Eclipse sat at the center of the temple, burning.
He was a lone, shining candle at the heart of the vast, dark space.
A terrible, silent light poured from his skin, brightening the ancient stone walls and casting monstrous, leaping shadows behind the pillars.
The light was not warm or divine; it was a cold, consuming fire that ate him from the inside out.
From his clamped jaw, suppressed groans escaped—low, animal sounds of agony that had no other outlet.
He felt his skin contract, tightening like parchment held too close to a flame before it blackened and dissolved.
He felt his flesh sear, the very substance of him dripping away in sizzling, liquid trails. It was a horror beyond description.
He wanted to scream until his lungs tore, to cry out until the very stones acknowledged his suffering. But he could not. His body was not his own in this ritual; it was merely the fuel.
Through the roaring haze of his own immolation, he heard the Archbishop speaking.
"I will make you a perfect being,"
the voice intoned, hollow and resonant in the chamber.
"You must become strong. You must be worthy of our God's grace. To be worthy, you must feel pain. You must endure it. I will train you until my last breath, until you become resistance to pain itself."
The voice was detached, as if the man were talking to himself, remarking on the weather. He spoke with the calm, repetitive cadence of a lunatic, the same phrases cycling like a cursed prayer. Over and over again.
Disgust, cold and sharp, cut through Eclipse's fiery torment. Every time. The Archbishop always said the same thing, as if possessed by a broken record of devotion.
He would employ every conceivable method of suffering, all in the name of forging "pain resistance." He tortured him daily and sanctimoniously called it "training."
That was why Eclipse deeply resented him.
.....
After an hour—a measure of time marked only by the gradual dimming of the unnatural light from Eclipse's body—the Archbishop finally ceased the spell.
He maintained a meticulous balance: he pushed Eclipse to the absolute precipice of death, then pulled him back.
Cool, healing magic washed over Eclipse's ravaged form, knitting charred flesh, soothing ravaged nerves, only to make them pristine for the next day's violation. The healing itself was a kind of violation.
The Archbishop stood, his ornate robes whispering against the flagstones. He looked down at the trembling form on the ground.
"Stand up"
he commanded, his voice now devoid of its chanting softness, hard as iron.
"Take your sword. Begin your daily routine."
Wordlessly, mechanically, Eclipse obeyed.
Every movement sent fresh echoes of pain through his newly-healed body, a ghost of the agony that had just possessed him.
He pushed himself to his feet, his legs unsteady, and began walking toward the pillar on the right side of the temple nave.
There, lying across two stone brackets, was the sword. It was a long, elegantly curved blade that resembled a katana, its length a stark, silver slash in the gloom.
He grabbed the scabbard, lifted the weapon free, and drew it. The shing of metal was the only true sound in the temple.
Then he grasped the hilt with both hands—his grip white-knuckled, desperate—and assumed the starting stance.
He began to swing.
Seeing this, the Archbishop turned. He walked slowly to the simple stone altar at the far end of the temple.
He knelt, intertwined his fingers, bowed his head, and began to pray in earnest, his whispers a soft, relentless counterpoint to the steady whoosh of the cutting blade.
...
Eclipse slashed the air vertically. A perfect, downward cut. He reset his stance. He slashed again. And again.
His palms, still tender from the morning's burning, began to protest. The friction heated the skin, forming blisters that would soon burst and re-form into calluses.
He did not stop. He had long ago lost count of the swings. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? The number was meaningless. The action was everything.
He fell into the void of repetition. The sword became an extension of his will, then of his soul, until finally, it felt as if his hands had become part of the sword itself—a living, suffering component of the cold steel.
Sweat sprang from every pore, beading on his brow, tracing paths through the grime and soot on his skin, and pouring down his body like a ceaseless, internal rain.
Time dissolved. In this state, he felt transported to a dark, formless space. A space without time, without light, without thought.
