He stood there, directly above the spot where his mother had drawn her last breath, and tremors wracked his frame. His mind delved into a place long sealed off, buried beneath layers of trauma and pain, isolated by the passage of time and the scars of displacement. With a determined resolve, he broke the seal guarding the vault of his deepest memories.

He stood right here, in the same spot back then. Crying, sobbing quietly with his tears dropping onto the floor. Missing her.

He heard his father behind him, exiting the bathroom. Wordless, soundless as always. He just grunted at his son to move over.

Luke, absentmindedly moved with his back closer to the wall.

Head still bowed down, he could only see the ceramic, gray tiles, and his fathers worn-out slippers crossing over them.

He stopped next to Luke, and suprised, Luke lifted his face to greet him, with blooming hope of hearing some words of support, some familial bonds to develop.

As their eyes met, he saw only rage.

Hatred.

In a sudden, brutal assault, Luke felt his father's fist slam into his stomach, the force of the blow stealing his breath away in an instant. Shock and disbelief flooded his mind—never before had he endured such violence. Desperately, he mouthed the word "Why?" but no sound escaped his constricted throat, his lungs deprived of air.

And yet, it was only the beginning.

As he tried to remain standing, his body shaking in a bent over pose, his father grabbed the side of his head. Fueled by animalistic anger, he started slamming his own son's skull into the wall.

Once. Twice. Thrice. Each impact reverberated through the narrow confines of the hallway, sending shards of pain splintering through Luke's fractured consciousness.

Blinded by agony, his senses overwhelmed, he collapsed to the ground in a haze of disorientation, his body battered and broken, mind consumed by pain.

Luke struggled for breath, his lungs refusing to cooperate as panic surged through him. All he wanted was an answer, a reason for this sudden eruption of violence. "Why?" he mouthed again, desperation etched into every strained syllable.

His ears were ringing loudly, sloshing sounds of his heartbeat filled his senses. Barely, through it, he heard the havy breath of his father, standing over him.

He looked up while coughing, body spasming. From his fathers fist, drops of red fell onto the tiles.

More rage in his eyes. More anger.

Just as a word was about to finally leave Luke's mouth, the question about to be born, his father moved again.

A kick broke his sternum, pain was blinding, cruel, it silenced the question.

Another one tore at his internal organs, the next dropped down on his arms that tried to guard the feeble body.

The assault continued relentlessly, each strike a vicious assault on his fragile frame. His feeble attempts at defense were futile, his arms offering little protection against the onslaught of violence. Bones splintered, flesh tore, and blood spilled, the floor beneath him bearing witness to his suffering.

No words were exchanged.

Luke remembered laying there, a storm of kicks and punches landing on him, his blood, vomit covering the space where his mother layed just so recently. His only wish was to meet her soon, as soon as possible, he yearned for the peace of death, a respite from the agony that consumed him.

His mother, her absence a gaping void in his fractured world.

He lost conciousness.

When he woke up, he still layed in the same spot. Swollen, bruised, barely breathing. His mouth was parched, he couldn't see anything, his eyes were swollen shut, and it was deep in the night, his world reduced to darkness and pain.

His nose was clogged by blood, cartlidge broken and digging into the soft tissues painfully. Yet, as he laid there, each breath piercing a needle into his chest, as his broken ribs rubbed and cracked against eachother, he could only focus on the smell, the touch, and the sound.

His broken nose throbbed with each breath, the taste of blood coating his mouth and throat. Yet, amidst the agony, it was the cold touch of the tiles beneath him that seemed to sear into his consciousness.

The tiles were cold, so extremely cold. They hurt just as much as the beating he recently received. They radiated a piercing cold that kept him awake, prolonging this torture.

Every time he was coming in and out of conciousness, it was always that cold and pain that awoke him. He could feel how dirty they were, unclean, how weirdly important that seemed when he understood they haven't been vacumed for a long time. The tiny pebbles and dust prickling his skin.

He could feel the grime that coated them, each particle a testament to the neglect that pervaded his home.

With each labored breath, the pain of his broken ribs reverberated through his chest, a constant reminder of his suffering.

The sounds...the sounds were what ignited the embers of his own rage. The silence, the echo of a silent home, one without love, without his mother, without compassion. Only to be interupted by the vile snorring of his tormentor. His father. Each time he heard it, he flinched, he wanted to cry, from anger, shame, pain. Yet, no tears would come out, at least none that he could feel. With the amount of coagulated blood, dried spit covering his swollen face, he had no idea how his body was reacting.

