Grip’s inside a towering, grim, perfectly circular fortress made of bleeding black thorns sprouting flowers made of leathery flesh with endless hallways spiraling in on themselves and filled with raging sheets of flame and screaming children and women and chains and death.
He’s running again, this time from an old woman the size of a titan, bent and stooped inside the cavernous spiraling hallway. She has a horrifying, huge, brown & yellow eagle on her shoulder, an eagle the size of a house, an eagle with razors for talons and razors for a beak and burning red eyes of pure, hateful flame. And she’s wearing a dog mask. Or is she a dog wearing a mask of human flesh?
It doesn’t matter. Grip has to get away. He hurls the rock in his hand at her by way of a momentary distraction and then runs. He runs through flames. He runs through walls of thorns that tear his flesh. He trips over chains. He crashes to the floor and smashed his nose on a piece of black, volcanic rock. Sickly lips like maggots open in the rock. “What have I become?” they say.
“No, no, no, not this jackass again…” Grip thinks, but…
There it goes: parchment paper, crying man, yellow fog, teeth and bruises and razors and blades.
Grip realizes he’s been here before. Or somewhere like it.
This is a dream.
He thinks, “Fuck this shite….”
WHAM!
Something’s hit his back. Something like a boulder.
Grip looks up. He sees feet. Gray feet. Orc feet. He looks up further. There’s a monstrously huge orc, sun-charred gray-green skin, dead black eyes, a mouth filled with axes and cudgels for hands.
WHAM!
He crushes Grip’s legs into pulp.
WHAM!
He crushes Grip’s…
WHAM!
Grip wakens.
First Reference: Chapter 22
Other Notable References: —