One

"Fuck..." A low hiss came from Nea as Claudette hastily applied a styptic agent to a long jagged gash that ran up her leg, caused by the vicious attacks of a rusty bonesaw. Despite the injury, it was a miracle that Nea was able to escape from the nurse at all. At her best, she was a merciless killer, and her worst a vengeful goddess. Two of their friends, David and Min, had met their ends hanging on those rusty hooks.

"Hey, Nea." Near looked up. "Listen- I'm sure we can get out. I've counted four generator pops, and we only need to do one more." At Claudette's words, Nea shook her head. "I don't think so. We know that bitch is probably defending the last three with her life." She gestured to the poorly dressed hole in Claudette's left shoulder. "And you're on your last hook." There was somber silence for a while, both girls struggling to think of something.

An idea clicked in Nea's mind, and she spoke up. "I think- there is a way for one of us to get out. For you to get out." Claudette knew exactly what she was talking about. "No. You are not sacrificing yourself for me."

"Dett, it's either one of us gets out, or none of us get out!"

"I'm sure we can find a key, or distract her or something- anything's better than that!"

"It takes nearly seventy seconds to complete a repair, are we really going to be distracting a teleporting ghost bitch for that time, alone before she figures out what's up?"

"We'll figure out something!" Claudette was getting desperate now.

"I've made up my mind Detty." She gave a weak smile, backing away from Claudette. "See you back at the campfire." Nea turned her back on Claudette and ran into the fog, searching for the telltale heartbeat.

And Claudette was left alone.

"Alright. Find the hatch." She muttered to herself as she packed up various medical supplies that were strewn out over the wiry grass. "Don't let her sacrifice be for nothing." Claudette got up from behind the pile of compressed scrap metal they had taken refuge behind and began walking. The oppressive silence that filled Autohaven wreckers was suffocating, and even more so without a fellow survivor to accompany her. Dwight's optimism, Meg's energy, Jake's calmness, Nea's fearlessness, Ace's lightheartedness, Laurie's confidence, Bill's sturdiness, Min's competitive attitude, David's will, Quentin's support, hell anyone would be preferred to the unbroken silence.

Eventually, she found the hatch. A large, unmovable lock made out of metal and wood, that only opened for the last person alive. Claudette had escaped though it multiple times, most of them with the killer breathing down her neck, and her friends dead. Never before had it been the result of a purposeful sacrifice.

Claudette winced as she felt Nea being injured as she messed up a vault. Her eyes instinctively looked up, and started searching for Nea's yellow aura. Nea was running, taking sharp corners and doubling back on herself, trying to throw the Nurse off and buy Claudette time. She threw a pallet down with as much force as possible, clutching her side before throwing up a middle finger. One blink rang out, and another sealed her fate.

Nea fell to the ground, her yellow aura transitioning into a angry red. Their auras were linked, and Claudette, bleary eyed, gave a thumbs up in her direction. Nea gave a weak thumbs up back, before she was hoisted on the killer's shoulder and her aura vanished. Seconds later, Nea's aura appeared in her vision, and a pained scream rang out as she was carelessly strung up on the hook for the second time this trial. Though she could struggle for extra time, Nea let herself get impaled, before being dragged up into the sky by the entity. Sacrifice. Her aura vanished for the last time, and Claudette let her tears fall.

Claudette sat, rested against a pile of metal, and waited for the lock to open.

But the nurse was smarter than that. She had seen Nea, bloody and bruised, give a thumbs up to a wall of crushed cars, a seemingly innocent but meaningful gesture. She had seen how the brat let herself die instead of putting up a fight. She had seen how Nea attempted to aggravate her as much as possible, kiting, stunning and insulting her. She had seen it all, and she knew exactly what the last survivor was about to do.

Charging a blink, she threw herself out towards that direction, tanking the short fatigue in order to reach the black lock before it opened. She saw the last survivor, falling into the dark pit, and the nurse's fingers clawed at the survivor's bloody hair, grabbing on to the thick locks. The nastiness unbalanced her, and the Nurse, in all of her killing glory, was dragged face first into the hatch with Claudette.

Claudette was in a wild panic, twisting and flailing. The hatch was opening, everything was going so well. She would be out, and back at the campfire with everyone, and Nea's sacrifice would be worth something. Then her heart started beating, unnaturally so. Claudette's blood was rushing in her ears and the pounding got louder, heavier, faster, and it made her breathing get unsteady and ragged. One ungodly screech, another. She was heading this way. Her chest hurt. How did she know? God, the hatch was so close to swinging open- Another screech. She was right there, bonesaw raised above her head.