In that emptiness, there was only one truth: the arc of the sword, the pivot of his hips, the exhale on the cut.
He moved according to the Archbishop's ingrained instructions, a marionette whose strings were made of trauma and routine.
This was his life. It had become a terrible, unchanging ritual.
The variable was the morning's torture—somedays fire, somedays ice, somedays a slow, surgical precision with needles.
The constant was the afternoon of the sword. His body, made of an alien material, had no need for sleep.
Yet, his consciousness craved it. His eyes would flutter, his vision blurring with a profound, spiritual exhaustion that no amount of physical rest could cure. He was perpetually, utterly weary.
In this forsaken place, discerning the passage of days was a challenge.
Thick, eternal clouds swirled perpetually in the sky beyond the temple's open roof, a gray shroud that blocked the sun and cast the land in a perpetual, gloomy twilight.
The only reliable marker of a day's end was the Archbishop himself.
The cycle was immutable: the morning torture, the healing, the command, the sword drills, and finally, the Archbishop's prayers at the altar.
When the prayers concluded, the Archbishop would rise and the day's final, formal instruction would begin—lessons on theology, on anatomy, on the weaknesses of mythical beasts.
Eclipse had come to measure his life in the space between one prayer's end and the next prayer's beginning.
He had found another, fainter clock. Occasionally, on a rare night when the cloud cover broke, moonlight would descend.
A single, silver pillar would pierce the darkness through the oculus in the temple's high ceiling, painting a luminous coin on the floor. Eclipse watched for it. He counted.
It descended roughly every seven prayer-cycles. It was his week. He had counted many, many weeks.
The memory of his first sight of that moon was a faded, fragile thing.
When he had opened his eyes in this world for the very first time—understanding, with a jolt of impossible clarity, that he had been reborn—he had been overjoyed.
He had harbored great ambitions, dreams of conquest, of exploration, of a grand, new life unshackled from the past.
Now, after so many years of the same relentless cycle, those memories felt like they belonged to someone else.
They were fading, bleached of color and emotion, dissolving like mist under the relentless sun of his suffering.
There had been a time, fueled by a resurgence of that dying will, when he decided to escape.
He had explored the limits of the temple grounds during a rare unsupervised moment and found it: the Barrier.
It was invisible until you were upon it, a faint, shimmering distortion in the air, like heat rising from stone, humming with a potent, divine magic. It encircled the entire temple complex, a perfect, impassable dome.
The first thing he had done, fueled by a wild, desperate hope, was to try and break it.
He had slammed his fists against the shimmering air. The Barrier had felt solid, unyielding, and cold. It did not vibrate, did not crack, did not even acknowledge the impact.
It simply was. Enraged, screaming his throat raw with a fury he didn't know he still possessed, he had punched harder, throwing his entire weight behind the blows.
His knuckles split. His wrists ached. The Barrier remained pristine, untouched. His own arms were left bruised and bloody; the Barrier hadn't suffered a scratch.
Defeated, he had returned to the temple that night, the taste of copper and despair in his mouth.
But he had made a decision. A small, quiet act of defiance. He would go to the Barrier every day. Not always to pound on it—that was a lesson quickly learned.
Sometimes, he would just stand before it, press his palm against its cool, unyielding surface, and stare into the hazy freedom beyond.
He would test its edges, search for a flaw, a weakness, a momentary flicker. He did it even though, in his heart, he knew it was futile. The act itself was the point. It was a whisper to himself: I have not yet fully surrendered.
He would return to the temple, to the pillar, to the sword. He would lift the blade, his sore hands finding their familiar grip, and he would swing.
Whoosh.
Whoosh.
Whoosh.
The sound was the beating heart of his prison. Each cut was a moment endured. Each swing was a step on an endless path.
And in the rhythm, beneath the exhaustion and the resentment, a single, cold certainty was being forged, stroke by stroke, day by day, in the fire of agony and the silence of the moon.
He swung, and he waited.