His fingers clutched to fine dust. A panicked spasming as if a hundred bare knuckles had struck his spine. He pressed his fingers into the dust until they met rocks which cut like razors. An abyssal black engulfed him, but not as anything known to him. A foul but intoxicating wind howled through the deep. Like the last breath from the agape mouth of a long lost love, wanting to be kept. Cato rose on bloodied fingertips and pressed into the current. His toes sandwiched cold ash and bits of something else.

The knight trudged on into the dark and soon reasoned that he was in a crater or depression of some sort. At the peak of an incline his garments began to glow with a dull light and his spirits were elevated from terror to courage. Endless hordes of stumbling naked humanity were now seen. They were both repelled and agitated by the emanating light, swatting at the fringe of the aura with frenzied fists. Here was a great host of shades, now naught but a faint glimmer of what once was. Endless mobs swarming the glitter in that pitch and then being repulsed by it. Cato recognized some from life, despite the apparent ravages of disease and murder. Some from his homeland. Great princes, virtuous matrons, criminals, all shifting lethargic in this blind sea of ash and rock. Cato reasoned then, that he would follow the wind.