Claudette dived for the blackness, her vision blurry. But then, Claudette felt the cool darkness, and her heartbeat calmed. Claudette had escaped. She could nearly cry. Cry for Nea, cry for David, cry for Min. Cry for the fact she escaped, cry for the fact that some did not. Cry for the fact that whether they liked it or not, she and others would be put in the exact same trials all over again. And again. And again.

Claudette, Dwight, Meg and Jake were the first four. The 'original' survivors, among all the others. They survived for months, those same four in every trial. It was maddening, the pain and torture they were put through, and despite nobody wishing someone else this fate, those four were all relieved when more came to take their place. In the end, what was a hopeless group of four people became a dysfunctional family of eleven, each doing their best to support each other through the unknown.

A minuted passed, and Claudette was struck with a deep sense of confusion. She felt fully awake, and usually when people come out the semi conscious state that you enter after a trial, they are sitting at the campfire, with everyone around them. Nobody knows how you arrive, only that it happens in a place where nobody has their eye on. This time though, there was no warm firelight, or causal chatter, or the clicking of toolboxes and flashlights. There was only silence. Claudette looked around, and with a sharp intake of breath she realised something. This had happened only once before, and god coming down from heaven wasn't going to help her if this was what she thought it was.

Once before, not too long back, a man who called himself David King arrived at the campfire. He spoke with a thick British accent, and looked like the kind of guy that would go around to pubs, trying to start a fight. He was at least a head or two above Dwight and Jake, and when they told him what kind of situation he had unwillingly stumbled into, he just laughed. He laughed until he found out what it was like to see your teammates die in front of you, only to come back. He laughed until he found out what it felt like to be dangling from a hook, only being held in by the very flesh and bone of your shoulder.

He stopped laughing, and he got angry. Angry at the Entity, the killers, and the bullshit rules of the fog. They all tried to warn him, that the rules of the entity should never be broken, but it was too late.

The next trial, he attempted to fistfight the hag. She brutally tore him limb from limb, and ended him slowly, savouring every cry that wheezed from his torn lungs. Dwight and Ace, who had been working on a nearby generator, found themselves unable to look away. But when David finally died, after all of that, he didn't go back to the campfire. He went to another trial.

But this time, he was alone. There were no other survivors in the trial, he could feel it. It was just him, the clothes on his back, five broken generators and a killer. Until that incident, no survivors really had any idea what kind of trouble you could get into if you broke the rules. Now they all knew better. David was an example that none of them wanted to follow.

That... punishment trial was exactly where Claudette thought she was. She was in a dark forest, but it was not the huntress' domain, The Red Forest. There were twists and turns that looked strangely unlike the entity's uniform handiwork. Claudette could feel no other survivors with her, and she began freaking out. What had she done to deserve this? Surely escaping through the hatch wasn't a punishable offence now? There were no generators around her, and the canopy above was too thick to see any light poles. Her only option now was to keep walking and hope she didn't wander into the killer's terror radius.

Claudette kept walking. And walking. She was confused, even more so than before. Surely there was an end to this map, surely she would come across those brick walls that defined the impassible border of the constructed world. As she walked, the strangest, most groundbreaking thing happened. Claudette's stomach growled.

She was hungry. Actually in need of food. Their bodies had been put into a sort of stasis, that prevented their bodies from ageing, or needing any kind of sustenance to keep them functioning. Unfortunately for survivors like Quentin, they were also frozen in the situation they had been taken from, meaning that he was constantly in a state of exhaustion.

Slowly, piece by piece, the meaning of this revelation came back to her, and it took Claudette a while to steady herself as her whole world spun. She was gone. Away. Not in the realm of the entity. Somewhere else. Claudette's brain didn't know what to focus on, this discovery, or the emptiness inside her stomach that was turning into a burning pain, her stomach trying to catch up with years of consuming nothing but thin air.

Claudette clutched at her stomach in agony, eyes frantically darting back and forth. She could eat a horse. Or a rabbit or- botany knowledge. She was looking for clovers, a big patch of them if possible. She stumbled through the forest, tunnel vision making it hard to make out details in the world around her. When her eyes opened again, she found herself kneeled in a patch of silvery clovers. Claudette pulled out a generous handful of those leaves and ate them. They were bitter and small, but she couldn't bring herself to care. Finally the pain subsided to a slight ache, still there but not as noticeable. Panting, Claudette looked up and around at her surroundings.

