Twisted

Lena's mouth hung open, the Twisting Nether feeling as if it were pulling her body limb from limb and compressing it all at the same time. She struggled for breath, her heart beating sideways in her chest cavity, slicing through muscle and bone there as it continued to beat obligingly.

Something was wrong.

Usually her teleportation spells were a simple skip through the Twisting Nether, barely even a blink of an eye, but something was wrong. She was stuck.

Her eyes bulged from their sockets as she clawed at herself in jerking, spastic movements, unable to control her muscles in the same way, panic rising in the back of her throat. Her thoughts sawed at her mind, unable to travel in a straight line from one idea to the other. She groaned and ground her teeth impatiently while her brain tried to connect the dots.

The alter-time spell. She was working out the formulas for a way to give herself a way to loop time in short instances, and she spoke the incantation aloud at her campsite and then .... darkness.

No. No that wasn't it. Something else happened.

She had been on the peak of Neverest. Her pants still showed a dusting of snow when she craned her neck to look at them. Why... She let out a soundless whimper. The slithering being crawling up her leg. The box. The voices.

She had panicked. She cast the spell, not even caring about the ramifications. She just wanted to get out of the grasp of the thing that was surely going to overtake her. And just as she shimmered from view on Azeroth, she saw Krastos, saw his eyes, saw him leap toward where she had been standing, hands outstretched.

Did she? Did she see him? They really were coming for her?

And now she was in the Twisting Nether. An apt name, she managed to squeeze the thought out. She'd never been stuck for so long. The rule was that if you were able to manipulate your mind, you could still open a portal, could change the state of the Nether, could escape it. It could, legend had it, even be pleasant, based on what the conjurer would bring to mind. Clearly, she was in no state of mind to attempt conjuring pleasant moments. She couldn't even conjure a portal to get OUT of the Nether.

As she grasped desperately for that knowledge, she felt herself slipping, still being squeezed by what had taken hold of her on the mountain, still being ripped apart by the chaos of the Nether. Invisible tentacles still tightened around her legs and were working their way around her waist.

What was it that could be in both realms at once? That could exist and not exist at the same time?

Her eyes widened at the cackle both inside her mind and out. You resist. You attempt to cling to your life as if it actually matters. You'll learn.

The Old Gods.