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This burns, what the hell is happening?
The man gasped, his sight flickering back to life. Agony surged through him, intensifying with every passing second, radiating from every corner of his body like wildfire.
The ground rushed up into view just as consciousness flickered back, his body limp, sprawled across the cold concrete.
In a gut-wrenching flash, he realized he'd plummeted from a skyscraper above, though not a single memory explained why, or how, he'd ended up there.
His legs refused to respond, limbs locked in place by the brutal toll of the fall. Craning his neck upward, he froze, the towering monolith looming impossibly, a silent giant bearing witness to a mystery he couldn't recall.
Then came the storm inside, waves of searing heat and icy chills tearing through him as dizziness clawed at his mind. Pain pulsed with every heartbeat, forcing his eyes shut again and again, fluttering like dying sparks in the aftermath of catastrophe.
Scorching, no, freezing, wait, both at once? How is that even possible?
Heat surged and shivered over his flesh in erratic pulses, as though opposing seasons waged war upon his body with each passing breath. Suddenly, he seized his temples, fingers digging into taut skin as a white-hot lance of agony split his thoughts.
A guttural spasm wracked him, he doubled forward, coughing in jagged convulsions, and crimson spray arced through the air, splattering the unyielding concrete below.
Trembling, he reached behind his head and withdrew his hand slick with something jagged, something wrong, slivers of bone, pale and splintered, clinging to his blood-slick fingers.
Then his gaze dropped, and there it lay: a patch of glistening grey matter smeared across the floor in unnervingly straight-edged segments, arranged like a deliberate mosaic, cold and grotesque against the stark pavement.
This can't be happening… no way
When the man glanced around, he had noticed a pool of blood spreading beneath him, as if it had seeped up from the ground below. Miraculously, he was still breathing, alive against all odds. He'd come to recognize this kind of pain, this raw edge of survival.
With half his skull pressed into cold concrete, the nausea made sense, but why, then, did warmth spread through him? Only a sliver of his brain touched the ground, yet something pulsed beneath the wreckage.
Every few seconds, a siren screamed in his left ear, the right one gone, silenced by the building's brutal collapse. Around the man, boots pounded the debris as police and medics swarmed the scene, closing in.
How am I even still alive in this state?
Help me please.
The man's plea was no mere cry for help, it was just a desperate, breathless summons for urgent healing, a cry teetering on the edge of expiration.
Then, in an instant, a searing, otherworldly glow split his sight, sharp and electric as a lightning strike frozen mid-air, pulsing with a brilliance that defied nature.
Out of that luminous rupture stepped a figure immense and radiant, advancing toward him like a vision torn from myth. Encircled in a corona so fierce it seemed to bend the light around him, the being loomed over the man, visible only to his eyes.
Before him, the immense figure coalesced from shadow and light, rising like a primordial guardian astride the threshold of realms, its silhouette etched against the trembling horizon.
He extended his arm, not a simple motion, but a sweeping arc of purpose, as if drawing a thread from the loom of fate itself, an ageless decree unfurling across the ages, both solemn and inescapable.
"Craving rebirth? Then cross the threshold and gain the power to do so," the voice thundered, inaudible to the world, yet echoing like a storm inside his mind. "Stay here, and you'll wither, a ghost of regret, untouched by grace, unshaped by fire."
Without pause, the man thrust his left hand forward, fingers trembling as agony split his skull like lightning. Tears carved glistening trails down his cheeks, his breath ragged, his soul ablaze with longing. He nodded, fierce, feverish, a man clinging to the edge of salvation.
"Grant me one more turn," he gasped, voice splintering like cracked glass. "I can't… I won't fade into nothing."
The towering figure above studied the man, the figure's eyes were ancient and fathomless, then dipped his head once, an oath sealed in silence.
His immense hand clamped around the man's, and raw power erupted, flooding his veins with radiant light that burned like dawn breaking through endless night.
"So be it," the entity murmured, voice resonant as stone shifting beneath the earth. "You shall be the last soul to gain this power."
And in the span of a breath, he was gone. Mystic Fire plunged into darkness, life snuffed out mid-descent. Yet his tale? That had only just ignited, like a spark flung into the void, destined to become flame.