She had arrived in a clearing, the silvery moonlight making the clovers around her glow like stars, save for the patch in front of her that she had violently torn up in her desperation. The oaks curled around the area, and the canopy thinned out around her. Ahead of Claudette, what looked like weaved willow branches formed a graceful arch that lead into a pitch darkness, broken only by bioluminescent mushrooms.

It would've been a captivating sight, had the arch been about twice it's height. Claudette had to duck as to not disturb the arch. Almost immediately, she was enveloped in darkness. A sudden wave of exhaustion washed over her, and Claudette was hit with a pang of homesickness. Lord, what she would give right now to curl up in her own bed, in her own apartment.
A gigantic, twisted tree came through the mist, dimly outlined by mushrooms and moonlight. Without a second thought, Claudette braced herself on one of the gnarled roots and fell into the first true sleep she had had in years.

"Can you hear me?" A voice, familiar and yet unrecognisable. "Can you hear me?"

"No."

"Can youhear me? Canyouhear me? Canyouhearcanmehearme?"

"NO!"

"If you can hear this, you're alone."

"Fucking hell Dwight! We can't just leave her to DIE!" Jake's voice, angry.
"I don't want to as much as you do, but if we go back in there we'll die too and then NOBODY will live!" Dwight's voice, desperate.
"SHUT THE FUCK UP! SHE'S ALREADY DEAD!" Meg's voice, anguished.

"The only thing left of me is the sound of my voice."

Black spider legs fighting against a dying grip, yellow outlines bickering at an exit.

"I don't know if any of us made it..."

"I'm going for the basement chest, gonna see if I can grab sommin' for Claud." David's voice, resolute.
"SHIT! David, stay with me man!" Min's voice, panicked.
"See you back at the campfire." Nea's voice, resigned.

"Did we win..."

"What did I say? I'm just a pretty lucky guy." Ace's voice, smug.
"GET PALLET SLAMMED, BITCH!" Laurie's voice, victorious.
"Thank you. All of you." Quentin's voice, relieved.

"Did we lose..."

"Guys, we've fucked ourselves. We've royally fucked ourselves." Bill's voice, fearful.
"...what do you mean, 'I can't go back home'?" Min's voice, hollow.
"I miss them." Claudette's voice.

"I don't k n o w."

The world around Claudette was bright and speckled, hands instinctively reaching up to cover her eyes. She let out a low groan, back aching from the awkward position she had held all night. Peaking through the holes in her fingers, Claudette did her best to examine the world around her without the mindset of a survivor. Instead of looking for pallets, vault spots and hiding places, Claudette did her best to look at the colours, and the giant tree she had taken refuge in. Was the real world always this saturated and comically perfect, like something straight out of a cartoon? Or had she been in the entity's realm for so long that the slightest bit of actual colour looked fake?

To Claudette, the sunlight was glorious. It was everything she ever remembered and more. More enriching, more fulfilling, more warming than what they had all dreamed about. God, Claudette could just bask for ours on end, had it not been for the slight chill that ran up her spine. Quickly, her eyes snapped open, searching for the thing that was looking at her. The culprit was a small equine, which had the markings of a zebra, and strangely uniform golden rings up it's left leg and neck. Claudette released a huff of air, and relaxed. It's eyes seemed a little too big for it's body, and it had a strange marking on it's hindquarters that looked like a spiral. It was obviously somebody's pet, or farm animal due to the rings, but what kind of person keeps a baby zebra as a pet?

Claudette walked up to the baby zebra, which was making loud whinnies at her approach. Hopefully, the zebra would lead Claudette back to civilisation, then she could file a police report, then she would go home, then... And then what? Be forced to spent the rest of her years getting over mind breaking trauma, haunted by the flashbacks of her former friends and family, and leaving them behind.

Claudette didn't realise she had been following the zebra through the undergrowth till she nearly tripped over a root. A part of her longed to go back to the clearing, but common sense told her that if god wanted there to be a loner living in the wilderness than he should've brought Jake.

And with that, Claudette continued walking.

Author's Note:

A few little clarifications:

The black lock: The black lock, or 'hatch' manifests when (number of dead bodies in the trial) + (number of generators repaired) = five, and it opens when there is only one person left alive in the trial.

Killers: Viscous immoral beasts that exist to serve the entity, and sacrifice survivors. There are currently ten killers that exist in the trials.

Survivors: Humans pulled from different times and places, and forced to participate in the trials till the end of existence. There are currently eleven survivors.

The entity: A malovent force that created and maintains the realms to consume the survivor's hope via sacrifice.

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