No one knows.Where that land lies,Or when it first came to be.

  Sailors speak only of endless fog beyond the western sea,And the maps of those who vanished in the wastesAre always left blank.

  It has no name.But some whisper it anyway—Deadland.

  There, the wind grows like moss.Clouds crawl low across the ground,Spilling thick rust-colored dust.The sky fails to shed proper light.

  The sun burns red, then darkens like cooling ash,And the stars refuse to watch.

  What passes for flora is too slick to be plant,Too silent to be flesh.Some creep on bare roots,Some breathe through their leaves,And others strangle themselves in loops of thorned vine.

  Beasts do not move by day.They rise from the deep at night,Snarling in packs,Foam trailing from fractured jaws.

  Their eyes have half-melted;Their ears are gone;Bone fragments from other creaturesAre fused into their skin like crude armor.

  Some wear their own skulls in grotesque grins.Others tear themselves open,Dragging viscera through the dust as they run.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  In this land, predation spreads not by instinct,But like a sickness.

  There is no intellect.No speech, no fire, no form.Only life that refuses to rot,Sprawled across a broken world.

  And at the heart of it all—

  A smooth, oval-shaped metal capsule.

  Buried in sand, bone, debris, and mire,It had not stirred once in all that time.

  But on one particular morning,When even the air seemed to hold its breath,The capsule hissed—Quietly, slowly—And began to open.

  Inside lay a man.

  But there was something in his appearance—Something inexplicably wrong.

  Not monstrous.Not deformed.Simply… out of place.As if he had worn a human formFar too long in some other world.

  His skin was pale and lifeless.Muscles beneath it shifted,As if awakening from ancient strain.

  His eyelids fluttered.His chest swelled—A sudden, sharp inhalation.

  From his brow to his shoulders,Across his chest, his limbs—Marks began to glow.

  Lines, like living light,Coursed under his skin,Rippling upward in pulses of brightness.

  He rose.Wordless.Soundless.

  The marks ignited.A radiance wrapped around him—And then exploded skyward,Splitting the morning gloom of Deadland in two.

  And then—

  He vanished.

  No footprints.No closing capsule.Only emptiness.

  No one saw it.No one knew.

  But from that day forward,The world—very quietly—Began to forget something.

  As if something long overdueHad begun to walk again.