rakesh panted heavily as he tried to calm himself.

But…what kind of creature would do such a thing? It seemed as if . . . as if all of Jiro’s blood had been…removed from his body.

Had he been in any pain? If so, why hadn't he made a sound?

Perhaps that was the way of the lands of The Nothingness. Forbidden creatures attacking in the never-ending night. The end of life so terrifying and strange it could hardly be imagined.

Rakesh wrapped his arms around his knees and tried to force the terrible thought of what could have destroyed Jiro out of his mind.

He couldn't let his mind imagine. He couldn't dream up impossible ideas and wander down forbidden paths.

"Concentrate, Rakesh," he murmured into his knees, pressing his forehead to their bony edges. "Think about what to do next. Not Jiro. Not the pain. Not the strange, eerie darkness. What to do next?"

Through the silence came a sound off in the distance.

Chanting.

No. It couldn't be.

He straightened into the strange fog that creeping into the area and congregating around Jiro's discarded body as if it meant to absorb him.

Rakesh drew in a sharp breath. The scent of the fog – a musty, bitter tang – filled his lungs.

Still, the chanting continued.

Rakesh staggered to his feet again and moved toward the sound, scrabbling through trees, dirt, bushes, and anything that slipped into his path. Help, he screamed in his mind because he didn't have the power to do it with his voice. Please help me!

The chanting strengthened, growing louder and louder.

Nearly weeping with relief, Rakesh stumbled through a crowded copse of dead trees to find an ambient, strange glow. Thick, gray rock walls hid some source of light inside a cave.

There was a cave with . . . something inside.

The fog had seemed to follow Rakesh, trailing him like a gossamer drape. He stared dumbly at the rock walls for several minutes. Should he go inside?

The chanting burrowed into his mind with terrifying force.

Chanting meant people. People likely meant aid – a chance to survive the dark lands of The Nothingness.

Or, it meant something far more nefarious.

What if the creature – or people – who killed Jiro waited inside?

A fresh course of pain surged through his back. Though his finger had been removed, it ached as if he still possessed the appendage. His thirst was so intense it was nearly overpowering.

Live or die, he had to go inside.

The light seemed to beckon to him as he stumbled inside, passing through the exterior cave wall.

Ancient runic paintings filled an inside wall. A short passageway broke into an open, sprawling hall that soared into the depths of darkness above. He sucked in a sharp breath, letting his fingers trail along the strange markings on the wall.

What was this place?

Rakesh shuffled along beside the wall, searching for signs of dripping water, a lake, an underground river. Some source to quench his insatiable thirst.

Always, in the background, rang the undeniable chants of ringing voices, although he didn't recognize the specific words. The chanting continued with disturbing clarity now that he'd moved along. It seemed to call to him even faster now, burrowing deep into his bones.

The strange hypnosis blurred with the deep darkness his body longed for.

Sleep. Rest. No more running, exhausted, from the strange darkness.

Light illuminated one particular corner. Rakesh crept up to it and slowly peered around the edge of the wall. He blinked, forcing his eyes to acclimate to the light coming from within, then recoiled with a buried shriek of terror. Panting, he closed his eyes, then forced them open again and looked back around the corner, confirming everything he'd wished he hadn't seen.

Four men in black robes formed a circle. Around them danced blood-shades in the air, swirling around them with a deep curtain of vapor. The men reached out, pulling the vapor into their bodies. The chants intensified.

Rakesh tried to look away, but his body wouldn't response. He remained stuck, staring as a new darkness, illuminating in a strange way, slid through the four robed men. It infused their faces. Sped through their eyes. For a moment, evil seemed to permeate the air.

Rakesh's fingertips dug into the stone.

Surely he was imagining this. He couldn't be seeing such things – it wasn't possible.

Yet…something dark resided here. Something ethereal and terrifying and horrid.

Perhaps he was hallucinating. His mind was whirling with impossible visions because death was about to take him.

Something cold and rigid pressed into Rakesh's shoulder from behind. All the whirring thoughts in his head cleared as if someone had pulled a drain stopper out. He lost control of his muscles, and fell into the beckoning darkness.