The smell.

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That's what stuck to him the most, even when he lost his sense of smell after a bad setting of a broken nose that his father broke yet again. Even as Luke's sense of smell dulled from the repeated blows to his nose, the memories of the foul odors of his home remained seared into his mind.

The smell of the trash that hasn't been thrown out for weeks, the dirty dishes that piled up, rotten and undried clothes from the bathroom.

The smell of cat shit spilling out of the litterbox.

The begginings of rot and moisture that started climbing up the wall, that would take root so deeply and forever here. That disgusting coffe, thick as mud that his father always drank.

He remembered seing spots of white and green mold growing on the coffe, in the porcelain cups, before all this happened. He just didn't care back then, it didn't register in his mouring, the sorrow a blindfold on his eyes, making him unable to see the early signs of what was to come.

Luke remembered the disgust he felt at the sight, the indifference that allowed such filth to thrive unchecked. It was a house consumed by decay, a testament to the apathy that had taken root within its walls.

As Luke's memories flooded back, his heart burned with a searing rage, his damaged soul spewing forth sparks of fury. He was ensnared by the ghosts of his past, forced to relive the horrors that had brought him to this moment of reckoning.

"Five years..." His voice was a strained whisper, forced through clenched teeth that threatened to shatter under the pressure. Blood seeped from his gums, staining his mouth crimson as he bit down hard. His tongue pressed relentlessly against the roof of his mouth, as if seeking escape from the torment.

He recalled the harrowing days that followed, lying broken and bruised on the cold floor, unable to move until his body had healed enough to stand. He remembered the vicious onslaught of beatings that came whenever he dared to utter a word, to ask a question, to simply exist in the same space as his father.

For breathing.

For living.

For the cardinal sin of existence itself.

He remembered how gradually the house turned into a pigsty, how his own blood decorated the furniture time and time again, how it came to be that the sharp shards from the mirror were left inside his cheek for the sin of blocking the doors for a second to long in his fathers judgement. His face smashing the surface, allowing him to look deeply into his own eye as his was treated worse than an animal would, how that eye followed as the heavy, calloused hand dragged his cheek across the cracked glass, shredding his face to the rhythm of his shrieks.

His body trembled with the weight of those memories, muscles coiling like taut springs, joints emitting a cacophony of cracks and pops as he folded in on himself, crushed by the weight of self-imposed mental anguish. Beads of sweat dripped profusely from his brow, his heart pounding like a drum, the relentless rhythm of trauma echoing through his veins. His ears rang with the roaring waves of his own blood, his vision blurring with the intensity of his torment.

Something changed, something passed through him.

He could smell the rancind smell of sweat, of the spilled alcohol that seeped into the dirty wife beater and those goddamn, stinking, cheap, bottom of the shelf ciggaretes that his father always smoked. He could still feel the searing heat of cigarette butts pressed against his skin, the twisted pleasure his father took in inflicting agony upon him.

He remembered hissing through his teeth until the heat died down in his flesh. How charred the skin was, how immensly itchy it got when it healed. He still had those scars, they still itched to this day.

Before him stood the shadowy figure of his father, his head crowned with a mane of pure white hair, the torn wife beater clinging to his form like a shroud of decay. In that moment, as they stood on the brink of confrontation, Luke felt a surge of anger and resentment coursing through him, a silent vow to break free from the cycle of abuse that had bound them for so long.

He was shuffling drunkenly in front of him, deciding whether to go to the kitchen, or to open the doors to the living room.

He stood still for a moment, an arms reach away from Luke.

The eruption of power transformed Luke's surroundings into a scene of chaos and devastation. His eyes, once dead and emotionless, now blazed with an otherworldly intensity, turning first bloodshot and then pitch black as the dark energy surged through him. The Trail of Tears, symbolic of his past pain and suffering, wept black ichor, staining the ground beneath him. Meanwhile, his scarred chest pulsed with an unearthly light, each heartbeat echoing like a thunderous cannonade, a harbinger of impending destruction.

As the Trails of Void spread throughout his body, they warped the very fabric of reality, distorting his surroundings in a maelstrom of madness and rage. The air crackled with raw energy, the Veil trembling under the weight of his fury.

"FIVE FUCKING YEARS!!!" he roared, his voice a primal scream that echoed through the air, sending shockwaves rippling across the Veil. In the real world, the atmosphere grew heavy and disorienting, the air vibrating with an otherworldly energy that defied explanation. Cracks spiderwebbed across the walls of the building behind the Veil, a testament to the sheer force of Luke's rage.

