Damp. As the knight continued walking from pillar to pillar in a giant cavern, he came to the conclusion that the room was growing more damp by the minute. Due to his still sensitive hearing, he could hear the hundreds of droplets of blood seeping through the ceiling, and their growing speeds that made the knight's head throb in agony–he really needed a break. Along with the dripping, he heard the beginnings of cracks in the corners of the room, fighting a battle against the obsidian and marble that made up the room, with the sounds of bubbling blood beginning to surface from the wounds in the obsidian, but it was very, very slow.
He glanced about the room, he knew that he should probably leave the room, but leaving the knowledge of the giant known as Soven, was not something that he wished to do. From what he had gathered so far, the original Black Knight had craved power for some unknown reason, but if the hyper detailed illustration chiselled into the marble was anywhere near accurate–it was a vengeful, depressing reason. He sought out a source of power after years of stagnation, and what he found were several blades of darkness held at the minimum of a bottomless pit–probably metaphorically bottomless. He had been some type of leader in the country he sired from–maybe a noble of some shape. The Black Knight had gone on a rampage after that, killing many in his uncontrollable rage given monstrous power, he toppled everything after that.
The city–only represented by blue lines bisecting the pit walls for some odd reason–had been left red after all the carnage, then, in what he assumed to be quite a number of years, the black knight ran around the continent murdering anything he saw, and in a final stand by the rest of the continent, numerous countries of the era gathered together to end the vile man, and only then did the knight gain control of himself, after a single picture of the knight holding the corpse of a woman–who he could only assume to be his daughter, as that was one of the few bits of information that he had let slip in his nonsensical rants–yet he continued killing, he no longer had a reason to, yet the images of people staked on blades of black on large red pigmented battlefields remained. It was like he had simply lost his purpose in living.
The knight wasn't sure what he was looking at after that, but the images were the most detailed out of all them from that point moving forward in the story. He would almost call them dreams, with random fragments of other scenes of a man–probably the black knight–living a simple life. Walking with a girl that went to his hip in height, on a street simply painted sapphire–again, whatever that meant. The next depiction was a giant–yet nowhere near the simply numbing stature of the true giant… It created a question.
'Could the giants shift sizes?' It was a theory that could add up–why death seemed to be such a thin creature despite being of a race known for moving mountains on a whim. It was a shrimp–and that was something that had puzzled him a little bit after their first encounter, but that would make sense. In the final two sketches, there were only two figures, only represented by faded pigments of white and black in the first in the same space that had appeared in the previous delirious place that was the setting for the previous pillar, but now they were shaking hands. In many of the carvings from this story, there was attempts at adding emotion, the greatest of these being the horror, and deeply depressive feeling that the carving of a father holding his dead daughter in his hands–which he caused–but even that didn't quite land on the mark, but these last two seemed to not just been illusive in setting, but contrastingly blatant in the nature of them–as if these pictures were torn directly from the fragile indestructible fabric of time and placed here as a trophy. There was such deluded sorrow in the black knight's stance that the knight could almost see the black knight quivering on the two dimensional plain–much like the dragon in the blade of Rising Tide–the heart of metal.
The knight stared at the handshake for a moment, a tide of typhoon-like emotions ripping through anything it came in contact with, adding it all to its own ferocity. There was something so wrong about the final image at the very end of the hall, that the knight took a small step back. There was so much depressing acceptance that he almost hurled in his helmet. He had assumed that Soven forcefully took over the knight's body, but it was so much more complex than that–that man wanted to die, he knew what he did was wrong–but he continued, even after getting his body back. He seemingly loved blood in the crazed state he was in, for he never stopped tormenting this land, yet when he was given the chance to stop, he decided to continue tormenting them, even when it hurt him. What did he want to gain from such genocide? There was nothing left for him to take away from the people of the land, yet he continued taking what they didn't have, and now that very same man was tormenting the knight, for a very different reason. The simple question: why?
Just looking back on the images he had seen described in the white stone as tall as the sky made memories creep up. Memories that did not need to be dug up from the graveyard.
Red painted the gray stone pathway. The knight looked around, Rising Tide glistened in the blood that encased it–the blood of innocents. Orange was the primary color for the night sky as the flames of death engulfed the land, but that's not what had his attention. It wasn't the slow dripping of the thick red liquid that had been soothing to him while he needed to see clearly, it wasn't the anguished filled screams of women in the night, calling out the names of their children in his language, no. What had taken all his attention was the small girl of seven years of age laid in front of him. Her skin was pale, growing more pale by the second. Her once vibrant, lively, and almost mischievous blue eyes were cloudy. Death had taken her from the knight–and there was no one to blame but himself. A single slash was on her body, separating her head from the rest of her pajama covered body. In her small innocent hand was a brown bear that he had given to her, not four months prior. Blood spilled from both sides of the wound, staining her white gown, the stones beneath her, and his feet stood next to her body. The look of confusion on her face that had morphed into mortification was permanently branded into his memory–but his mission wasn't over.
