Darkness.
It was not the darkness of night, nor the kind birthed by the closing of eyes. It was older, deeper—an ancient void that existed before the first star had taken breath. In that vast, silent emptiness drifted a lone soul, weightless and without direction. No warmth touched it. No voice called to it. No memory of the living world reached it. Only the void remained, swallowing every echo of existence.
For most souls, such a place would have been the end.
For him… it was routine.
He had been here before.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Two hundred times.
He no longer wondered why. He no longer questioned the nature of the abyss. He had endured centuries beyond counting, each life a strange curse—each death a familiar release. The emptiness did not frighten him anymore. It had become a companion, a silent witness to his endless cycle of pain.
Then, as if the void itself exhaled, a thin crack of sensation touched him—one that he had come to dread more than death itself.
Birth.
The cycle was beginning again.
---
Sound returned before light. It always did.
First, the muffled rush—a storm of distant noises, panic, crying, footsteps shuffling, cloth tearing. Then came pain. A sharp pull, a violent lurch, the world tearing him out of the void and plunging him into existence.
He would not see the faces around him, but he could feel their fear.
There was always fear.
A cold wind brushed his skin. Somewhere above him, a woman's voice trembled with horror. Others whispered. Gasps thick with dread filled the air.
"What… what is happening to him?"
"He's aging—look at him! That thing is not a child!"
"It's a demon."
Yes. He remembered this part well.
Pain struck like fire, burning along his bones, reshaping him at impossible speed. His fragile newborn limbs stretched into youth, then adulthood. His spine twisted, then bent with age. Muscles hollowed, skin wrinkled and sagged. Teeth loosened. Hair thinned. His very cells crumbled.
Every breath was a scream trapped inside a body too broken to release it.
He had lived through this transformation in deserts, in castles, in iron cities, in floating islands, in demon pits. Every universe, every plane, every world he had ever touched forced him through the same grotesque birth.
But this world… this one was colder.
The villagers' fear was sharper.
The hatred in their voices struck deeper.
"Take him away!" someone shouted. "Do not let this abomination curse our village!"
He was ripped from hands that had not even held him with love. He felt rough cloth, the frenzied grip of panic, the hard slam of something wooden opening.
Then the drop.
A harsh, violent fall—and the sickening realization that he was being discarded like a pest, not a child.
The wind howled around him as he plunged downward—a fall so deep the air around him became heavy and suffocating. His body smashed against stone and rolled into a chamber so cold it felt like the bones of the earth itself.
When he opened his eyes—fragile, dim, barely functioning—he saw nothing.
Not darkness.
Emptiness.
An ancient underground prison, buried so far beneath the earth that even the concept of time had rotted away.
He had been thrown into a forgotten vault where sunlight had never touched stone. A place carved by fear, sealed by superstition, and left to die by history.
He would remain here.
Alone.
For years.
---
Time slipped through his grasp like dust. Days and nights had no meaning. Seasons did not exist here. The cold was constant, gnawing, unrelenting. Sometimes water dripped from the ceiling—tiny droplets that echoed through the cavern like the sighs of ghosts. He drank them when he could. Sometimes he lay awake for hours… or perhaps days… waiting for something—anything—to change.
But nothing ever did.
He grew again.
Bones straightened, muscles strengthened, vision sharpened. His body became that of a young man—strong, capable, agile. But the prison remained silent. He spoke to the stone walls, not for hope, but to remind himself that he still had a voice.
He wondered about the world above.
What sky stretched beyond the earth?
What people roamed the lands he had been rejected from?
What fate was this universe preparing for him?
Not that it mattered.
The cycle cared little for his thoughts.
Eventually, the curse reclaimed him.
The first sign was pain—deep, aching, crawling under his skin like a thousand needles. His breath came in sharp, ragged bursts. He felt the slow burn of reversal as his tissues began to shrink.
His body betrayed him.
Age reversed again.
Youth slipped away.
His limbs shortened.
His chest caved in.
His lungs grew smaller.
His voice withered into silence.
He knew this ending well. He had experienced it too many times to count.
Yet this time… despair felt heavier.
Perhaps it was because this world had offered nothing—not even a moment of kindness. Perhaps because the centuries of torment finally weighed too much. Or perhaps because the prison's silence had carved loneliness into the deepest parts of his soul.
When he finally curled into the shape of a newborn, his body trembling, his breath thin and fading, something inside his mind cracked.
And the flood began.
Two hundred lifetimes erupted through his consciousness at once.
Faces—some kind, some cruel.
Battles fought and lost.
Lands he had wandered.
Demons he had encountered.
Gods who had ignored him.
Deaths he had suffered.
Cries he had screamed.
Tears he had shed.
The memories didn't return softly or gently.
They tore through him, ripping open every scar, every wound, every pain.
He could not breathe.
He could not scream.
He could not move.
It felt as if his soul was being torn apart and stitched together at the same time.
He was drowning in his own existence.
And then—
without warning—
the darkness around him trembled.
A crack sounded through the void.
Not a physical sound.
A cosmic one.
The kind that made reality itself flinch.
A voice descended—deep, resonant, ancient beyond language.
"Enough."
The world froze.
"Your suffering ends here."
Something stepped into the prison chamber, though it did not enter through the walls or ceiling. It simply was, as if it had emerged from the concept of existence itself.
It had no fixed shape. Shadows swirled around it, bending, twisting, folding. Light refused to touch it. The darkness around it moved like living ink, devoured by the presence it radiated.
It knelt near him—this newborn curled in a trembling heap on the stone floor.
Its voice was soft, yet carried the weight of worlds.
"The Architect of Creation has chosen to intervene."
He felt something then—something he had not felt for two hundred lives.
Warmth.
Not physical warmth, but a warmth that reached his soul, like the touch of a forgotten sun.
"You have wandered long enough. Suffered long enough. Endured more than any mortal, immortal, or divine ever should."
A hand—if it could be called a hand—extended toward him.
Reality shook.
The cavern walls crumbled into dust without making a sound.
The earth above split apart in silent lines of light.
Time itself shattered, fragments of moments scattering like shards of glass.
"Be born now," the entity said, its voice trembling like the heartbeat of the universe,
"not for the last time…"
The prison dissolved.
The void cracked open.
A brilliance flooded the world.
"…but for the first."
Light exploded—pure, radiant, overwhelming.
He felt himself lifted, carried, hurled forward through a tunnel of color and sound that transcended anything he had ever experienced.
A new world awaited him.
A new body.
A new fate.
For two hundred lives, he had been nothing but a cursed soul trapped in an endless loop of decay.
But now…
for the first time…
he was being freed.
The light swallowed him whole.
And in that moment, he understood:
His true story had finally begun.