I watched the same memory being played out for so many times already… I lost count.

Floating in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t matter where you look to... it’s all black. I can‘t move an inch. I feel like… I‘m being forced to watch my worst memories for the 1000th time... Is this the price I have to pay? The price for releasing the ultimate evil. At first… It hurt… a lot... It felt like my whole body was being disassembled to the atomic level and rebuild again.

But now?… Hah. Not anymore... It doesn‘t hurt anymore... I can't feel anything anymore... I don‘t know if it stopped, or I lost the sense of pain or maybe I just lost the willingness to care about anything anymore. I can move my eyes but I can‘t close them it's like I'm watching a movie. Every time the memory plays out... It is like I’m there again but I can‘t change the outcome... No matter how hard I try... the ending was always the same.

I have noticed the 5 strange symbols on my left hand... That I can‘t understand but I get the feeling that I should know what it means. Every time I try to dig deeper into my mind to search for the answers I get the image of the coffin, a beautiful woman walking down the desert and... me being pierced through the heart with a knife… I don’t know what’s real and what’s fake anymore, I lost all sense of reality. After that, a huge shock-wave is sent through my body and the feeling that my head will explode any second.

I have sat there watching the memory play out… I don‘t know how much time has passed… Perhaps seconds... days... months… years... perhaps even decades when you are stuck in a place of nothingness, darkness you even forget about the time itself.

At first, I tried counting... Yet no sound came out it feels like I’m stuck in a black hole until… I don’t know how much time has passed, but I felt a surge of enormous, throbbing pain… I thought I lost all of my senses, but this worked as a reminder that I have yet to pay for my sin.

But after what had seemed like an eternity an extraordinary feeling slowly overwrote the pain. One I felt for the first time in my life. Is this what people call the feeling of power? After a while, I didn’t feel any pain at all. I felt powerful… like a lock inside me was finally undone. My ears started ringing… “Wait… my ears? I can hear?” I said in a confused tone that echoed through the surrounding void. I continued looking into the screen that played my memory still not being able to look away. When it suddenly cracked with a loud sound. The cracks kept on multiplying until it exploded with a loud bang and with a blinding white light coming out of it. The symbols on my left hand glowed and then everything went black again... No sound... nothing until I felt a similar sensation I thought was long-lost… The breeze of the wind...

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‘No way… Am I back?’ I thought to myself while my whole body ached and was numb not listening to a single command I’m giving it. “Aaaahhhhhhh” I shouted with all the power left in my body. And I heard my own voice, with no distortions… It’s been so long. I slowly opened my eyes. I was inside a forest, but it‘s different from what I remember. It was all… Black and.. grey. I saw a healthy tree in the corner of my eye. It gave me hope. Yet after a moment, it got engulfed by a dark flame. “Ahhh I don’t care anymore..” I whispered in a strange and tired voice. ‘I just want to sleep…’ I thought while slowly closing my eye and went back to sleep. Ignorant of the surrounding destruction.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------— Angelina ( Village inhabitant )

“Mommy, Mommy” My daughter shouted with a joyful tone from behind me. While tugging on my tattered dress.

“What is it, sweetheart? Could you tell papa to come back soon? Tell him the dinner is read-” I was about to finish. When I heard something loud. Like an explosion from behind me. I tried to turn around but the second I did I got thrown to the ground and shrieked in pain. “Aaaahhh” When I looked down at my arm which was pierced with a plain piece of wood. You could even barely see the bone all the while blood was oozing all over the place like crazy. My face turned from pain to horror. I felt goosebumps running down my spine. I couldn‘t move… I saw something I could never forget.

There was a huge... at least a 200-foot tall skull made of purplish black flames burning away our crops and forest in seconds. Making it colorless. It straight up removed the colors from the world. The sky was being dyed black everywhere the flame went.

“A Devil!! He has come to make us pay for our sins!” An old man roared with all his might. Like he was enjoying the panic in the village. Everyone was shouting, running away or crying being lost from their families.

After a while, we noticed the fire was beginning to extinguish after we all packed up the most important things. Yet the fire just went out… The skull disappeared… But the colors never came back.'No one wants to stay here anymore... I mean could you blame me? Just when things were starting to get better this happened... “From this day on this land got the name of The cursed forest, anything that set foot in it… perished.” A tall old man with a dirty priest robe said with a grim tone. “The Bloody Emperor got interested in this accident like or was a game to him… at least he sent a few rescue groups and adventurers… We survived something unexplainable today. I think everyone here is tired so I call this meeting to an end."