Flesh blistered from the heat, bubbling and splitting in grotesque patterns across Alatar's body. He clawed at himself in frenzy, nails raking down charred skin until strips of him came away in his hands. His screams tore from a throat already ruined, raw and flayed by the act of speaking, but the sound that emerged was no longer human—wet, alien, broken, as though reality itself tried to strangle the syllables.
He struck his head against the stone block, again and again, desperate for release. Bone cracked. Blood painted the runes. His body crumpled. For a moment, he welcomed the dark tide of death—
But it never came.
The agony healed him.
It would not let him die.
The flesh he ripped away reknit itself, wet tissue threading back over bone. The skull he shattered mended with a sound like stone grinding against stone. Every wound sealed only to split anew as the fire reignited, hotter, crueler.
He lost count of time. Days? Months? Years? He could not tell. There was no sun, no moon—only pain.
His tears blackened, tar-like, yet still evaporated as soon as they formed, leaving scorched tracks down hollowed cheeks. His eyes burned away, sockets collapsing into ashen craters—yet still the void within wept. Dark rivers formed where eyes should have been, a ceaseless cycle of grief and fire.
His bones twisted and warped, splintering into obscene shapes, only to snap back into place with each pulse of regeneration. His spine curled, contorted, then cracked upright again, endlessly broken and remade. Muscles sloughed off like melting wax, organs withered into ash, his heart disintegrated into dust—yet each time, in less than a heartbeat, he was made whole again. Whole only to suffer anew.
Every return was worse than the last. Every rebirth dragged him deeper into a well of torment no mortal mind could comprehend.
Death had never felt sweeter.
The silent front entrance of the temple bore witness, unflinching. Its runes glowed faintly, feeding on his torment, while his guttural, alien screams echoed endlessly through the sanctum. The sound was not merely heard—it reverberated in the stone, in the air, in the marrow of the temple itself.
If mercy were real, surely it would have pitied him.
But there was no mercy here. No reprieve. Only silence, unbroken and eternal, watching him writhe.
Alatar did not ask for this fate.
And yet he endured it—trapped, flayed, rebuilt—his body the crucible of a truth far greater than himself.
Time moved like nothing mattered, as though the universe itself had forgotten him.
And still he screamed.
The torment did not relent.
Alatar's body blistered, burned, collapsed, and reformed in endless cycles of agony. Each time he shattered, he was rebuilt; each time he begged for death, life was thrust back upon him. His flesh was no longer his own—it was a canvas for suffering.
But something else began to stir.
Each time he was reborn, the gray markings carved into his flesh—those strange, ancient sigils that had appeared with the devouring of the blue llight—flared faintly. Only for a second. A dim, ghostly light, easily mistaken for the afterimage of pain. Alatar, locked in torment, never noticed.
And from the towering doors of the temple, a dark soot seeped. It drifted like ash carried on invisible winds, trailing down in slow, patient rivulets. The soot clung to him, coating blistered flesh before burning away with the next cycle, only to return again, thicker, heavier, more insistent.
It did not scatter. It did not fade. It stuck.
At first, it gathered on his skin like dust. But with each rebirth, tiny filaments of the substance seeped inward. Minute streams of black flowed into his throat, his lungs, his heart. The soot moved with intent, carried by veins of fire and blood, embedding itself where no cleansing flame could reach.
Alatar did not notice. He could not. His screams drowned every other sensation, his sanity unraveling strand by strand. Hope had long since fled him. Time was meaningless. Hours bled into days, days into years, years into… something else.
Endurance became his only truth—an endurance in which he had no choice.
And still the ash crept deeper.
To an outside witness—had there been one—they might have seen the pattern, might have understood the design hidden in the agony. The soot gathered with impossible patience, building cell by cell, stitch by stitch. They would have realized that whatever transformation was occurring was not for the present, nor even for centuries.
It would take ten thousand years.
A scale no mortal could comprehend. A span of time in which kingdoms would rise and fall, stars might die and collapse, and still Alatar would suffer in silence, burning, breaking, screaming, reborn.
He remained blind to all of it.
His body cracked, healed, cracked again. His hollow sockets wept black tears that steamed away into nothingness. His bones shrieked as they twisted and reformed. His voice was reduced to a guttural rattle, an alien sound that echoed forever within the sanctum.
And through it all, the temple stood silent and watching, its runes pulsing faintly with every cycle, feeding on every scream.
The soot clung. The markings glowed. The silence deepened.
And Alatar endured, unaware that something vast, patient, and inevitable was already rewriting him from within.
The pain never ceased.
Every attempt to voice the Etymon-script still seared through him, an endless cycle of burning, blistering, breaking, and remaking. Yet with each rebirth, the soot-like substance crept further. What had once clung to his skin now lived inside him. It invaded organs, seeped into marrow, flowed along nerves, and threaded itself through his veins until he no longer knew where he ended and the substance began.
Millennia passed in this crucible.
His body shattered and rebuilt without mercy. His mind followed. Each time his sanity broke—splintering like glass under the hammer of pain—it was remade, just as his flesh was. But these rebirths of mind were not like the rebirths of flesh. They brought… something new.
Wondrous, even.
It was not that the pain lessened—oh no, the flames still gutted him, the silence still devoured him—but his perception shifted. His mind had expanded, stretched into places it had never touched before. With each remake, he found he could take a part of himself—his terror, his grief, his raw nerve of suffering—and lock it away.
Sealed, hidden, unreachable.
Each fracture of sanity became a brick in a new fortress. And within that fortress, the torment was no longer absolute. He bore it differently. He endured.
Until, piece by piece, he became something else.
Only a sliver of his inner consciousness remained raw and untouched, a shard of memory to remind him of who he was. But the rest—cold, distant, unfeeling—became a machine of endurance. Apathy. Silence.
This change was not his alone. The black soot had seeped further than flesh. It had wound itself into his neural pathways, twisting thought, reshaping how he perceived the world. His organs pulsed with it. His brain thrummed with it. His very sense of self bent beneath its weight.
And yet… Alatar did not know. Not fully. Not yet.
Two hundred years remained before the soot would fully merge with every cell in his body, rewriting him at the most fundamental level. But the transformation was already underway.
Now he sat against a cracked pillar in the silent temple, his body still withering and burning from within. Skin peeled, bones glowed faintly as if lit from beneath, black tears tracked from his hollow sockets. His form decayed, reformed, decayed again—an endless cycle—but no screams came anymore.
He simply watched.
Waited.
Breath rattling, flesh failing, his hollow gaze fixed on nothing. His mind, fortified by centuries of breaking and rebuilding, endured what would have destroyed any other being countless ages ago.
Alatar did not pray for release anymore. He did not plead.
He simply… was.
A shadow of what he had been. A vessel awaiting something he could not yet name.