"Haah... haa... hah..."
Azalea panted, eyes blinking open into suffocating darkness.
"Fuck... haha... fuck," he wheezed in pain, but then laughed.
A humorless laugh.
The first thing to greet him, yet again, was pain, so mind-breaking it seemed to devour him from the inside out.
No.
This was worse than before.
His face.
It burned, it screamed, and something was terribly wrong.
"Aaahh!" he cried out, the agony spiking as realization dawned.
His face had been scorched.
He couldn't see it, but he felt it in the stiff twitch of ruined skin and in the raw nerve endings screaming with every shallow breath. It was charred, blackened, crisped.
"Again... yet again..." he groaned and let his eyes drift shut.
But something was off. Very off.
Why can't I move, he thought, his heart beating faster.
This wasn't like the last time, when he had woken up outside the academy with bones shattered and his body limp and broken. That had been raw physical trauma. This was something else entirely.
"My legs..." he whispered, eyes snapping open.
He wasn't lying down.
No.
He was suspended.
He strained, tilted his head painstakingly to the right, and saw it. Chains, heavy and cold, wrapped around his wrists. His vision sharpened in a jolt of panic and he turned the other way. More chains, holding him aloft. A room with stone walls, damp and empty and cruel.
He looked down.
And his mind stopped. It simply refused. His brain couldn't process what his eyes were showing him, couldn't accept it.
His legs were gone, chopped off at the thighs.
Gone.
"Hehehe... HeheheHEHEHEHAHAHAHAHA!"
He laughed. Dear gods, he laughed. He laughed until his ribs ached, until his lungs threatened to burst, until madness clung to his every breath.
So this was it, huh?
No escape, no salvation, no mercy. Even now, even after everything, he still wasn't spared. Still dying a stupid, meaningless death.
How hilarious. How absolutely hilarious.
He laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
But then came the sobs.
Tears welled up and slid down blistered skin, and even through the madness, even through the laughter, grief crawled in slowly. His legs were gone, and now the pain made complete sense, the screaming searing agony since the moment he had woken up, of course it did.
But another question slithered in.
How was he still alive?
No one should survive this kind of mutilation, no one. A potion, maybe, some twisted alchemy keeping him from death. Whatever it was, it meant only one thing. Whoever had done this wasn't done with him yet. They wanted to break him, fully and utterly, to shatter him until even he forgot who he was.
Sobs.
Pathetic.
He hated the tears. Hated being weak. But weakness had always been a part of him, since that life, the first one, the trauma, the past he had never fully shaken off.
His stepmother's sneer. The way his siblings looked past him like he wasn't there. The favoritism, the inequality, every single day shoved right in his face.
He remembered the day he walked out, quiet and alone and completely unnoticed. No one stopped him, and no one came looking for him, and so the loneliness grew.
He had juggled three part-time jobs while in college, scraping by and clawing his way toward some semblance of independence, saving enough for a tiny apartment that was still better than the one-room hole he had slept in after pawning off everything he owned. He bought a second-hand TV, a console, a few small things that made him feel human again.
That was when he found it. Arcane Resonance, seven parts and one sequel, a game so vast and immersive that it swallowed his loneliness whole. A world of magic, of freedom, of infinite possibility. It started small, just humans, but each part deepened and expanded and evolved, bringing more races and greater threats. By part three, Arcane Legacy, it had become clear that humans were the weakest race of all.
Still, he loved it, lost himself completely in it.
But not all memories from that time were welcome.
No.
One more crept in now, the real reason he had died, his first and greatest mistake.
Meeting her.