It was dark, and I soon felt the kind of cold that had no business existing anywhere other than… well, death?
It felt like falling off a cliff whose bottom I could never reach.
Death, it turned out, was overrated.
I wasn't sure what I'd expected, but it wasn't this — an eternal, boundless abyss with nothing to show for it. No memories. No grand finale. No last curtain call. Just the good old void.
I should've stopped complaining. This was my permanent home now.
But something was wrong. Why was I still thinking?
Was this the last stretch of consciousness people talked about? The part where your memories replay, where you're shown something before the true end? I'd heard about it.
I waited. Patiently, I'd like to think.
The abyss offered nothing.
I'm not stupid. A little mad, maybe. But not stupid.
Something was dreadfully wrong here.
Damn. It seems I can't even kill myself properly.
This world is a nightmare. I swear — if I'm somehow not dead, I'll burn every last piece of it to the ground.
Then again, who am I kidding? I've been cursed—multiple times. Life has a sense of humor like that — a terrible, exhausting sense of humor that never seems to land.
Honestly, Life needs to relax. She's far too harsh. No wonder Death and Misfortune have better reputations. Much chiller company. Far better taste.
Though didn't the system once say they were my lovers? Funny how that works out.
Curses. I'm so tired of it all. Just let me slee—
[Error]
[ERROR — FOREIGN ENERGY DETECTE— ERROR]
Pain.
Pain. I felt serious pain. It tore through whatever I still was, and I was certain of it: my very soul was on fire. Nay, my very existence was being burned alive from the inside out.
[ATTEMPTING SOUL OVERRIDE — FAILED]
[ATTEMPTING DELETION — SYSTEM FAILED]
[FAILURE. FAILURE. FAILURE.]
[FOREIGN ENERGY HAS GAINED ENTRY SUCCESSFULLY]
[Your existence is being erased]
[ERROR]
I wanted to scream, but alas, I had no mouth.
The void around me had begun to tremble. The quiet stillness that had held for so long shattered all at once, as if the abyss itself recoiled from what was happening to me.
It felt like an eternity. The pain never subsided. My mind went numb somewhere in the middle of it.
What was I? Who am I? Where—
No. I knew where I was. I was in Hell. This was Hell. I suddenly felt as if millions of different needles were making their way through my mind; the pain and agony were unbearable.
Yet even in my agony, I had realized that the abyss was slowly collapsing towards me. Moving toward me, slow and inevitable, as if it had simply decided it was finally done with me.
I watched it come. There was nothing else I could do.
The abyss consumed me.
[Wake up, Alymur of Noone. Your Nightmare has begun…]
Light. Blinding and sudden, tearing through everything before I could make sense of anything.
Then it was gone.
The biting cold showed me no mercy, and it was the very first thing that brought me to my new reality. My eyes dragged the world into focus piece by piece: snow, dark trees, mountains, a vast open valley swallowed whole by a grey sky.
Not the cave.
Definitely not the cave where I had died.
My legs gave out. I hit the snow on my knees, hands sinking into the cold, and I stayed there — just stayed there, staring at my trembling fingers while my heart continued to thump loudly, each beat slowly echoing in the valley I was in.
How?
I had been certain. I was dead. I felt it. I saw my own end. There was no coming back from that type of death.
Yet here I was.
A dreadful feeling settled over me, slow and heavy.
Did Death reject me?
Am I that unwanted?
Even in dying, I couldn't manage to do it right. Truly, a man of consistent failure.
I forced myself upright and made myself look at where I'd ended up.
The sky was a pale, washed-out grey — deeply depressing, might I add. Tall, dark trees ringed the valley around me, their bare branches cutting against the sky like old cracks in older stone, each one easily dwarfing me. An eerie silence permeated throughout the forest, as if daring someone to disturb the tranquil peace.
Out in the distance, a single path wound through the snow toward one of the far mountains, half-swallowed by the treeline.
I stared at it.
Screwed, I thought. Completely and utterly screwed.
Was I even still human?
The answer, if there was one, probably lay somewhere at the end of that path. Not that I had any other options.
I made myself move. One step, then another, my footsteps swallowed almost immediately by the silence of the woods.
I had no idea if I was still in the same world — or whether I'd stumbled into one of the death zones from the geography lessons at the orphanage.
Deep down, the possibility terrified me.
How am I supposed to survive this?
What am I even doing here?
Two questions. No answers. Just snow, and silence, and a path I had no choice but to walk.
Death zones. In this world, there were only seven of them, the forbidden places no adventurer had ever returned from. Expeditions packed with experts, funded by kings, blessed by priests. Gone. Entire parties swallowed without a trace. Rulers had tried to map them. A few had tried to conquer them. Not one had managed either.
We learned about them in geography at the orphanage, tucked between lessons on trade routes and river systems as if they were simply another fact of the world, something to memorize and move on from. I remembered thinking, at the time, that only a fool would ever end up in one.
Noted.
It seems I am the fool.
The thought should've broken me. I mean, perhaps it did. I am sure my 14-year-old, highly mature mind can endure this.
But somewhere between the cold and the silence and the impossible fact of still being alive, something else surfaced instead.
Spite.
Raw, ugly, completely irrational spite.
I let out a laugh. Slow at first, then less controlled, escaping my lips in a way that had nothing to do with anything being funny. My eyes were wet. I hadn't noticed until just now.
Fuck this. So what if Death had rejected me? So what if I had no power, no system, no idea where I was or what was waiting for me in those trees?
"I will live in spite," I said aloud, to no one. "I will torment every last one of you — the gods, their apostles, every rotten piece of this world that thought it could be done with me."
My voice echoed and then disappeared into the trees.
I started walking toward the path, laughter still catching at the edges of my breath.
"And if even my own lover won't have me," I added, almost conversationally, "then I'll force my way to her."
"A lamb," I muttered, almost to myself. "That's what the system called me. A lamb."
I almost laughed again.
"So what? Even cornered prey fights back."
A smile had settled onto my face somewhere along the way. I could feel it, the sort of smile I always carried when I refused to take my medicines, a smile that greatly unsettled the kids around me.
I carried down the beaten path, the cold chipping away at my mind.