Pain.

Excruciating, eternal pain.

I wanted to learn back, to scream, to do anything. The best I could settle for was a low moan, escaping out of my treacherous mouth, my throat cracking and straining under even that strain. Tingling nettles of agony drew patterns in my arms, legs, chest, everywhere. Electricity worked itself through my muscles, power pervading my body and filling me with a lightning-esque energy that writhed like a living thing inside of me. The urge to vomit rose and faded with the ebbs and flows of the energy coursing through me, pumping through me with every beat of my heart.

Time passed. I felt something flow down my throat, feeling it balm my energy-scorched throat for only a second before it returned in full force. The thrumming energy slowly, ever so painfully slowly, began to recede. It faded with every shuddering, thorn-bitten beat of my heart. The thrumming energy began to feel less painful as time passed, on occasion feeling more water travel down my tortured throat. I took a deep breath, releasing a long, shuddering sigh, the sound a cross between a relieved breath and a death rattle. Slowly, carefully, I cracked my eyes open.

And I could see.

Obviously, my eyes could see the blurred outline of what looked to be foliage. But I meant I could see something…different.

Well, ‘see’ seems like the wrong term for it. Any sensation that would describe it would seem different. I felt some strange…thing, traveling through my body, through the air, through the ground below me. I felt it in every inhale, every exhale, through the wind, through the warmth of something surrounding me…blankets? I refocused my mind towards the sensation. It wasn’t exactly like a force, but it felt like…a pressure, but even that was misleading. Like pressure, I could feel the force behind it, but I could also taste the strange thing flowing through the air, feel it against my skin, hear it like a faint, harmonious hum, a mechanical thrumming noise to accompany it. I could see its dimensions in my mind's eye, like wide, swirling masses of a light-gray color. It was, altogether, an extremely confusing sensation, to feel something that so obviously was outside my own senses.

I let out another rattling sigh. In, out. In, out.

Eventually, I managed to tone down and parse through the overwhelming sensations and nausea pervading my mind, body, and soul. With another deep breath, I tried to sit.

And immediately regretted my decision.

My entire body twitched as the agonizing, tearing electric sensation seemed to tear through my veins like butter, mind going blank and vision flashing white for a moment before I vaguely felt myself slam back down onto the ground, almost arching my back on instinct by slamming down on very solid ground. Instead, I let out a wheezing cough, turning my head to the side with another jolt of agony as I spat out a reddish liquid interspersed with bright blue that looked startlingly similar to blood. Another set of coughs wracked my body as I spat out more of the stuff.

Through the ringing in my head from the overwhelming sensations pounding into me and the pain still running through my body like a thousand angry termites, I heard the sound of someone rushing over and moving my head to the side, tilting it upwards and placing a liquid- water, thank the gods forgotten and revered- on my lips. I spluttered and coughed for a moment, unused to drinking while laying down, but eventually adapted and drank greedily, letting the substance balm my shredded and burned throat. I heard something saying something, but it sounded muffled, unimportant, like someone was trying to talk to me while underwater. I squinted up at the figure that had saved me from thirst, my eyes still blurry from having just woken up.

I continued staring and squinting, until a pair of brown eyes staring down at me with a kind expression, leathered dark skin curling up into a smile. After a couple more moments of focusing, my mind clicked. The farmer I was traveling with. He must have saved me from…

Something in my mind clicked, a rush of memories overcoming me as I suddenly remembered what I had done during the night, some undeterminable time ago. The camp, the robbery, the drinking of Titan’s Blood…the eviscerating pain that coursed through me. The power. I thought I was going to die, crushed by the sheer weight of opening myself to a fount of infinite energy. But I was still alive. Somehow.

I looked back to my savior, a thorn of guilt lodging itself in my chest as I realized that I hadn’t even asked for the man’s name. A few more seconds passed before I realized that he was talking to me, meaning I should probably listen.

Look, I was a little out of it at the time.

