The Sandman's Return

The world didn’t end in fire. It rotted while people were still alive. Fear seeped into humanity like corrosion. Some endured. Most didn’t. Those who broke twisted into monsters called Evildoers—predators born from what humans couldn’t survive. Bell lasted two years in that world. Not as a hero. Not as a chosen one. Just someone worn down, cornered, and finally betrayed during the fall of a human fortress—sold out by a survivor consortium that needed a scapegoat to escape. Death should have taken him there. Instead, Bell activated a cursed item he never fully understood. Dream Dust didn’t save him. It erased him. What rose in his place was no longer human—an empty, starving shell the Abyss eagerly shaped into a weapon. That existence would later be remembered as the Sandman, an Evildoer so lethal that even monsters avoided its path. Humanity fought back. Heroes burned their lives trying to stop it. They failed. The Sandman was never killed. By a fracture of fate too cruel to call mercy, what returned to the past was not Bell’s body—but fragments of his memories, shattered into recurring dreams and inherited by his younger self. A few days before the apocalypse begins, Bell opens his eyes again. He knows the truth now: The Sandman is not him— but it was born from the moment he lost himself. Having gazed deeper into the Abyss than any human should survive, Bell carries fragments of its rules… and glimpses of its flaws. Whether those insights are real—or remnants left behind by something inhuman—he doesn’t know. But he knows this: If he loses himself again, humanity won’t get another chance. And the more control he gains… the more the Abyss remembers the blade it once wielded.