Ashen Raizen thought he had gone blind.
The void was nothing but black. No shapes. No walls. No end. No meaning. Only silence, stretching forever.
At first, he almost believed this was peace. Maybe death had no suffering, no burden, no hunger. Just emptiness. He let himself drift, waiting for the end.
But it wasn't peace.
It began with a sting. Sharp, quick, like the prick of a needle. He flinched. His soul if that's what he was now shivered under it. The sting came again, then again, until there were hundreds of them.
He clenched against it. This is nothing he told himself. Compared to starving nights. Compared to freezing winters with no blanket. Compared to hunger clawing at his belly while people called him useless. Compared to those things, these stings were bearable.
But they grew worse.
The needles thickened into blades. Not sharp ones. Dull ones. Jagged edges that didn't slice clean but tore slowly, grinding against him as though trying to split his soul fiber by fiber.
Ashen screamed. The sound rang hollow, swallowed by the darkness, thrown back at him like mockery.
And when he thought he would be torn apart completely, when he believed he would finally scatter into nothing, the fire came.
Electricity seared through him. It didn't heal. It burned. It forced the broken pieces back together, every tear sealed shut with sparks that fried his being. It was crude, violent, like stitching flesh with barbed wire and acid.
It was worse than dying.
Cut. Burn. Repair. Cut. Burn. Repair.
Again and again.
At first he tried to count the cycles, whispering numbers to keep himself sane. One. Ten. Fifty. A hundred. But the numbers ran out, and the pain never did.
Time blurred. Days melted into weeks. Weeks bled into months. Months collapsed into years.
The void gave no end.
The knives grew slower, crueler, dragging themselves across him as though savoring his agony. The electricity grew harsher, repairing him only so he could be cut apart once more.
Ashen begged.
"Please… please stop…" His voice cracked, thin and pitiful. "I can't… I can't take it anymore…"
The void ignored him.
He cursed.
"Why?!" His scream tore through the darkness. "Why me?! Haven't I suffered enough already?! Why won't you let me die?!"
No answer. Only the next cut.
So the cycle continued.
Years became centuries. Centuries twisted into millennia. He lost all sense of time, his soul trapped in a wheel that never stopped turning.
And then, when he thought nothing could get worse, the hallucinations began.
At first, it was faint. A voice.
"Ashen… Ashen…"
His broken self jolted. That voice he knew it. It was her. His mother. Tired, pale, but soft, the way she had looked the night before she died.
"Mother…" His voice cracked. He reached out with trembling hands that weren't really there.
The knives struck. They ripped him apart, shredding the vision. His scream rang out, and when the fire seared him back together, her face was gone.
But the voices returned.
Sometimes it was his father, the man who left and never came back.
Sometimes it was the neighborhood children, laughing at him.
Sometimes it was his landlady, pounding on the door, shouting for rent.
All of them were there, and none of them were real.
The void mocked him with their words.
"Why didn't you study harder, Ashen?" his father scolded.
"Why are you so worthless?" the children jeered.
"You can't even pay rent," the landlady spat.
"You'll never amount to anything," they all chorused.
He screamed back until his voice dissolved. His pleas sounded like madness, bouncing back at him, twisting into more voices that weren't his.
There was no escape.
As the ages stretched, the hallucinations grew crueler.
He saw a table, steaming food laid upon it warm bread, rich soup, roasted meat. He staggered toward it, tears falling, reaching out only for the knives to carve him apart before he could taste it.
He saw a girl. A stranger, but her face was gentle. Her eyes kind. She looked at him as no one ever had without hatred, without mockery. Her hand reached for his. Warmth touched his soul.
And then electricity burned him alive, her face crumbling like smoke in the wind.
Sometimes he saw himself. A cracked reflection floating in the void.
"You're not even real anymore," the reflection whispered.
"You're just pain. That's all you are now."
And he believed it.
Centuries collapsed into one another. The past faded. His memories slipped like sand through broken fingers.
Faces blurred. The streets of his childhood disappeared. The blue sky, the pale moon, the taste of stale bread all of it dissolved.
Sometimes he tried to remember his name. "Ashen Raizen" The words felt strange on his tongue. Was that who he was? Or just another illusion?
He laughed sometimes, a broken, hollow laugh. Other times he wept until he forgot why. Most times, he simply lay still in the void, letting the knives tear and the fire stitch, too empty to resist.
But the void never stopped.
The pain worsened with each cycle. The knives grew heavier, dragging across his essence as though sawing at bone that wasn't there. The fire twisted, frying him inside out, pulling him back from the brink only to throw him into torment again.
There was no rest. No pause. No hope.
Ashen longed for silence. For an end. For true death. But the void refused.
His voice was gone. His thoughts cracked. His will dissolved.
Ashen Raizen, once mocked as hopeless, was no longer even hopeless. He was nothing.
Just a soul suspended in endless torture, hallucinating faces of the past, forgetting, remembering, forgetting again, until even forgetting lost its meaning.
Time had no shape.
Perhaps he had been here ten thousand years. Perhaps a million. Perhaps forever.
The knives cut.
The lightning burned.
The void swallowed his cries.
Ashen endured because he had no choice. Not out of strength. Not out of defiance. Only because the void refused to let him vanish.
And so his torment went on.