He snapped awake.
Ochre leaves strewn across the soil rustled as he pulled his body up. Birch trees stood tall and thin around him. The air was filled with the dawning hum of violent winds, quickly scathing across the radiant afternoon light.
It was serene, it was quiet. With only the crunch of tumbling leaves filling the silence. He looked to the rigid and rocky ledges around his clearing, dust dancing across the stone with only beams of light curving and bending against the trees to reveal them.
And the radiant light beamed to him. His flayed tendons glistened gold, shining their sanguine warmth over his emaciated body. He was spilling blood and stomach across the dirt, his fingers were mangled and contorted, and all serenity ceased as he found himself screaming until his lungs gave out.
He ran and ran and ran. His lashed limbs snapped and twisted as he bolted barefoot through the forest. He felt splinters dig deep into his toes, his mind quickly sinking into delusion as a question swarmed him like a locust infestation.
It began to seep even deeper as he was pushed into a migraine, the question eroding every cell in his body as he still ran and ran. His vision became a grainy blur before he tripped and fell across a fallen trunk. Jagged wood shards stabbed him in the elbow as he winced, before getting up to run and run and run.
He started searching, for something, anything that would give him an answer. Yet even a slight glimmer of an answer quickly escaped him. The forest could give no answer, it was nothing but an expanse of trees and dirt, a labyrinth of delusion which a clue would be near impossible to uncover.
Who was he?
Where was he?
What was this?
But the more he tried to dig into the deepest trenches of his memory, the more the gaping ravine of cluelessness widened until it was a yawning void. He couldn't do anything but run, run until he found something that could give him an answer. He tried desperately to find any memory, any idea of his past life, yet they were gone like the wind.
The afternoon sun burned and blazed into deep hues of orange and red, quickly setting to the distance. He felt like his head was splitting apart, cracking and breaking from all the delusion pouring in and out of him. And his head wasn't the only one, for his body felt the same, too.
He could feel his limbs slowly stave off the edge and teeter to the brink of exhaustion, but somehow they still managed to fight on. He could barely breathe, his throat bleeding and his lungs burning. Yet his exasperation couldn't rival his delusion, and he kept running and running, no matter how many times he fell.
He finally stopped once he tripped and struck his head against a rock. Though, there was nothing to trip on, not a tree branch, not a protruding pebble. He picked himself up only to be struck down again. Infuriated, he planted down his hand over the soil.
The ground was quaking.