His father turned, his expression one of surprise and confusion. Even in his drunken stupor, his instincts as a former soldier kicked in, and he began to scan the room frantically, searching for the source of the danger. But his movements were sluggish, his reactions dulled by the poison that coursed through his veins, the same poison pounding on his liver taking away his speed and focus.

Luke felt a surge of revulsion coursing through him as he looked upon the man who had inflicted so much pain upon him. This pathetic excuse for a father, this spineless coward who crumbled before the wrath of his own son.

Luke's father staggered backward, his back slamming against the wall in the very spot where Luke had suffered countless beatings before. His arms rose unsteadily, as if to shield himself from the unseen threat, the bottle still clutched tightly in his hand. His knuckles, scarred and weathered, turned white from the force of his grip.

With his pure white hair contrasting starkly against his weathered face, his father appeared more like a grotesque monster of a man than a parent. Wrinkles lined his face, and his skin, dry and aged, seemed to beg for release from its owner. Luke heard it's pleas, for them to be seperated.

Luke, now towering over his father by more than a head's length, glared down at him with a mixture of fury and contempt. the Son stared down his Father, frothing with rage, spit and blood mixing with flakes of his regrowing teeth, now being ground down as no words could escape his mouth, just animalistic growling.

Luke extended his arm, the flesh one, yearning to feel it, to experience the sensation of snapping his father's spine, crushing his trachea, and watching the blood seep from his flesh under his own grip. He craved to feel his father's pain, to revel in it.

In the eerie silence of the Void markings and the roaring of his own blood in his veins, sparks danced around Luke, heating the air and distorting his surroundings. Yet, amidst this chaos, his focus remained solely on his prey.

The twitching fingers slowly passed through the raised guard, the Veil making any defence impossible. He manifested his powers through the Reach of Void, Luke seized his father's neck in a vice-like grip.

His father's eyes bulged in terror, his mind overwhelmed by the incomprehensible sight before him. None of this should have been possible, yet the alcohol dulled his senses, amplifying his torment as his mind struggled to process the agony.

The father's struggles seemed inconsequential as his breath was stolen away, an iron grip blocking his attempts to inhale. A black, smoky hand manifested from the air, its freezing talons digging into the back of his neck with ease, drawing blood effortlessly. Tears clouded his vision from the sudden influx of heat that accompanied it, burning off his eyebrows, tormenting him until he was unable to scream.

Luke effortlessly lifted him higher, ready to finish what he should have done years ago.

"YEARS!" he screamed, more to himself than to his father.

Memories flooded back, the endless hours of torment as he was forced to train, toil in the mountains, dig holes only to cover them up again until his palms were raw. He remembered the countless beatings, the need to realign his own bones, to stitch his own wounds. He recalled being coerced into joining his father in criminal activities, forced to inflict pain on others just as he had suffered.

He froze.

"No..." Something within him snapped, and a hole appeared in the wall of his mental palace. A door, once covered by bricks, concrete, and layers of mental barriers, shattered under the hammer of acceptance, of reality.

"That was my choice," he said, admitting it.

He could have escaped, could have attempted to kill him more than just once when he was asleep. He could have acted sooner. He did finally escape, finally beat him. Somehow, it had always been possible. The sins he committed at his father's command were on him, the pain he caused, it caused him pleasure. He found joy in meting out punishment, in forcing people to break just as he was being broken. He had inherited his father's violence.

Just as his father's eyes bulged out of their sockets and his body started to go limp in his hold, his anger surged.

"YOU DID THIS TO ME, YOU MADE ME THIS WAY! YOU DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH I HAD TO FIGHT THIS, WHAT IT COST ME, ALL BECAUSE OF YOU! YOU TWISTED FUCK!" he screamed, his spittle passing through his father, hitting the wall and boiling on the stone.

He could end this now, get his vengeance. End the nightmare, slay the monster.

He would relish it, he heard voices, his own, dozens of them, hundreds even. They begged, demanded to kill their tormentor. They wanted him to cut up his body, spread it across the dirty floor, use the bones to stretch the skin, and parade the organs like ornaments atop them. To crack his spine, and as he heard the spinal cord snapping, to pull his head off and smash it in his hands with a clap. To feel the viscera shower him, to cleanse him from the sin.

He decided.