The Mercy Of Death.
To the living,Death is the final silence.
To The dying,it's mercy,the hand that ends the ache of breath.
But to the few who walk beneath cursed stars,Death is neither end nor peace.
For there are souls in Avarn who refuse the stillness.
They greet the grave as a gate,the darkness as dawn.
Their hearts do not still; they are tempered,struck upon the anvil of extinction until even the gods avert their gaze.
They learn from their undoing.
They carve meaning from pain.
They die, and die, and die again, until Death itself grows weary of claiming them.
And when they rise...the world trembles.
For those who master death no longer live in time.
They become it.
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"Snow!"
Asheen woke up with a start, his countenance bloodlessly pale,sweets tickled down his face. His chest rising and falling with harsh and rough rhythmic breathing.
His eyes were widened in pure fear and horror.
"Wh...what..what is going? How am I still alive? Where is the hole in my chest?". Ashren was totally flabbergasted as he touched all of his body.He completely healed,the huge hole in chest is no more, his body felt light and deep down he sensed a kind of soothing peace and vitality.
"Wh..where am I?" A hoarse and cracked voice escaped from his mouth as he finally have the time to look at his new surroundings which totally blew his mind. His little brain couldn't comprehend what he was currently seeing.
Examining his surrounding, he found that he was lying upon a rippling sea of black water,thicker than blood,smoother than glass. Each breath he takes, send faint circles gliding outwards,bending light that did not exist. Beneath its surface,shadows writhed like memories of the dead,nameless faces flickering and vanishing as though drawing in eternity.
Above him stretched a void without horizon,an endless cathedral of night. Yet the sky was not empty.
The void was littered with moons,trillions of them, fractured and bleeding. Their pale surfaces were split like broken skulls,and from their wounds spilled river of red light that fell like rain across the firmament. The liquid did not vanish upon touching the black sea below; it sank and rose again as shimmering crimson vapors,weaving constellations that pulsed to the rhythm of a colossal unseen heart.
Each moon turned slowly,groaning like ancient doors upon cosmic hinges. Their dying glow cast reflections upon the black sea,a thousand Ashrens looking back at him,each with different eyes,different scars, different lives.
The air,if it could be called that,was alive with whispers. Words that were not words,forming and fading between his thoughts.
"You have crossed the veil."
"You have died once. You will die again."
"Rise child of the Cycle...the Samsara remembers you."
His body felt weightless,yet unbearable heavy,like he was being pulled both upward and downward at once,toward the moons bleeding above and toward the abyss yawning below.
When he tried to move,the sea beneath him rippled,and faces began to appear on the the surface,pale transparent, echoing with his own voice: fragments with all the deaths he had yet to die.
The water was not water. The sky was not the sky. The Realm itself was memory incarnate, a reflection of every soul that had ever walked the path of death and return.
And within this Realm of ruin, Ashren felt it, a pulse,faint but furious,deep within his chest. His heart was still beating. He was not alive. He was not dead.
He was somewhere in between,where gods send their unwanted children to be reborn.
Ashren's mind felt like blank canvas; his knees buckled beneath him, as the black sea beneath him rippled ominously outward. His head hung low,his form started to tremble visibly, faint but lugubrious sobs echoed from him. The sound was deafening in this expanse of black canvas of empty space.
His mind blurred as a flood of memories surged back,the smiles of the villagers: Galen, Eamonn, and the rest. His best friends, Lykon and Snow, their smiles and joyful expressions filled his mind.
He remembered the first day he and Lykon became best friends. It started with a fight; although he won, Lykon didn't go down without making him suffer. Since then, they have been the best of friends, going on adventures together, roaming the entire Wind Moon Valley, chasing birds, climbing trees, cliffs, and mountains.
Their days were simple but full of bliss, something he cherished the most, something he vowed to protect for the rest of his life. But scene of Lykon being killed pierced through him,a sharp pain that tore through his very soul.
The stern and reproachful expression of Snow whenever he didn't behave, her soft smile, her stubborn but kind smile filled his mind. The scene of her heart being torn out of her chest and crushed twisted his heart in deep anguish.
One by one, the memories of all the villagers clouded his mind,the memories shifting between their joyful smiles and their last melancholic and fearful expressions as they were being massacred one by one.
His mind was reliving every single death of all the villagers vividly; his heart felt like it was being shredded into millions of pieces, and his consciousness felt like it was being pulled, mashed, and stretched all together.
His sobbing kept growing louder and louder; the black sea beneath started to move and tumble, and from the waves of the ocean, transparent and ghostly faces began to appear on the black sea. Their mouths opened wide as if they were screaming, but no noise was heard.
The infinite expanse of void above him shook; the moons started to spin faster and faster as thick crimson-red liquid kept pouring down, forming an enchanting and shimmering waterfall of endless crimson blood.
"Why...? Why...? Why does it have to be me? Why is this happening? This is not what I wanted... I didn't ask for this... I never intended to have this kind of fate. WHY!?"
Ashren's voice was cracked, hoarse, and choked, his voice pulsating across the infinite void. Huge waves rose and crashed, thousands of spectral faces with boundless screams and voiceless gazes locked on the kneeling Ashren.
All his family was gone; his peaceful Wind Moon Valley, gone; his best friends gone; his grandpa gone; everything he ever held dear to his heart, all gone in the span of a single night.
Today was supposed to be a joyous and festive night, a night of laughter, togetherness, and love; a night to be shared and remembered for eternity. But fate played a cruel joke on him and turned that night into a night of nightmares, a night of horrors, a night of deep lugubriousness.
A night that will forever haunt him as long as he walks the surface of this world, a night that will forever be etched into his very soul, into the depth of his memories, a night that he will wake from countless nights.
Ashren held his face as he continued to sob; the tears streaming down his face were crimson blood. He was crying literal blood, his face smeared in it. Droplets of blood landed on the black sea, causing it to ripple outward and inward at the same time, as if reality was bending to the weight of these blood tears.
Just then, silence as to be called enveloped the place; the huge crashing waves stopped mid-air and silently and soundlessly flowed back to the black sea, like waves returning to the sea.
The bleeding moons above stopped. The air thickened, congealed, until it pulsed like flesh.
A bone-sickening, spine-chilling low growl echoed from the darkness, like two metals scraping together.
Ashren stiffened when he heard that low growl; his blood ran cold, and he felt it flow in reverse.
He slowly and mechanically lifted his head,and as he did,his face came into view,a deep shade of crimson. His eyes glowed a fierce red, reminiscent of thick, boiling tar.
They were filled with intense emotions:deep seethed anger,resentment, and a chilling intent to kill.
"YOU!!!"