You continue to fly through open skies, unable to rest anywhere for fear that the scroll's power will suddenly wear off. Hours pass by, and still you see no other inhabitable islands or places where you can land. You encounter a few passing airships – active ones, thankfully – but they are only merchant ships and pay you no heed. You dare not stop.

There are numerous lightning storms in this part of the sky, and you are quick to stay away from them. Many an airship has fallen victim to the fierce and unpredictable weather conditions escalated by the deadly situation on the surface far below. As it is, a single strike would probably send you plummeting out of the sky. You need to stay airborne at all costs. You saw what the surface is like now: nobody can survive there anymore, and the people who remain there now have no future.

Nightfall comes at last, and you are exhausted from flying for so long in one go. It is too dangerous to keep going in the dark, anyway, so you absolutely need to rest soon. You decide that the next inhabitable island you see will just have to go. You should change your angle of ascent, too, and see what you can find. Up or down? There has to be something here. So many islands have fallen now, so many lives have been destroyed…

You choose to descend

You allow yourself to fall downwards, reasoning that you are now too high up to see any inhabitable islands. Your eyelids are heavy and your head drops onto your chest from your exhaustion, but you maintain some element of concentration and continue to descend at a normal pace. It might be your imagination, but the air pressure seems particularly high around here. Dark clouds have built up around you, filled with rain which is pelting down upon the surface…

Thunder rumbles in your ears, and your eyes flick open when you realise that you have stumbled into the midst of a storm! Shaking your head, you start to fly away from the area to avoid the bad weather, but the wind buffets you back and forth and blows a torrent of rain right into your eyes. You cry out, shielding your face protectively, and start to fall through the clouds.

You're falling a bit too fast for your liking now, but at least you're clear of the storm. From here, you can see that you're actually not too far from the surface where chaos rages. That won't do at all. You decide to force yourself to slow down, trying to fly back up to where the sky islands are.

Nothing happens. You continue to plummet, faster and faster towards the earth. Your flying ability is no longer in effect!

You don't entirely understand what just happened – perhaps the storm did something to your abilities, or maybe the effect wore off on its own – but what's important is that you're now in constant freefall. Quickly, you try to suppress the sheer panic rising up in your chest and struggle to slow yourself down. Something gives, and you manage to lower your speed of descent – just barely. You might survive, but it's touch and go at this rate…

You're so close to the surface of the planet now. You can see people down there. Buildings burned to the ground, screams and crying, the lava flow from an erupted volcano, mass flooding from the rising sea level…It's not a place where you could ever survive. You need to stay in the skies. You need to stay up here…

The noise from below gets louder and louder until it becomes almost unbearable. You can no longer stay in the sky, and you're going so fast that you can't focus on anything around you anymore. Praying very slightly, you brace yourself for a crash landing.

You proceed

The impact is tremendous as you make contact with the surface. As luck would have it, the trajectory of your descent takes you away from the mainland and sends you into the ocean itself, your momentum forcing you deep underwater. Waves of pain wash over you, and for several long seconds you cannot move at all. You feel as if you have broken several bones in your body.

Fighting to conserve oxygen, one truth reveals itself to you: you are alive. You can hardly acknowledge the fact, but you are alive. The wind has been driven out of you, and you are already starting to swallow sea water; swiftly, you struggle to swim up to the surface for air. Agony rushes through your body at every little movement, prompting a scream deep within your throat that nobody will hear. You grit your teeth and keep swimming upwards, your lungs burning. You need to survive.

You break the surface at last, hacking and coughing as you take in fresh oxygen into your lungs. Air. Fresh air. From here, you can see the coastline isn't too far away. You should be able to make it as long as you tread water and take it nice and slowly. You've survived this far and you're determined to keep going, despite the mind-numbing pain tearing through your limbs.

It takes several minutes for you to get to dry land, but you can already tell that something is very wrong. You do not feel well. Perhaps it's the effect of swallowing so much sea water, but you are unsteady on your feet and you can feel a surge of unnaturally dark emotions rising up inside you. You do not feel like yourself. Grimly, you force yourself to suppress such thoughts and concentrate on reaching safety.

The coastline is littered with corpses.

You stagger forward and see people shambling across the beach. They do not look like people. Humans, yes. You haven't seen a human being for a long time, but you know what a rational person look like and these are different. Their clothes are ripped and torn, their skin covered by a mesh of angry black spots which suggest the telltale designs of disease, and there is a frenzy in their eyes which frightens you beyond anything you have witnessed so far.

The people have not reacted to your presence. They are screaming at the top of their voices, wielding vicious blades in their hands, and killing each other on sight. Countless bodies cover the blackened ground as far as the eye can see, like the gruesome remnants of some kind of battlefield. It's as if a war is going on, but you can see here that the war is purely internal.

You see two men beating another to death with a hatchet. A crowd of children have surrounded a woman and are stabbing her repeatedly, all with the same murderous frenzy in their eyes. Three girls are gouging out the eyes of a bystander. A strange haze has settled upon this place, this peaceful village that saw no such violence before. Everything has gone out of control. You knew the situation on the surface was dire, but you had no idea that it had escalated to such extremes...

Something snaps inside of you. Something wild. It's the same feeling you had just minutes ago, not long after you accidentally swallowed some of that seawater. You turn to look at the ocean curiously for a moment, and can't help but notice that the water is...a different colour than it's supposed to be. It's certainly not blue...

You drop to the ground, retching, as a new pain takes hold of you. You can't see anymore. Blood fills your eyes and you buckle forward, clutching at the ground in a similar frenzy to the people around you. You hear yourself scream aloud as every thought going through your mind is crushed into nothing, nothing but a maniacal desire for bloodlust. The world feels like it's revolving around you all of a sudden, revolving in a sea of haunted faces…

There is no need to think anymore. You snarl and shriek like a wild beast, pouncing forward onto the nearest human being to pluck out their eyes and beat their face into a bloody mess. The man is holding a knife of some kind, and you immediately wrest it from his cold dead hands to take for yourself.

Gleefully, you charge at your next choice of prey. Two girls covered with blood from head to toe shamble towards you, half-blind. One of them is practically dead already, but she hasn't realised it yet. Both of her arms have been savagely torn off, and her head has been bashed in from one side. You slash at her with the knife and blood spurts out of her throat in a red fountain. The other girl lunges at your neck. You stab her in the stomach. She doesn't react.

A man is clubbing you from behind, but you don't feel a thing. More people are here now. More people, more violence, more chaos. You twist out of your assailant's grip and kill another person, doesn't matter who it is. You're having fun, and every part of you loves it.

This is your place now. You're part of the neverending chaos on the surface, just another victim of the shambling horde drifting across the planet in your insatiable desire to kill every living creature you see. Nothing else matters, because this is your world.