Eihm had been wading through the seemingly endless sea of grass-stems for 24 hours now, as far as he could tell by the position of the sun. His legs were shivering, struggling to keep his body upright, his charred wounds ached to the point of torture, and his vision blurred and flickered, a reflection of his exhausted, haunted mind. He could not sleep. This was a product of his resolve, to escape the nightmares that he knew lie waiting for him in the shadows of slumber. But in the monotonous, uninterrupted hike, his mind that was once trained for silence had been clamouring with noise. In that noise, hidden by the dense fog of mental nonsense that now seeped through a sanctuary once upon a time beautiful and carefully constructed, was a voice, whispering to Eihm in a cadence that although he tried to ignore it, he could still not fail to receive its message.
“You are a monster,” the voice told him. “You have been inducted into the ranks of the damned - a shackled soul. These tattoos bind you tighter than any chain, scrape sharper than any metal, and are more insidious than any cuffs. And who clamped them onto you? That’s right – it was master.” When the shape of this though finally sunk in, Eihm’s eyes seemed to swell with blood, threatening to pop inside his skull.516Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡOqYxswlEbm
“So carefully he tied you to that bench. So honestly did he look in your eyes as he tightened the straps. So lovingly did he damn your soul!”
Eihm tried to fight his own mind and his own heart, but it was a war that he could not win with an enemy that never sleeps, not even as he would. And so when he fell to the ground from exhaustion, within the twenty-ninth hour, Eihm suffered a double hell – Devil spears once again pierced his flesh, and the demonic shadows of his psyche tormented him in the background. He awoke the moment after the sixty-third spear's tip touched his skin, yet his sleep, and his torment, seemed to have lasted even longer than that first time.
When Eihm awoke, and with many sounds of pain managed to wrench his stiff body upright, he was startled by the sound of his own voice –
“I can think…”516Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmYaOVScEbB
Somehow, he had forgotten that his mind was his own, and the transmission of that mind’s speech, that was hidden so deep under the rubble of his psyche, into the night air, mingling with the chirrups of the crickets, finally gave him a lifeline.516Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWRk5mme8s1
He thought for a moment, and then realized his error.516Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWFscJOXBqq
“I have to… say things. Out loud…”516Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡtJn4Qa0A04
Step by step he forced his body into motion – to where did not matter, only forward – and with a will began thinking, talking and walking at the same time.516Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡeCUXZwfIlM
“So… now I’m a… a Devil-Marked. I have Devil powers… I guess. I can make green light, and then… broken things become whole again.” His tongue became more flexible, and his speech picked up momentum. “I can make red light, and those healed things are broken again. But how do I do it? I don’t remember what I did with the geysers. I was crazy. It just happened by itself. It wasn’t me. It was the devil. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t…”516Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡvBFDevmYEG
Eihm’s voice stumbled and tumbled into chaos, and he could no longer focus on the talking, the thinking, or the walking. A malicious sickness was filling him with slimy dread, and as the young monk lost control of his mind, body, and spirit, so too was control over his stomach, his bowels, and his nerves lost. He was a sobbing, chattering wreck for an hour and a half before he could control his twitching fingers, and it was another hour before he could quiet the involuntary shouting and his body listened to him enough to uncurl from a spasming, fetal hug.
When the moon came closer to the horizon and Eihm could make out the silhouette of trees, he headed into the darkness of the small forest, talking to himself the entire time and pretending for the sake of his sanity that it was the dark, stoic trees who spoke. Groping within the dried leaves he was able to find a stiff branch, and with great effort and pain snapped it in two. It was with this branch that his experiments began, supervised and verbally recorded, if rather unscientifically, by the stout tree-trunks.
Eihm soon found that, after much unsuccessful flexing, chanting, and posing, that in the beams of moonlight that pierced the canopies he could make out a faint red aura around the stick. It unnerved him greatly, and with its light in his eyesight a specter of the dread of the nightmare spears darkened his heart.516Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡsYZUuUGLji
"Sixty-three spears... less than last time." This thought past his lips seemed to tear a rent in his mind, with thoughts of torurous pain leaking into his consciousness like blood. He began babbling uncontrollably. "Spears", "pain", and "darkness" chased around and around after each othe rin his voice. 516Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAq2cfIWJXF
His perception of the broken stick slowly barged its way through the chaos to the forefront of his mind. The light around it seemed to flash at him between moments of incoherence, until it could no longe rbe ignored. Once the red aura remained steady, outlining the two pieces of the stick, he could faintly make out the runes on his right arm; even in the dark.
They frightened him - those red, angry symbols that burrowed into his flesh. If he could stand to notice them for too long, it sounded like another voice began speaking to him. One of the trees, claw like braches spreading their moon-lit shadow over him, trying to grasp him, somehow following him no matter where in the forest he went. And so as dawn began to tint the sky Eihm fled the forest, in his injured stumble, clutching the two sticks that were once whole in his right fist. As he glanced back, expecting to see that clawed tree pursuing him, he noticed, for just a moment, an old, bare-branched wooden coloumn, ensnared and shackled by creeping orange-leafed vines.
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