I give up.

Judas Kiara had walked miles west from Lucian to Fannie's Graveyard before he exploded and began to die.

Going to Lucian was a mistake. Before Judas could walk past the small town's wooden gates, the canine void-demons had emerged from the surrounding forest trees and chased him into the old graveyard. He ran as fast as his legs could carry him through the thicket of dead trees until he crossed the snow field and ended up in the graveyard. Once they had him cornered, the few dozen canine effigies lunged at his body.

At impact, Judas' body began to purge itself of the void-beasts that had locked themselves inside of him. The explosive void rifts torn open by Judas, and the few like him, did not have a formal name. He coined the term 'void-out' to describe the uncontrollable purging his body performed every so often. As his body erupted, he retreated into his mind for a last visit home.

Colors swam and warped until a sunset came into being. The gloam settled over Judas' memory of Auqia. Shades of loss, regret, and longing spanned the polychromatic horizon and swam through the compact town. Reds and oranges beamed across the land and washed Auqia in its fiery warmth.

Judas was a young boy again as he leaned against the large square hole in the wall and overlooked the docks. The sun glowed against his dark skin and his hair would fly up each time the sea breeze rushed through the window. Fish jumped about in the burning sea. Cries from children playing in the streets receded to the back of his mind.

"You keep staring out there, like you're looking for something," Raven paused. "Like something's going to come out of the water at any minute," she said with a small giggle. A gust of sea breeze blew into the room and she shivered.

Twenty-seven void-outs in hardly a decade. Each void-out brought Judas home to relive his life's most lucid death and were as overwhelming as the bloody sunset that day. The Kiaras and every other family was washed away in the sea that spilled out into and tore apart Auqia. His home, now deceased, existed only here in the bridged path between life and death.

The encroaching darkness began to drain the colors and sounds of rushing water. Isolated in the increasingly tenebrous space, Judas watched his father's back once more. His father carried on a one-sided conversation in his usual emphatically chatty fashion. Judas could never consciously place the conversation unfolding before him in any part of his childhood, yet he witnessed it each time he returned to his mind's Auqia.

". . .and a big storm that's everywhere and it's all around us and I can feel it-," Judas sank beneath the darkness and his father finally stopped.

Let me go, Judas pleaded to no one. Please, let them take me.

Judas gave in and withdrew from the light. As if his soul was weighed down by stone, he sunk deeper into aphotic solace. No one would remember him. He would leave no children. By his power, every trace of his life had been destroyed.

"Who's taking you?" A voice suddenly intruded.

The voice was hardly audible in the suffocating darkness. Judas failed to trace the sound in any direction. Perhaps a passing memory? Well, it would pass like all the others, so he ignored it.

"Hey, I'm talking to you!" The voice called out to him with indignance.

The sudden aggression startled Judas, and he began searching the dark for the voice's origin. He stood consciously alone as he looked around in empty space. More yelling caught his senses and Judas surmised that the voice was somehow below him.

What type of memory was this? Judas had never needed to seek out a memory while he was trapped within this unknown space where he relived Auqia's destruction. Was this voice another part of the memory that he was only now able to access? Had death allowed him to confront some hidden part of his mind? Perhaps he was finally crossing over and this voice was the key to do so.

Judas focused again and sought out the voice that would lead him to his liberation. Willing himself to drown, he sank deeper, tracing the sound that had called out to him. He had hardly felt any real descent as he dragged himself through the darkness. Suddenly his senses came into contact with a vague shape captured in nothingness.

The trapped shape stopped speaking upon Judas' notice. No memory had looked like this before. The relived events usually overwhelmed Judas with the amount of detail they possessed. Yet this one was wrapped in mystery. It was settled in darkness, unable to manifest. What had been locked away here? Was it something Judas wanted to relive? Maybe his mind kept it away from everything else for a reason.

In his agitation, Judas struggled to reason with himself. Though this memory could lead him to the afterlife, how painful would it be? He tried to think of all the worst moments of his life that would warrant him to lock it away. How does one manifest the unknown?

Judas retired the idea that he would discover the memory inside himself.

"Are you done yet?"

Judas grimaced in annoyance at the bonded amalgamation before him.

He centered his focus on the shape and attempted to will it into being. His attempt would be the opposite of descending through the darkness. Instead of recalling the memory from within, Judas would allow it to surface outside of himself. He would meet this hidden specter at its own level. He grasped the specter from within its webbing and willed its ascension through the aphotic depths burdening it until a shape finally came into being.

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A young man appeared before Judas, no older than himself. His loosely coiled hair danced about his face, maintaining his obscured visage.

"W-what are you?" Judas stammered.

"You're alive?" The man asked curiously. "Aren't you? You're not Kaeli, you're Antekuam right?"

Judas stepped back from the man. Although the figure had not moved, Judas felt the need to create space between them. Once he orientated himself, he looked around and recognized that he wasn't dying yet. He stood naked in the aphotic realm. The effigy before him came in and out between moments of clarity. Though no other details built themselves like the memory of Auqia did.

