Achird was always slow to wake. It was something he considered his greatest (or perhaps only) flaw—he couldn't simply spring out of bed the instant his alarm went off the way it seemed most people could. Feeling slowly came into his body and he huffed, rolling over and slowly opening his eyes as awareness pierced the fog in his brain as slow as a sloth was to climb a tree. He didn't even register, at first, how he wasn't in his usual bed, that no alarm had gone off. The fog in his head persisted as he sat up and rubbed his eyes with a soft groan. Another day of trying to battle the Chaos infection on his planet... And then awareness fully surged into his body as the memories flooded back—the screams, the accusations, the horror as people dropped like flies, and the place he'd fallen for the last time, what he remembered thinking was for the last time—he shrieked as he woke up fully, head snapping up, ears perked on high alert as he scrambled to look around for the nearest threat—only to shriek again.

There was no threat. Only death. He remembered now, coming down to the safety bunker to check on the last few remaining people he knew of, only for Chaos to overwhelm him. He remembered passing out. He didn't remember any of these people dying, but they clearly had. The room he'd woken up in, the room he'd thought he'd die permanently in, contained the skeletons of the last people he'd trusted (to the extent he could trust anyone, anyway). There was Colin, his main strategist, recognizable by the distinct twist to his antlers people had made fun of him for. There laid Colin's husband Albert, because... He could tell because they were lain together. Spooning. His heart ached. He squeezed his eyes shut, not wanting to look at any more of them. Not wanting to be able to identify any more of them. He made his way up and out, blinded, but much more sanely than he would have if he'd kept his eyes open any longer, he suspected. He... he wasn't sure what had awakened him. Why hadn't he died, like everyone else? He obviously deserved to, if he'd failed this badly. If Chaos had taken over so... so completely, so utterly, that death had had its chokehold on all the people of Achird... why hadn't Achird, himself, gone?

He sighed, rubbing at his face and staring up at the sky. Failure seemed to be his middle name. He couldn't even die correctly... Something shot across the twinkling sky and he squinted. There... some kind of... whatever it was, it had some kind of energy to it. It pulled at his gut, boiling away at any apprehension that tried to take root there. He followed its call, squeezing his eyes shut briefly as everything warped.

He stumbled, letting out a short yelp of pain as his ankle twisted from the rough landing. Fresh air blew across his face, fierce and cold. Where... where was he?