“-ye were extremely dehydrated for a while, so I used what I could salvage from the cart.” The man was saying, a flicker of frustration crossing his face for a moment. “Not that there was much left, anywho. You definitely saved both of us from a death sentence back there. But…” he released a slow, steady breath. “I’m not sure what to do from here, to be honest.”

I opened my mouth to respond, only to let out another fit of coughs. The farmer frowned at me. “Try not to speak. Or move. Or… do much of anything, to be honest. I have no idea how ye’re even alive right now. That explosion…” He shuddered, slightly. “I would’ve thought anything nearby would be ashes, you included.

A wide variety of comments, from snarky to genuine, built up in my head. However, I listened to the farmer and said nothing, much to my frustration. The farmer then sat up and brushed off his pants. “Now, I’m going to go get some food fer us. We’ve been workin’ on berries that I found in the forest, for the most part. Not the best, but they’ll keep us alive till ye can get up and walkin’ again.”

Silently, I hoped that I recovered quickly.

I did not recover quickly. Not even close. Every breath was a fight, every word was agony, and every movement sent what felt like lightning arcing through my body. The berries were enough to sustain the both of us, but just barely. The farmer, who’s name I now knew as Darmo, had gathered water by a nearby river, which was luckily very close. It took a day for my throat to have recovered enough to speak. From there, time was a blur of trying to understand this new sensation I had, learning about Darmo’s life, and going through a series of extremely painful exercises to get my muscles moving again. During that time, I made many startling discoveries.

The first one was the most obvious. I stared down at my hands numbly, frowning in confusion. They were completely unblemished, clean, and still tingling with painful energy. I would have expected…something to have happened to my body after experiencing that. Horrible scarring, maybe. Glowing energy to replace my veins. Something. But no, my hands remained in the same condition as it was the day before the incident. A quick question to Darmo had told me that I didn’t have scarring anywhere else. I didn’t know the complexities of magic, but I thought that there would be more extreme consequences than some pain, no matter how extreme.

Not that I was complaining, of course.

I began to focus on the swirling patterns throughout the world, trying to make sense of it all. I realize I could sense the strength of these forces, in a very clear sense. I could feel a strong breeze versus a small one without ever coming into contact with them, and I could easily point out which tree was growing stronger than the others, even without looking at them. Reaching out with my senses was…strange. Again, that combination of pressure and warmth, hearing and taste, sight and sensation, entered my awareness. My mind was trying to interpret an indescribable sensation through a woefully insufficient system to describe it. I could feel things about a half a meter away from me in detail, the sensation fading until disappearing a full two meters away. Eventually, I turned my new senses towards Darmo, and…frowned.

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The energy traveling through him was small. Frail.

It traveled through his body in faint blue tendrils, barely noticeable even when I was right next to him. I focused on myself, and felt a thrumming, glowing whirlpool of blue, spiraling out from my chest and filling my body with power, like a surging river. Next to me, Darmo was…next to nothing. What was this strange sense, some metric of power? If so, was I really that much stronger than Darmo? The thought…troubled me, for some reason.

The third, though perhaps the least startling, about Darmo was his history. When he was a young child, he grew up deep into an area known as the Great Traveler’s Domain, a massive stretch of land that took up well over half of the continent, and was the literal and metaphorical stomping grounds of the Traveler. The thought still brought a fire to my chest, though I made sure to keep any feelings to bitterness away from my expression. He had escaped the Traveler, evacuating as he was near the edge of where its foot is supposed to land. If only I had been closer to the edge…

I shook my head and moved on. No use pointlessly focusing on what-ifs.

Time continued to pass by, my recovery still excruciatingly slow. Eventually, however, I grew able to move, then stand, then stagger, until eventually I felt able to walk without too much difficulty. The day we discovered that, Darmo decided that we should start our journey to the city. When we had a cart, we would have been about a day from the city.

The trip took half a week.

We had to stop frequently for me to rest, and to gather food. I knew a little bit about trapping from my travels, but not quite enough to feed both myself and my companion. But, regardless, we managed. The days blurred together in a mix of hunting, foraging, traveling and resting, never being truly still.

