So why am I writing all this? Where am I? Who is this for?

What I didn't say about my last death is that before I climbed the rookery, I found this book I'm holding in my hands. It was blank. That was strange, since I had never seen one like that. I think so, at least. A heavy, leather-bound book with nothing in it. I picked it up and after I died, it respawned with me and my weapons in the monastery. It was a strange blessing. I had already ran out of space in the small room at the top of the monastery where fate has decided to send me after death, again and again. And now I have a book in which to write it all down, and try to make sense of what little I remember.

Memory is a fickle thing. After waking up from death — what... dozens? hundreds of times? -- and having to remember how I died last and then read the many warnings I wrote on the walls, I'm not certain which things happened and which ones I just read about. The first times I died I seem to have just written down things like "watch out for the bowman in the tower" and things like that. Possibly, when I started forgetting more and more, I must have realized I needed to provide myself with more context. And I started to fill out the wall in charcoal or chalk or whatever I found, relating parts of my story. So I am a man with a mind made up of fragments of memories and forgotten things I just read about from an unreliable narrator that's also me.

And on top of all that is that I'm trapped in a city invaded by demons that respawn every day no matter how many times I kill them. Just like me. Except I'm alone and they're a whole army.

How it started is something I pieced together little by little. I remember some images, but they might also be creations of my mind after reading my own accounts about it.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

The short version is this: I’m in the city of Ashenfell. I lived here before the invasion. It seemed to be a serious place, with lots of churches and museums. I was part of the city garrison, stationed in the city center. I wasn’t supposed to fight hordes of demons. I was supposed to protect the citizens from pickpockets and murderers. I think I was good at it. I used my wits more than my sword. But then the invasion came. There were just a few, too few to seize the city, and the garrison fought it off, but it was impossible to stop them. We killed one and it respawned minutes later. And our side suffered heavy casualties and every loss made our situation more dire. So it was that they were able to seize it without an army, just a hundred or so demons. And there were thousands of my brothers in the garrison. All gone, just like that. And I’m the only one left.

I don’t remember how and why I survived, and keep surviving, or rather, not surviving but returning to the living, respawning as the demon-spawn do, and it seems I never figured it out because I never wrote it down. Something happened to me to mark me, something that makes me come back again and again to this monastery, cursed to try again to rid the city of these demons. And it’s hopeless. What could I achieve? Everyone’s gone. So if I got rid of them I would rule over a dead city. What’s the point of that?

But over time, hope came to me. If I was cursed with this, like the demons, there has to be a way to bring back everybody that fell to the invasion. A spell, an object, something has to be causing the respawnings, theirs and mine. I just need to find it, break it, or turn it into my weapon. That’s the hope that has kept me going.

And I’m going to achieve it. Any day now. In this death or the next.