The Silver Tongued Devil Chapter 2: Chapter 2 - Out of Network

Read chapter 2 of The Silver Tongued Devil by The Vilkas on NovelPedia.

Waking up felt like drowning in dry air. Matas's lungs worked, technically. They didn't feel like they belonged to him. Each breath scraped in shallow, wheezing pulls that tasted like stone dust and wet leaves. For a while, that was all there was—breath and weight. Something pressed into his ribs hard enough to ache. The ground. Had to be. Time had stopped making sense somewhere between the gust and now. Matas couldn't say how long he'd been conscious. Could've been seconds. Could've been hours. His body didn't track it the way it should have. There was no progression, no sense of then becoming now . Just a flat, endless present where breathing happened and pressure existed and that was the whole universe. He tried to decide if he was dreaming. The logic seemed important. In dreams, things didn't follow rules. In dreams, you could fall through red void-spaces and survive them. In dreams, the world could stop making sense and you'd accept it because dream-logic was its own kind of law. But dreams had a texture to them. They were slippery. You could feel the wrongness when you tried to hold onto details. This wasn't like that. The pain in his ribs was too sharp. The weight pressing down was too specific. The taste of stone dust and wet leaves was too exact. His mind kept trying to catalog details like it was making an inventory of evidence, and evidence meant this was real. That thought should have scared him. It didn't. Fear required energy, and every bit of energy he had was committed to the simple act of breathing. In. Out. The cold pressing against his cheek. The ache in his ribs. The weight of his own body, which felt heavier than it should have, as if gravity had been turned up in this place. He became aware, gradually, that opening his eyes was a choice he could make. It wasn't automatic. His body wasn't running on default settings. He had to decide to open them, the way you'd decide to move a limb that had fallen asleep. It would require effort. It would require committing to the reality of this place, whatever this place was. For a long moment, he didn't. He stayed in the dark with his eyes shut, with the weight and the cold and the taste of stone, and pretended that pretending was enough. But the pressure in his chest wasn't getting better. His lungs weren't getting fuller. Whatever had happened—whatever that void had been—it had taken something from him that breathing alone wouldn't restore. He could feel it like a missing piece, a hole in his center that the oxygen couldn't fill. Open your eyes, some part of him said. Not a voice. Not even a thought, really. Just an imperative, the way his body had known to keep breathing without being told. He forced his eyes open. His cheek was cold, rough, and damp. Gravel? No. Too smooth. Rock. Memory tried to catch up and faceplanted. Van. Wind. Phone. That out-of-place icon on the screen. Then— Pressure. Not the gust that had shoved the van. Not just noise. This had been everywhere at once, like the world was a lung and he'd been inside it when it exhaled. The thought made his chest seize. He forced his eyes open. Light stabbed straight through his skull. For a split second, he wasn't on stone. He was falling through red. A curve stretched beneath him, glossy and scaled, each plate the size of his van's hood. Distance meant nothing; his brain tried to tell him it was close and far at the same time—like he was insect-small and pressed against a skyscraper window. Beyond that impossible arc, something even bigger moved behind a jagged wall of mountains, a silhouette sliding past their peaks as if they were grass blades. Weight settled on him—not on his body, but on the idea of his body. A pressure that said: small. Insignificant. Not worth noticing. Then it was gone. Matas was back on the ground, heart hammering, bile in his throat, hands clawing at dirt that wasn't the gravel shoulder of any Illinois back road. "Fuck," he croaked. The word came out thin and shaky. His lips felt