Eventually, we began to slow down near the last day, traveling at a somewhat casual pace. I had mostly recovered, and could basically walk for the entire day while barely needing a break.

As we continued traveling down a packed-dirt road, eyes trained around us for possible threats, I decided to strike up some conversation.

“So…What do you plan to do? After you get to the city, I mean.”

The farmer looked wistful for a moment, then glanced at me. “Well, I guess I’ll have to hire someone to get me back home, then try and find some way to get another cart.”

I winced at that. I was partially responsible for that, at least. While Darmo was going to lose his grain either way, he might’ve been able to keep the cart if I’d cooperated. I didn’t regret that, not at all, but I wished I had handled it better, at least.

After a moment of pause, I pursed my lips, considering something. I was planning on not doing anything like this until I had gotten to the city at least, but…

Darmo had helped me. He had kept me alive in the middle of nowhere, nursed me back to health, mostly at the detriment of himself. He waited patiently when I had to take breaks, and did all this when I had destroyed nearly his entire form of income for possible weeks, and probably put him into significant debt with the cart. It would be best to help him.

Begrudgingly, I looked at my own coin pouch-the very same that was given to me many years ago. With a sigh, I lifted up three gold brands, the form of currency in this area, and nearly a fifth of my current money stores, and handed it to him.

Darmo’s eyes grew wide at the sight of such cash. I gave a slight smile.

“That should be able to pay for a cart, and then some, right?”

Darmo, staring at the coins, nodded numbly. It made sense, this was probably the first time he had even seen an entire gold brand. Most paid in silver brands, at most.

“I-I can’t possibly take these,” he began, spluttering “that’s…thats probably more than I would’ve made in this entire trip!”

“Then see it as a gift for your troubles.” I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. I had made the decision to do this, so it was final. It was only a matter of how long it would take for me to convince him. And if he took until we reached the city, well…

I could always put something in his pockets as we said our goodbyes.

Darmo was still protesting the large sum of money being handed over to him, so I decided to cut off that line of thinking.

“Darmo, you’ve helped me recover from my…injuries, and fed me when you could have just left without me. If you had left once you got here, you would have been in the city more than a week ago. More than that, I had, however accidentally or not, destroyed your cart and crops. This would just be paying for that. If anything, I should be paying for you more. If you hadn’t helped me recover, there’s no doubt in my mind that I would have died from thirst or starvation before I could recover enough to get food. I, in a very literal sense, owe you my life. Compared to that, I’m grossly underpaying.” I gave Darmo a side-eye. He knew that was true. If he didn’t he’d figure it out soon.

A moment of silence passed between us, and then Darmo quietly said, “Thank you.”

He took the coins, and then I smiled. “Think nothing of it.” I said, patting the farmer on the shoulder. “If you ever need something, just let me know. I’m not sure when or how you’ll be able to contact me soon, but eventually…” I grinned at the man, feeling that swirling energy I gained awareness of before seemed to twitch as I spoke. “...don’t be surprised if the rest of the world soon knows my name.”

The farmer blinked, then tilted his head back and laughed. “Well, I can’t blame ye fer not being ambitious enough, at least.”

A chuckle built up in my throat, and I released it, still grinning. “You’ll see.”

We fell into silence once more, noticing the treeline beginning to thin. We walked up to the peak of a hill, and stared at the vista before us.

The area around the city was brown and barren, the area quickly tapering off into a sharp cliff face, revealing a flat plane of stone that continued for as long as we could see. The sunset fell perfectly behind a silhouette. Spires rose up towards the sky, some hewn from stone, others of iron, all gleaming in the light of the falling sun. People came and went, walking around like ants from the distance. The spires all began to fall lower and lower, seemingly carved into the cliff face. The sight was, if anything, idyllic, with the metal lining some buildings sparkling in the sun and giving the air a feeling a warmth- and opportunity.

Darmo turned towards me, smiling in the bittersweet way marked by two friends parting ways. “I suppose this is it, then.”

I nod, unsure of what to say. “It is.”

They walked down to the city in silence, both of their eyes trained on the city, and towards the future.