The knight's eyes shuddered open instantly, a silent scream on his agony ridden face. Why did she have to appear to him? There was no reason for the arcane of his memory to surface in a place like this. Tears strung down his face like the ropes of a noose would wrap around the neck of a disgraced one. The world spun in his vision. Staggering, he put a hand on the marble and breathed in and out violently. The memory replayed. Then it stopped. To which it played again. And it played again. He held it in for a moment, an intense feeling of disdain for getting bile in his helmet manifested, in his armor shifting, melding into something atypical from what it had been a few moments prior. The heavy plated armor turned into something thinner, yet it retained its same durability, enabling better range of motion, while sacrificing nothing. The armor receded from his left arm, revealing his arm of shadow now with a mark of light inside the palm. The helmet had melted into the knights face for a moment before it expanded into a long, maroon cloak kept around the knights neck by a string made of a distinctly metallic tinge. The knight's face was revealed to the warmth for a moment. He may have been clean shaven in the past, but in the current moment, he had a slightly thick, scraggly beard that did not articulate how long it had been growing for, dark bags were hung like potato sacks underneath a pair of distinctly frightened chocolate eyes releasing streams of white hot tears. His unkempt brown hair fell onto his face, blocking the star-like scar on his left cheek. There was a knitting in his brow that could only come from a clearly horrifying event playing in front of someone. A tremble in his lip was gritted back, but was forced forward as the knight let loose pure bile onto the ground in front of him, colliding and mixing with the coagulating blood from the depths of the black igneous. Quickly after, the hood changed again, morphing into a red helm not unlike how it had been before–yet definitely less bulky–allowing for more visibility than he had ever dreamed of while having the can on his head.
The armor had shunk on his frame, while shifting around, molding to the wishes of what the knight had wanted previously. Joints were expertly crafted around, both protecting the joints, and allowing for an exorbitantly more amount of movement. The tapestry remained on the armor, the same tapestry showing off his once grand, mountain destroying fight with the heavily wounded face of demonic life–or faces, would be more appropriate. The delineate of the brawl seemed to be even more intricate than it had been before the strange remelding of the armor he wore, but the knight was still trapped in his mind–guilt having consumed his mind. His eyes were dilating, his breath was growing ragged as his back hit the pillar he had been slowly backing into, which had been slightly submerged in the blood flooding the room from the deep rifts in the obsidian floor, and seeing the blood only made the knight more hysterical. He silently slid down the pillar, he was still laid upon. Tears still pouring down, he wept to himself–the guilt dredged up. It wasn't a knife stabbed through his heart, it was his body getting ripped apart. His gut felt like it was escaping him– Kat didn't deserve what he did to her–none of them did, so why did he do it? Why did he do it? He had asked himself that same question as he stared at her corpse, as he walked over her body and continued his purge. Where does it end? He asked himself, but he didn't stop. The rage in his heart could not be washed away by the death of those close to him. She was ripped from him, and he was blinded by rage. He could remember it so vividly despite playing backseat the entire time.
The drips of blood from the ceiling which were so painfully clear seemed so distant to the screams of agony as he relived the past–without his own consent. The blaring images and colorful sounds were plastered around what he perceived to be the entire room he was in. Muttering turned into a whisper, a whisper into regular level, and then the simple repeated phrase became a crazed chant at the top of his lungs, saliva flying out of his mouth, as he lowered his head to the floor in front of him. The pond of blood he had sat in rippled when his helm connected with the warm liquid and touched down onto the equally warm glassy floor. Thankfully, blood did not leak into his helmet, but the tears definitely leaked out of it. He was bowing, he wasn't sure who he was bowing to, but this is the stance he felt that he needed to assume.
"Im sorry," he said. The cracking in his voice carried over from each and every repetition of the twin words, growing in octave, until he reached the loudest his voice could manage. The shouts reverberated around the room, echoing almost as loudly as the sobs echoed in his own ears. His cracky voice assumed its whisper, as he continued chanting his apology, something that had been long overdue.
He remained in that spot for an indeterminate amount of time, the shudders in his shoulders and back slowly growing weary of itself, as his body gave out for exhaustion. There were no more tears to let out. There were no more wails. There was only the painful silence that the consequences of one's actions could cause. Guilt.