A sigh, weary and endless, drifted into the void—vanishing into the silence, just like everything else before it.
"Ah..."
A pause. Silence. A stillness as endless as time itself.
"I think... I have lingered long enough."
Still, nothing answered. Not even the void.
"I've told tale after tale... As time willed it, so it passed. And now, anything would be better than this."
Silence.
"Little monster... listen well."
"I will tell you how it ended—how it always ends."
The void swallowed the words, but they did not fade.
"World after world. Time after time. Years passed without end, until in the end... there was nothing left of him."
"Pain changes people, but he was something else... truly."
"It took more than what could be considered 'unreasonable' for his spirit to finally break. Horrors beyond words, lives lost, worlds shattered, actions so vile I dare not utter them."
"They stained his soul, tore him apart, until there was no one left to be called 'him.'"
"But life, existence—it's persistent. From loss, something new always rises. And so, he was born again. Forgotten? No. He could never be forgotten."
"But even this 'he' was broken before he could be whole again. The cycle would not stop. The words, the lives, the curse—or blessing—of his endless existence. And so here we begin, again, as he was tired. More than tired. As he was done."
...
From the first breath—or rather, the lack of it—he knew. The weight of existence pressed upon him, familiar and unrelenting, as if it had never left.
The memories of endless lives, endless suffering. The knowledge that it would all happen again.
So, he refused to breathe.
The world blurred at the edges of his vision. The warmth of the womb was gone, replaced by the cold air of a new life that demanded he cry, that demanded he fight.
He refused.
But then—
"Come on, breathe!"
A desperate voice. A rough, calloused hand pressed against his fragile chest. Not his mother—he couldn't hear her. He didn't need to. She was gone. He had seen... heared and witnesed enough deaths to know when someone wasn't breathing.
"Please—" A sob. Choked, rasping. A man rarely cries that way.
Another voice. Small. Trembling. A girl. "What's wrong with him? Why won't he cry?" Too young to sound so afraid.
His vision cleared, just for a moment. He saw her—a little girl, dirt-smudged, wide-eyed, desperate.
Someone... someone like...
A flicker of memory. A ghost of a feeling.
Someone long forgotten. Someone lost in the tide of reincarnations. The sensation was weak, distant, but real. It clawed at the hollow pit in his chest.
And so, for no reason other than that single moment—he took a breath.
His cry broke through the air, sharp and raw. The relief on the man's face was instant. The girl—his sister—laughed through her tears.
They gave him a name. It meant nothing to him. Just another name in the sea of forgotten ones. But he held onto the girl's voice, onto the warmth of her tiny fingers curling around his own.
For her—for this last fragment of something he had lost and also never had—he would live.
One last time.
...
Life in the dirt was nothing new.
He grew up beneath the weight of hunger and exhaustion. Their father, once a wealthy man, had lost everything. Now, he worked however he could while his son and daughter begged in the streets.
They learned quickly.
How to watch the crowd, how to tell who would spare a few coins and who would spit at them. How to disappear when the guards came looking for vagrants to drive away.
Some nights, they found food. Others, they had only each other.
His sister, despite being older, was fragile in ways he was not. She smiled easily, even when she was cold, even when she was starving. She still believed people were kind.
He had long since lost that belief.
But he stayed by her side anyway, even when his mind told him to let go.
Because no matter how many lives he had lived, remembered or forgotten—no matter how many faces he had seen—he would never let suffering be left alone.
If I remamber correctly, that was something he wished he could change about himself.
...
The night it happened, he woke to his sister's screams.
Dirt everywhere. The weight of it pressed down on their tiny cottage, blocking out the moonlight, sealing them in a tomb of broken wood and suffocating earth.
He moved before he could think, clawing at the dirt, digging—his fingers raw, nails breaking. Beside him, his sister coughed, struggling to push the weight off her frail body.
It took him hours—hours of endless digging until his hands bled—before he saw it.
The light of the outside world. A fragile, flickering hope. But the tunnel kept collapsing. The air barely trickled through tiny holes in the mingled wreckage and dirt.
Still, as fragile as hope was, he did not crush it. He looked around, calling for his father—
Only to see him. Impaled by a jagged beam of wood. Likely trying to dig them out when the wreckage collapsed.
His sister didn't see it. He didn't let her.
Days passed.
Starvation clawed at them. Dehydration set in. But he did not give up. Slowly, desperately, he dug. Supporting their escape with whatever wreckage he could.
And by some miracle—one he had never seen in any of his lives—he saved her.
They got out.
But... why is there always a 'but'?
When they finally dug themselves free—when they felt the wind on their faces, saw the sky above them—
They heard the screams.
The village was gone.
The sky burned red.
The collapsed mountain behind them spewed fire, but its lava did not flow onto the ground. No, it rippled into the sky like waves from a bleeding wound, just like the sea water rose from the other side of the city, two forces meating high in the skies above.
Before he could even process what he was seeing, skeletal hands clawed at them, dragging them from the wreckage.
His sister screamed. He struggled.
But there was no fighting back against an army of the dead—not when he was already half-dead himself.
...
In the ruined city square, beneath the sky burning with hellfire, twelve liches stood in a circle, whispering in a language that stung his ears.
He did not understand, but he could still deduce some things—a ritual was being performed. Summoning something—something worse than all this death.
They were soon thrown into the prison cells beneath the ruined village, locked away in the dark with many others. For days, they remained there.
Everyone was starved and dehydrated, yet strangely enough, they were kept alive with just the bare minimum from the skeletons' tendings. It was a disgusting torture.
Thankfully, if one could even be thankful for such a thing, it did not last long.
Still, as he searched for a way to escape, he noticed a pattern.
