Searing pain coursed through my arms as I scraped my way forward, inch by inch. I could feel the air brush across my broken and singed skin, causing strips of dead skin to flutter across raw sinew and fiber. Every mote of ash falling on my body amplified by the sheer sensitivity of my broken body, the muscles tattered and the tendons long since inflammed and ruined. 

I had long since lost track of time, or at least time in the sense of minutes and hours. Now I no longer thought of nor could think of what day it was, but rather kept a sense of "time" through the order in which wounds appeared on my body.

The first had been the scarring in my lungs, the ash clogging my esophogus and nostrils, burning microfibers and sensory hair as I retched and coughed untill my insides were as scarred as my outsides, scraps and bandages had been the only thing keeping my skin from the cruel tearing rocks and ashladen, sandwhipped winds. Then there was my broken leg, the fierce winds buffeting me off a small ledge, causing me to snap my right leg across a unlucky stone. And then the burns on my belly as I crawled forward, the scars on my fingers as they scrabbled for a fingerhold.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Despite all of this, despite the near debilitating amount of suffering I felt I still moved forward, walking at first, then crawling and now scraping forward with only my arms and hands, my legs and feet had long since been ravaged by the heat.

And oh yes the heat, how it burned and how it hurt. 

I wheezed out another mouthful of ashes, moisture no longer a thing in my body, and scrabbled for the next handold in the rock floor. Instead of a nice solid grip however, I held nothing but more grey ash. Ash was everything in this blasted hellscape, and hellscape it was, scorched black rocks, jagged like teeth ripping through the sky filled my sight, ash dancing like snow amongst everything, and the ominous orange glow of whatever lightsource was beyond the horizon filled my sight. It was a sight that I would've called beautiful had I not been dying.

Dying. Death. The great release. Oh how I wished for it to take me, and yet how I wished for it to never come. To die now would release me from the pain, and yet it would spit in the face of the distance I had traveled. I had traveled this far alone.

And yet I found myself stopping. My hands, which had momentss before been digging through the hot ashes now were at my throat and chest, my body curled up and still, too tired and hurt to even let out a moan or whimper.

And it was in that moment of defeat, of surrender, that my salvation came.

How ironic.