There was no light to see. No hope to salvage. The boy already thought himself dead.

As he lay with his back on the stone floor of the makeshift prison cell, deep in the caverns, the icy touch of death brushed his half-closed eyes, prodding them to keep shut. He knew it was futile, yet the boy cried for help, tears running down to his lips producing sounds that came out as whispers.

He didn’t want to die. Truly didn’t.

Yet, there was only so much someone could do after being beaten to death and thrown into a freezing prison room. The guards weren’t merciful today. Perhaps they just wanted to vent their frustration at him, and he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or perhaps not, and that was his fate.

Now, on the brink of falling into eternal sleep, his mind wandered back to the joyful moments of childhood that brought up one last smile. Although, “smile” was an exaggeration.

It was more of a spasmodic reaction to the unusual spine-freezing temperature, in the shape of crooked busted lips. The boy was barely five minutes in the cell, and already stopped sensing his nose, along with the tip of his limbs. He gasped for air, but instead of chilliness, he felt the burning heat of a thousand suns destroying his larynx and lungs. Every breath brought him closer to the inevitable end, and with each second, he came to accept it all the more gladly.

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As his eyes gave in to the darkness that lurked in the corners of these caves, the boy stopped caring about the world. About his hometown, his favorite alleys, and friends, old and new alike. About his relatives and siblings, and of all his parents, all awaiting him on the other side.

And as these ideas clogged the boy’s mind, he unconsciously turned his head slightly to the left, in the direction of the steel cell door. He itched to feel the heat of light for one last time, and in the pitch of blackness he lay in, he saw a small line of fiery orange coming from the guard post outside. He yearned to grab it, make it a blanket for himself. Perhaps it would warm him better than his sackcloth ever did.

As he pondered about it, a strange sensation hit him, a premonition of what was going to hit him.

Pain.

Whatever physical punishments he endured working as a mining slave, these combined would pale compared to the sensory overdose his entire body went through in a single moment. It was as if someone threw him into the world’s hottest furnace, head first, with myriad razor-sharp knives seeping under his skin.

His vision got blurry, lights from outside twitched and twisted like spirals in his mind, nausea hitting him with the force of a meteor. He tried to scream, but only the urge to grasp the air came about.

The boy spasmed back and front, violently slamming against the ground, his organism confused about how to respond to the strange threat invading his blood system. After what seemed an eternity, it decided there was only one way to deal with it. To let it overtake him.

In the end, a quick thud sounded in the otherwise quiet cell, signaling the death of a young nobody.