It began with a scream of pain. He did not know why his overseer's right hand was burning with true damage, but that ignorance didn't stop the overseer from looking at him with seething anger. The overseer's blood red eyes seemed to contain a strong disdain and disgust from his very presence like he had killed his favorite pet, but that painful scream attracted his fellow overseer friends.
"Eh's a Etaf Desruc!" the pained overseer spoke in his mirrored language. As for the young man himself, he knew that the overseers above him will inevitably choose to kill him upon the Dark Altar.
These overseers were the kind who devoured human flesh and souls—monsters that sent shivers down his very spine. If he was sacrificed upon the Dark Altar, not even his soul would be safe. This much he understood even if his eyes held confusion and thin traces of hope.
However, the mirrored tongued Overseer was not going to let the pain of true damage stop him from dragging the human male—no older than eighteen—from the corner to the Dark Altar. He wanted to slay his cattle and reap the benefits of long cultivation.
The scream erupted from his mouth for a split second before the Overseer bit it back as hard as he could. The sound of his sharp teeth grinding against themselves somewhat audible as the human male felt his body grow colder and weaker from fear. Each step closer to the Dark Altar felt like stones piling up on his back—an invisible weight that threatened to break his back—yet the Overseer's buddies were coming soon.
He heard about the last time they ate the flesh of, what they called, a Fate Cursed. They mentioned how tender the flesh was, the blood slightly warm, and the bones crushed to powder between their fingers. Even their soul was devoured like a light growing dim into darkness.
Into nothingness would have been a better word for it.
===÷[LOTR: CONVERGENCE]÷===
This world our protagonist lived in was far unlike any world he knew about in the past. He knew he reincarnated into this world as a newborn infant through a false promise from a god in where he was promised a new life with a loving parent and friends, but they failed to mention how bad this world truly was.
He had once expected to be in a world of magic where there were hot elves and muscular orcs, but that had been quickly dashed as he grew up. This world, called Orthon, was a world where monsters ruled over humanity and the latter seen as nothing more than mere cattle. He quickly understood that the Overseers, the monsters in charge of raising their stock, spoke in a reversed version of English yet this could have been part of a perk for reincarnators to understand all languages.
As for himself, he knew he had a name. His memory was sharp enough to recall a vague memory of seeing his mother once and she named him at the moment of his birth, but he never saw her again for over a decade. He had a feeling that the Overseers had killed and ate her since she gave birth to him, but all that did was turn his life down a darker road.
He tried to run, to flee, and find a place in this wide world that could offer protection for humans like him, but he couldn't. He was always caught by the Overseers or tracked down within the span of minutes. They always brought him back to suffer again the taste of hope before falling deeper into despair.
He hated the Overseers at the start, but that hatred soon felt hollow and useless as the Overseers were just that powerful. He had no idea why he was kept alive nor why they wanted to keep him until this very day, but it certainly was changing now.
===÷[LOTR: CONVERGENCE]÷===
He was jolted from an inner trip down Memory Lane by his back landing against the cold black stone of the Dark Altar. The Overseer who dragged him across the room finally let out a litany of curse words in his mirrored tongue as the pain of true damage wracked his nerves. The human male knew that the true damage was slowly killing him, but he also knew these Overseers were capable of self-revival.
One time, before today, he witnessed an Overseer be stabbed in a vital area by a human female he didnt recognize at all and the Overseer collapsed onto the ground in a small pool of dark gray blood. For a moment, it seemed like she had successfully killed one and wanted to trigger a rebellion, but her head went flying the next moment as the Overseer rose up from the ground. The blood was gone from the ground as if it went back into their body and they had used their own hand to kill her on the spot.
He witnessed it all and he decided to just stop resisting after that.
Now, as his ass was on the cold stone floor and his back laying against the Dark Altar, he felt that this life sucked and hoped a ridiculous event would occur to either save his soul or his body from these monsters. What happened next shocked him to the core.
===÷[LOTR: CONVERGENCE]÷===
On a lone meadow plain, covered in wild grass and the soft breeze carrying a faint scent of food, a human male appeared. His body lay on this strange meadow covered in cuts, scratches, gashes, and wounds that wouldn't heal easily. He was unconscious and clearly resembled someone in trouble, yet there wasn't anyone coming down this road for some time.
The nearest person to this area was a lone grey robed wizard that was already riding this path beforehand to find a certain dwarf prince, but he wouldn't arrive for a few moments.
If the Grey Pilgrim himself had known that someone needed help to heal, he probably would have arrived faster.
For the Convergence has begun.
===÷[LOTR: CONVERGENCE]÷===
Continued in: A Bumpy Ride.