The eye of darkness

When a soul passes the valley of shadows, there's no going back. Life becomes death. Teetering on the edge of oblivion, he was on the brink of crossing over.

There was the strange sensation of levitating in the air, freed from any physical constraints. A bright light in the distance was beckoning.

This is what it feels like when you die, he thought to himself.

The mental was a reflection of the physical. Strewn across the ground, constantly passing in and out of consciousness, the lone figure barely moved.

He could feel the end was near. It's as if the fire was slowly going out of the heath. Too weak to fight the Grim Reaper, the man made peace with his predicament.

Yet, a small spark seemed to persist, hidden in the innermost parts of the psyche. The brain was still churning, but had trouble separating the real from the imaginary.

Maybe it was just the gods of the underworld playing tricks on him. Was he still alive? Was he breathing? Or, was he already dead?

His mind kept flashing images. One, after the other. Faces of people he had encountered, places he had visited, and defining moments from his past, all of these passed in rapid succession.

The mental slideshow continued to speed up, racing ever faster. The pictures oozed together, turning into one giant blur. Then, in one instant, everything turned dark.

The body lay there, nearly lifeless. The brain flickered on and off, edging closer and closer to death. His existence was hanging on, hovering on the balance. Yet, at any time, it could be extinguished for good.

The desire to pass onto the afterlife was strong, but a tiny voice inside his head kept telling him to hold on. It wasn't over yet. He needed to live.

The will to live was stronger than the will to die. Sheer willpower nudged him back to consciousness. The soul pulled back from the gravedigger's shovel.

The body was slowly waking up, but with each passing second the agony got worse. Then a sharp pain suddenly exploded, pulsating instantly through his entire body. It's as if a thousand needles had poked him all at once.

He let out a loud scream. The high screeching noise penetrated through the forest around him, the sheer might of the sound waves almost falling the nearby trees. It seemed to be too much. His brain began to shut down again, trying to spare him from the torment.

With his fever reaching the boiling point, the heat became overwhelming. It was useless fighting it. His mouth opened up a little, as if attempting to say something. Only a string of incoherent babbles came out. Then, it got quiet.

Entering a state of heightened delirium, his mind again flashed a sequence of images. A mountain, followed by a river of lava, then a dragon, then fire, and once again a dragon.

Fire. Dragon. Fire. Dragon. Dragon. Dragon. The dragon kept coming back.

Slowly, the green monster became emblazoned in a faint orange glow. It got darker and darker until it appeared dark red, almost black. That's when the color turned into a river of blood, only for the dragon to appear again, spouting fire from its wide-open mouth.

This snapped him back out of his slumber. Dragon. His mind kept pausing over that image. It's as if it gave him strength.

He imagined the fire coming out of the dragon's mouth, breathing a life force into him. While he was still incapable of getting up from where he was slumped over, the pain was slowly dissipating.

He tried opening his eyes. To no avail. Only darkness. Concentrating, he once again forced his eyelids apart. Small flickers of light started getting through, but only in one eye. The other, still black.

After a few minutes, with vision haltingly coming back in one eye, the man managed to turn his head. Then he saw.

Immediately, he remembered why he was in so much pain. To his right side, it lay. On the dirty floor, just below the wooden bench. His right eye.

--

Dragon blood

The man's name was Pafe Tanamuse. Yet, hardly anyone ever called him by that name. He was only known as "Bad Eye".

As he lay there, his left eye staring at the bloodied right eye spread across the floor, images from the past flashed in his mind. Pain, the emotional pain of the past was stronger than the physical pain of that day.

Growing up, the other children taunted him, pointing at him, calling him names.

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"You are ugly. You are a monster. Go away," screamed the other kids.

In every nook and cranny of his soul, Pafe felt the pain.

Yet, all he ever wanted was a friend. He recalled how he would often sit alone, observing the world from a distance. Shunned by his peers, ignored by his elders, and mocked by everyone else.

Whenever looking into the mirror, he saw a deformed creature staring back at him. His right eye was all red, a solid block, with no white visible. He could make it seem bigger than the left one, popping it out of its socket. It gave him an other-worldly appearance, a strange creation mistakenly placed in the human world.

He remembered his mother telling him how he got that way.

"You were born a normal boy, with both your eyes in their normal place. But then you got sick. And it ravaged your body," his mother explained to him countless times.

"The illness almost killed you, but you pulled through. The marks healed in due time. All, except one. Your right eye." Those were the words his mother had used.

His mind brought him back to the nights when he couldn't sleep, nightmares haunting him from the shadows. A fiery rage kept building up inside him, sometimes erupting into wild temper tantrums.

"You are crazy," he remembered people telling him.