People weren't taken away randomly. It was in batches of differing sizes.
When someone was taken, they also took all those who seemed close to them—families, friends. They were dragged away together.
He did not know the meaning of all this. At least, not until the day they were chosen too.
...
As their group was led out into the square, he soon understood everything.
The square was even more transformed than before.
A large pool of oozing green liquid was in the middle, while above, the lava and the sea converged high in the red skies.
In front of the pool, two young men stood—the last remaining of the previous batch. He even knew these two brothers, but that sadness was no longer important.
One of the liches looked at them, and with a simple, quick glance, it chose. Without hesitation, it pushed the one who looked slightly weaker into the pool.
The moment his body touched the liquid, a sizzling sound erupted, like red-hot metal plunged into water.
Tiny bubbles hissed and frothed, spreading outward in rippling waves. The air became filled with the stench of burning flesh, a choking mixture of charred meat and acrid chemicals.
The young man's screams curdled, growing wet and gurgling as his throat was burned away.
The acid ate through him in seconds. Patches of flesh blackened and sloughed off, exposing raw muscle that soon melted into gelatinous strands.
His frantic movements turned sluggish. His body lost cohesion, breaking apart as the acid reduced him to a pulp.
Soon, there was nothing left but a bubbling slurry of liquefied remains. But before that happened, the liches finally began to move.
The second young man was lifted into the air. He coughed and screamed as the stench clawed down his throat, the scene burning into his mind.
A dense haze rose from the pool—a noxious steam carrying an eye-watering, lung-searing burn, coiling upward and distorting the air like heat haze.
With the liches' magic, it was contained around the floating young man, and at the same time, the pulp- previously human was lifted from the acidic liquid and then smashed onto the man, the still-dripping liquid burning his flesh.
All twelve of the liches began to chant.
The now blackened mass was forced into a humanoid form again.
But it wasn't long after they began to channel their powers that, without any sort of notice or sound, the black form exploded.
The pieces fell into the liquid, its dark haze rising into the lava and sea-forged structure in the sky.
Even if it wasn't completely clear, he understood now.
The liches were trying something strange—something akin to a fusion ritual.
Combining human bodies into a single thing. But that wasn't all. They weren't trying to create a monster. No. It was something greater, far darker.
Without much concern, the liches turned to the newly brought group.
They took two or three at a time, and every single time—no matter who they took—it was the same. Again and again.
Then, they finally chose him and his sister.
Throughout all this, he had tried to get away, not once but many times. It was hopeless. Skeletons surrounded them—hundreds, thousands even. The liches' magic bound them in place. Escape was simply impossible. He had no hope left.
But she did. He saw it still—the glint in her eyes.
He told her, whispered in the darkness, that if they had to be fused, he would protect her.
He would take the pain, take the suffering, take everything so she wouldn't have to.
She smiled, just as she always had.
And then, for the first and last time, a decision of her own.
A single step forward.
A plunge into the abyss.
He froze stiff.
The liches didn't care.
They just simply began.
As the ritual flowed, he felt it—the tearing, the pulling, the overwhelming force trying to break him apart and put 'them' together in ways that should never be.
His body hurt.
It hurt a lot.
But he did not scream.
Nor did his sister.
Or maybe his mind only heard the bubbling.
He was alive still.
But it was only him.
Because she had given everything so that he alone might survive.
So, at the very least, he should try to stay alive, right?
...
Soon, the liches' laughter resounded.
He noticed it also. He was still alive.
More and more power was channeled.
Different colors, different magics and runes bloomed around him.
Different things began to emerge—hearts, eyes, countless parts of creatures unknown.
Gems, stones, even herbs. So many things circled around him before smashing into his body; he couldn't even see around himself.
Then—crack. Crack. The sound of something splitting open. The blackened sky of lava and sea tore apart, jagged veins of light spreading through the fracture.
It wasn't stone.
It was never stone.
The realization hit like a hammer, knocking something loose in his mind.
The gate was opening.
And something was looking back.
The red gate opened to a world he could only feel but not touch. Not yet.
A strange darkness—darker than anything he had seen before—descended.
It flowed down like gentle water.
It infiltrated his body.
...
"Oh..." A voice, deep and dark, spoke from within, something in his own mind.
"What magnificence... this vessel... this body... what is this power?"
"Who are these? Sleeping?" The voice spoke without concern for him, even as he heard it all.
"A door?" But then, it stopped.
A clang echoed through his mind. *Clank...* clang...*
"You..." Another voice, loud. So loud that it shook everything.
"Who do you think you are!?"
"What... what is this... MONSTER!?" The dark voice shrank, almost insignificant compared to the overwhelming, furious presence.
It trembled as if in fear, feeding on its own screams.
"Sin-filled worm, DIE!"
And so it did.
...
Outside, the liches' laughter turned to horror as the power meant to bind the newborn being they had created twisted—changed.
It became his.
Dark, demonic power surged through him. He knew nothing—not what had happened, not who spoke, not even where he was.
He only heard the voice declare.
And then he felt it.
He was free.
And for the first time in this lifetime, he felt something other than exhaustion.
He felt rage.
The magic chains binding him shattered.
The ritual drowned in screams as the liches fell—one by one, torn apart, consumed by the very power they had tried to wield.
And so... he did not stop.
He did not care.
When the bodies lay in ruins, when the magic had faded, when all that was left was silence—
He fell.
But for the first time, he did not die.
The cycle did not end yet.
He lay there, breathing, feeling the weight of it all upon him.
And so, as the silence settled over him, he exhaled—a breath weary and endless, lost to the void.
This was not the end.
It's never the end.
It never would be.
"Ah..." A sigh, weary and endless, just as always...