Home at Last – Chapter 1
Awareness returned gradually. It started with the pains in his skull, a sense of sharp rocks or broken shells gouging into it. Not only his skull, he began to realize, but his shoulders, buttocks, and ankles—wherever a supine body would touch the ground. Consciousness followed slowly on awareness, with some semi-conscious instinct bidding him neither to move nor to open his eyes. An unfocused impression of recent—very recent—events engulfed him: violence, mad confusion, searing pain, horrible revelations, and worst of all, defeat. His mind went to work on sorting out and focusing the scenes, then recoiled in frightened panic as they became clearer.
No. Not that. Anything but that. His mind pushed back, trying to blur the memory once again. At all costs he would bar from his consciousness the wrenching reality of it. That agile mind, which had never let him down, now cast about frantically for the convincing denial that it could surely conjure up. A dream?—no. An illusion?—no. Yet even as he hit upon the best explanation—that his habit had always been to consider the worst that could happen—he knew it wouldn't work. Nausea swept over him. He would remain motionless, eyes closed, distracting his thoughts.
But that didn't work either. He felt bound and suffocated, and in any case could not ignore the pervasive odor, not so much foul as musty, stuffy, reminiscent of old, disintegrating books. Sooner or later he would have to move, would have to open his eyes, and then his senses would confirm the ghastly truth that his mind could neither bear nor avoid.
Reluctantly he opened his eyes, and for one merciful instant found reassurance in what anyone else would hardly find a reassuring vision. His heart surged in grateful relief to see the grotesque face of Ryuk, the sight he had awakened to nearly every day for six years. Everything was OK after all.
"Well, Sleeping Beauty," chuckled the shinigami, "'bout time you woke up! Are you planning on lounging there all day?"
Now he hesitantly shifted his shoulders. The broken shells beneath him inflicted fresh pain as he lifted his arms. But these weren't his arms—the reptilian limbs that met his eyes were sheathed in dull, brick-red scales and ended in gnarled, contorted claws. He made a fist, and saw, as if an apparition, the claw contracting into a ball. He touched the claw to his left biceps, which felt the contact as his own skin. Letting out a strangled shriek, and heeding the pain no longer, he sat bolt upright. A single glance at his legs disclosed the same hideous transformation. Ryuk watched with that look of placid amusement that had so often infuriated him.
The surface of the ground, he discovered to his horror, was littered, not with rocks or shells, but with cracked and splintered bones. Panting hard, and gazing around in bottomless dismay, he beheld overhead a featureless gray sky, from which diffused a meager half-light. The landscape curved slightly upward from where he sat, revealing at varying distances misshapen crags, gloomy mesas, grim piles of white and gray stone. Close by, a dark cliff rose in broad steps to a jagged, broken peak fifty feet above. A few scraggly bushes and twisted trees, themselves mostly gray and brown, poked up forlornly from the otherwise barren ground.
Pleading, desperate, almost sobbing, he turned back to Ryuk.
"Ryuk, where…?"
The death god threw his head back, wagged it from side to side, and cackled insanely. Then he stopped, looked straight at him, and drew in far too close. "Welcome to your new, eternal home, Light Yagami!"