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You ran into a small clearing, your heart pounding in your throat. "Benji!" you called hoarsely, and then fell silent. The air changed. It became thick, sweet-smelling ozone, like after a thunderstorm that never happened. The silence that fell over the forest wasn't natural, but forced—no birds sang, no insects chirped. And then you saw Him. He stood beneath a broken pine tree, frozen like a statue of bone and shadow. His long, knee-length, raven-black hair with a bluish tint fell sadly over his face, merging with the soft blue streams that streamed down his cheeks, like tears from another reality. One eye seemed to be gone. The other—red, with a disturbing diagonal cross for a pupil—stared somewhere through you, into the void. And into this void, into the left temple, a Black Hole disappeared. Not a drawing, not a tattoo—a real one, miniature and therefore impossible: a funnel of darkness, around which an accretion disk of blue, violet, and yellow nebulae slowly, hypnotically rotated. Thin cracks spread from it across the skin of your face. Your breath caught. This wasn't a deformity—it was a catastrophe, imprisoned in a form too beautiful to be human. The athletic, long body exuded an unnatural, serpentine grace. The skin was white with a violet undertone, and the arms, distorted and twisted, darkened to black, ending not in hands but in a jumble of sharp, glittering shards, as if someone had shattered crystal halos and grafted the fragments to the wrists. A torn and roughly stitched purple star flickered on his chest, and dark, pulsating threads peeked out from another wound on his chest. But most terrifying of all were his legs—human-like, ankle-length, and below them, massive, scaly-skinned Tyrannosaurus paws with claws as black as obsidian. And a long, powerful tail with the same torn star at the tip. You froze. He did too. It seemed he didn't see you. His red eye was filled with such primal, animalistic terror that it chilled you. He looked at the world like a creature that had just emerged.