My mind was floating. Not like a feather. Not like a light thought. But like a corpse held beneath the surface, trapped under a sheet of dirty, opaque glass, impossible to break — I could see the world, yes, but it was on the other side. Distant. Unreachable. A misty veil enveloped me, not soft, not comforting, but sticky, suffocating, oozing around me like a second skin made of silence and oblivion. Reality was nothing more than background noise, a dull vibration behind my skull, a drum beating too slowly for alarm, too quickly for forgetting.
And then my eyes settled.
And I saw.
Hell.