Then the words of the man registered in his mind. Kaeli and Antekuam, the two main distinctions between beings sharing the realm. The Kaeli were the immortals who ruled the heavens. The Antekuam were the mortals who worshiped the heavens, at least most of the time.

Not again, Judas inwardly grumbled. That Blood Syndicate asshole had been chasing him for days thinking he was Kaeli. The Blood, and this guy, were wasting their time. If Judas was a God of some sort, he wouldn't be running from the void-beasts constantly preying on him.

"I'm not Kaeli. I'm just someone trying to die, but I'm realizing how difficult that is," Judas said in annoyance.

"Dying? Here? That's not going to happen. And you never answered my question. How are you here? Did they open the hole again?"

The man fired off questions one after the other. Judas was becoming overwhelmed and continued grimacing at the man. Brown eyes challenged Judas' white ones.

Judas turned and trudged through the black ichor suddenly flooding the space. As he continued, the ichor swelled. It quickly rose past his knees, continuing up to his waist, climbing to his chest, and then he coughed and hacked as the ichor filled his lungs.

He no longer felt himself drowning. Instead, Judas felt suspended in space, unable to transcend in any direction. The crushing of his bones would never end, and now he would be captured in this darkness. Had that man been a memory? Was this what awaited him? There was a worse idea that intruded Judas' thoughts. Was this death? Ceaseless pain?

A hand around his neck pulled at him and turned him towards two dazzling brown eyes.

"I'll make a compact that will save you," The man seemed to say, but without moving his mouth.

"Let me go, just let me die!" Judas struggled for air in the man's grasp, reaching for the strong arm and pleading to the glowing brown eyes.

"You're hanging onto me though," the brown eyes returned with a smile accenting their words.

Judas' fears piled onto his heart as he crumbled beneath the pain wracking his body. What is this? He thought his lungs would burst from the black ichor blocking his airways. He closed his eyes, counted, and waited for them to erupt and for himself to turn inside out.

Yet when he opened them, beyond the dark deluge flooding his senses, there were still those brown eyes floating above him.

"You're still hanging on," the eyes seemed to say.

"Who are you?" Judas asked.

"I'm Ferrau, God of Gluttony," he responded.

A Kaeli? Judas wondered why a God would show pity and try to save him. After everything he'd done, Judas felt Heaven was always seconds away from punishing him.

"Do you want to eat me then?"

"No, I'm offering a compact to save your life."

No doubt this Kaeli wanted to eat him. Judas squeezed the God's arm, as if testing if it were real, if it could be so dependable.

"Will it stop me from drowning? Will the pain go away?"

"I promise."

Judas clenched his eyes shut and tried to pry open his lungs by sheer force, but there was no clearing his asphyxiation. Ferrau noticed small droplets float away from the clenched eyes.

"Please," Judas begged.

Judas only faintly sensed an abrupt ascent at rapid speed.

The seven moons glowed above in the night sky. Thousands of stars, each one representing the Kaeli, littered the vast, heavenly regions.

Judas realized he was lying in a field. He raised his torso in an upright position and saw the shallow black ichor pooling the graveyard.

Before he had a chance to reflect on his latest and strangest void-out, he could sense the beasts gathered around him. The void-demons filled Fannie's Graveyard. Judas surmised that these were all the ones that had been forced out of his body, and maybe some new ones. He feared that they would race back inside of him and the process would begin over once again.

Between himself and the nearest void-demons was a tall, ribbed figure. Ribbed, as in he had no stomach. He had flesh everywhere else, but nothing covered his entire torso. Torn flesh was loosely fastened to the ends of his hip bones and rib cage. Gawking at the man's exposed spine, a shiver ran down Judas' own.

"I got it from here," Ferrau said, turning to the scared mortal.

Ferrau had disappeared. Judas could only catch flashes of movement as Ferrau flickered in and out of vision from one side of the graveyard to the next. It was a blur of motion as Ferrau fought through the waves of void-demons that once resided within Judas. He thought that the last void-out would finally kill him. There was a freedom he thought he would find in death. That didn't feel like freedom, he thought, it was just painful.

Not only did he live, now this God of Gluttony fought to keep him safe from the demons threatening to return him to the edge of life.

Judas could hardly rationalize what he was witnessing as the monsters tried and failed to attack the swift Ferrau. All around Judas, the demons exploded and vanished.

The naked, semi-skeletal God finally walked up to him, extending a hand. Judas realized he had still been sitting in the black ichor stained grass.

"I thought you were a memory that I'd buried away," Judas stammered out.

"You're strange.” Ferrau said, chuckling in a deep voice and speaking with an accent that bewildered Judas. “Get your lazy ass up and hold my hand.” Ferrau winked at Judas and the two smiled at one another.

Pale and brown eyes met once again, and Judas felt a heat rising up his throat.