"If it is freedom you seek, first know all you know will soon be gone. What you seek is far greater than what any soul can achieve; ensure that what must be must be done."
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My eyes awake, not finding a place of comfort. Instead, a hellish landscape forces me into its grasp.
This place…
These woods were once a calm respite for me and my mother… now no longer.
A harsh combination of smells—rotting flesh, soot, burning metal and grass—overwhelm my senses. Familiar blades and armaments, which are of my fallen allies, pave the ground. A sea of bodies, that of many armored men, lay flat—dead—across the burning field. As far as my sight serves me, no single piece of land was left uncovered. Their faces are blurred with a horrid amalgamation consisting of the smear of their blood, fragments of their bone, and tears of their flesh, all burnt by the tenacious flames of the underworld.
Though I can hear little, their haunting groans and screams claw into my ears. In my many years of fighting… it is only now that I hear hardened men and women, tested through thousands of battles, cry and wail. Their voices—well, whatever sound is made from the remains of their throats—tremble as they beg for the comfort of their mothers and fathers. Others scream as the clutches of hellfire bite into their skin, consuming them through their armour bit by bit until all that is left of them are ashes.
While all before me crumble, I stand in the midst of it, motionless… paralyzed. Who wouldn’t with such a sight? The trembling of my fingers grows farther and farther beyond my control. The haze clouding my eyes thickens, unable to bear what is before me. I try to muster words, but thoughts of all kinds hinder any rationality.
As I try to continue processing the scene before me… a voice calls from behind. Try as I could, I could barely hear it. But, their tone… such a familiar voice… almost as if… it were mine…
Then, suddenly, the muffling in my ears clears, and what words the voice uttered I now hear.
Stolen story; please report.
“Kotoko.”
My name.
Instinctively, I turn to it.
“Ngh?!”
Black tentacles, each almost the size of mountains, rush towards me. They throb and wriggle as they inched towards me, readying to envelop me. Litres of an unknown thick, red substance drip from each of their suckers, so much so that a tsunami was already starting to form, crashing down towards me as well. The dozen bloodied eyes scattered across their slimy surfaces stare down at me as if I had committed a sin graver than the ones I’d already done.
Before even my next line of thought comes, it would be stopped.
The tentacles open wide, and with one swift motion, whip themselves towards me, reaching in for the kill.
“—————GRAAH!”
Suddenly, I awoke once more.
The upper half of my body, shaken, jolts from the comfort of the grass and into an upright position. As I recoup myself, my pre-mortem scream echoes in my ear, ringing as if to mock me for my fear. My breath, already rattling from that nightmare, hastens more than before. The heaves of my chest get deeper and deeper, banging against my heart. My vision slowly clears, but my mind does not. I think and think… but no attempt of mine to rationalise what I had just seen results in anything. Instead, my head falls into further dizzy.
“This dream again…” I exhaust a sigh and rub the ends of my fingers across my forehead.
O’ to the deities above, for many days, my nightly hours have strayed far from what they are meant to be. Instead of rest, you gift me with torment and exhaustion in my sleep. How cruel can you let fate be to torture me with vivid hauntings of my greatest fears and nightmares? Oh, how cruel. Even as the sun rises, I am not spared—the blessings of freedom are but a great dream. Each waking second I walk this Earth, I spend living in fear; my eyes always look behind, my feet tread each step with paranoia, and my mind sharp at all times, regardless of its protests.
But… all this… is but a phantasm. My delusions grow. My fatigue strangles me. My hunger cries to me. My sorrow chains me.
Yet… I must persist.
I must.
For him.