'How long has it been?'

I ask the darkness in hopes for a sliver of an answer, alas the void blackness remains its impassive attitude.

My body feels heavy, cocooned by layers upon layers of invisible weights, pressing down on me, crushing me.

There is no feeling in my limbs, there is no prickling on my skin, there is only profound vacuity. There is only a lingering sense of imbalance, of deprivation.

I hurried my mind; remember! It dreaded me that if I didn't do it now I would forever lose all adjuncts of my life. I could tell I had a life, I still have a life, but it feels different.

I skimmed through the complex maze that was my inner sanctum, my heart, my feelings, my memories.

I saw many things, felt even more, and yet sorrow tided over me, crashed onto my soul with ravenous greed. There was a distinct lust, a craving for the past, and regrets, heaps, no, mountains of regrets. They loomed over me like monolithic titans, a finger enough to crush my spirit, obliterate my soul.

I embraced the solitude, the regrets and the pain. I scooped it all up, penned and compressed until I could fit it inside my hollow heart. There I burned it all up, used it to fuel and heat what had lon been frozen.

Laid on ice my emotions came back to me, the emotions from that fateful day. The thoughts as I ascended into a higher plane, where I left my mortal husk and began treading the path of immortality. I felt them like it was yesterday.

How my lover left me, how she cried from the loss, tears rolling down her beady eyes like glittering rivulets. 'Why are you crying? I am not worth it.', I tried to shout out. I tried to reach the kneeling woman with my brittle hands, frail and weak at the time. But the sands of time silted the flesh from my bones, cleaved my body apart.

I was a fool.

An esurient idiot that had it all in his hands, and then dropped it on the cold hard ground where it shattered; to be lost from his grip forevermore.

A fool I tell you.

All my life I was in pursuit of the truths, the edicts of magic and creation. The obsession, the zeal to improve this world with any means possible, to evolve myself and the human species, was festering deep inside my mind. It was an idea so compelling that I lost myself in it. I gazed into the abyss of magic, and it stared right back at me.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Not long after, after suffering fortnights straight without sleep sunken in my studies, I met her. The lithe girl that handled herself with a mirthful smile playing on her lips. The girl that understood magic second to none, the girl that enraptured me not only with her beauty but also with her wits.

"Diana...." Her name trailed of my tongue.

Her wonderful platinum blonde hair followed me into my sleepless nights, gave me comfort where I shouldn't even deserve it. Her sapphire eyes contained many more myths than magic could ever offer, only waiting to be discovered by me, but I was blinded by my sins. Her lips were sweeter than the most mellow of honeys, soothing not only to my rasp senses but also my fatigued mind.

And yet I rejected her, her kindness, her warmth, I rejected it all.

My craze, my appetite for power was grand, bigger than anything else, and it formed my life. I was named by kings and emperors, granted title after title, until I myself sat on their throne whilst their heads dangled on crimson speartips seaming their old city; my city!

I killed, treaded on hundreds of corpses, but my goal was steadily prying apart from my clutches.

Amidst all the chaos I lost her. She too was only a stepping stone for Godhood, for the new dawn of mankind, or so my old self thought.

But when I gaze at these memories now, so familiar yet so strange, all I can feel is sadness for the lone man. I feel sadness for the constructs he build to protect his insecure self; the Grand Emperor, Arbiter of Magic -self proclaimed-. I felt pity for the man.

Though I knew I was this man, though I knew nothing had changed and those feelings are only waiting to be regurgitated at the slightest inkling, I couldn't accept his name, my name.

I couldn't accept the foolish man that called himself King. I couldn't accept the tyrant Arkxius, the man that shunned his lover. Never again would I allow myself to fall into such depths.

Arkxius was dead, he died with his feverish constructs and ideas. Yes, he was dead, literally it seems. I chuckled as I felt around my arid digits. Arkxius was dead in the truest sense.

And it seems he achieved his goal, not as he imagined it, but he did it nonetheless.

But for now, let's get out of here.