The torture of loneliness haunted his soul. Whether it was outside or moving through the family castle, he felt invisible to others. An outcast in his own family, an outcast in the wider world.

Love, the feeling that can overcome mountains, was never there. Pafe longed for it, but never received it. One particular conversation with his father hurt him deeply, the pain burning to this very day.

His father. The man, his greying hair and boxed jaw, evoked power. With one glance, he could send other men to their knees. Lining up his young son, he looked him square in the eyes.

"You are the first born," his father had said, "but you will never inherit the leadership of the clan. It will pass onto those members of the family that have the dragon blood."

Dragon blood was the magic liquid that in the minds of the clan was flowing between the veins of the select few. It was a heritage passed down through generations.

Finding out he didn't have it, crushed young Pafe to the core of his soul. Tradition and pride went hand in hand. For men of the clan, it was paramount to be part of this never-ending story.

The values of the Tanamuse family were reinforced through a constant reminder of old glory. Sitting around the fire, the clan elders used to tell tales of the past.

"According to legend, the clan descends from a dragon who turned into a man. The human wandered the earth, but couldn't turn back into a dragon. However, some of his descendants discovered this power, and through their dragon-shifting abilities were able to conquer many lands," recounted one grey-haired old man, as the children listened eagerly.

Pafe felt those words deeply. His heritage was an inspiration, a moral compass always on his mind.

"Then, they lost this power. For many generations the clan grew smaller, and less powerful. Our remaining territories are now nestled between a cold arctic sea to the north, and gentle wooded hills to the south." The clan elders would often remind the listeners of the territories that belonged to the clan, and the dangers lurking at its borders.

"On all sides, we are wedged in by other clans. The Bear and Tiger clans to the west. The Whale clan on the icy islands of the north. In the south, the rolling hills give way to the lands of many other clans, some more powerful than others," continued the elder.

In Pafe's memory, the elders usually paused there. The brief moment of respite was meant to give people time to reflect.

For little boys like him, these stories evoked powerful feelings of pride, and the need to uphold the family legacy. They also helmed in the dangers inherent to living in a world constantly in conflict.

"In the east, only the territory of the Unicorn clan lies between the Dragon clan and the never-ending plains of the Forever Grass. This is the domain of wild, nomadic peoples, who roam the vast steppes, sometimes raiding the territories of the clans."

The wild tribes served as constant bogeymen for the clans. Their attacks were quick, in and out, as if lighting had struck. They would disappear into the plains almost immediately, only leaving behind the havoc they had caused.

This was the world Pafe was born into. Warrior prowess was the skill prized above all. Wisdom was venerated, but omens and superstition sat deep in the populace's imagination.

As these different images made an appearance, Pafe kept thinking of how he always wanted to surpass expectations. A picture of him practicing with a sword popped into his head.

"One, two, three. Thrust," he kept repeating.

The young man tried to overcome his limitations. He trained the hardest of everyone, and despite being frequently shunned from the sword-wielding lessons, he would go on to practice on his own. He studied the most, often reading ancient books under his bedsheets, candle at his side, when others had already gone to sleep.

He still got no respect.

"You don't have the dragon blood," senior family members would often say to him.

A man with the dragon blood would never have a deformity like this. Dragon blood not only gave superhuman strength. It also healed the ones who had it running through their veins.

Somehow, Pafe missed out on this magical liquid in his body. At least that's what everyone in the family thought.

The bad eye was the cause of all his misery. Only if it were never there.

--

The rebirth

As he stared at the bloody eye lying on the floor, he came to a stark realization. Bad Eye was history. He had cut out the source of his pain. Perhaps this will stir up whatever little dragon blood he had left in him?

A new man was being born. This desperate act, this deed of madness or genius, would it finally allow him to reclaim his heritage?

The rebirth of an individual is a unique act of mental transformation. Most people never experience it. Some very rare individuals go through it multiple times in their lifetime.

A person's entire being gets rewired. The old thought patterns get erased, replaced by a new way of seeing. The world is literally not the same anymore.

The change can be gradual, but often it happens in a single defining instant. For the bloodied young man, the moment was now.

Pafe took a clean piece of cloth that was lying on the table next to him, and wrapped it around his head, covering his missing eye. The white immediately turned red as all the blood gushed out of the socket, soaking through the rag.

As he clawed his way up on the bench next to the table, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. For a second, he thought he saw a dragon. On a deeper look, it was his image staring back at him.

It was a familiar, yet somehow eerily different sight. The bloody cloth across his missing eye added a new element to the picture. Might. Force. Energy.

The awkward creature that used to gaze in the reflection disappeared. As if by magic, a monster had turned into a knight.

The hour had come. It was time to go home. It was time to change things.