He swam in a dark, bottomless pit for what felt like a thousand years. The void around him was filled with pale illusions, with the remains of memories, of places and things unknown to him.
Who was he? What was this strange place he was in? Was this death? Afterlife? But… but what was "death" or "afterlife" exactly? He didn't have the answer to any of those questions. In fact, he couldn't even begin to think about them. The visions and the pain filled everything left of his mind.
Slowly the void filled with dim light. Maybe it took seconds but for his shattered mind it felt like centuries. The soft glow became brighter and brighter until it filled the emptiness to the brim. It was hot as a flame, as a star – completely opposite of the coldness that filled the void. The light also felt… powerful and life giving. It destroyed the illusions and cleared the visions out of his mind in an instant. It turned the overwhelming pain into a simple numbness. And then it crept into his mind. But it wasn’t like the illusions. He wasn’t scared of the light. He welcomed it. And then it happened.
He opened his eyes and took a sharp, painful breath. In a sense it was the first one of his life.
It took a few second for the blinding light to fade and make his sight normal. He saw the grey skies above him, filled with thunderclouds like some beasts from another world. He felt the wind touching his sides and the ground below his back. His chest itched and there was a strange, pulsating pain in the back of his palms. But that wasn’t what occupied his mind.
It was the words. The words came out of nowhere and filled his consciousness. The meaning behind them also came with a lightning speed. Suddenly his thoughts had shape. He could speak now. The gift of language had returned to his shattered mind. But the memories didn’t come back. And he somehow he knew they would never return to him.
“Who am I?” The words came out slowly out of his chapped lips. They were still new and strange sounding to him, but their meaning was clear. He wasn’t sure that he could ever find the answer to this question. The place in his mind where memories would be was completely and utterly empty. It was like someone just erased them from existence. Were they there in the first place? He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. But an instinct deep inside told him that they were and they still should be.
But the lack of memories inside his headwasn't his biggest concern right now. Thirst burned in his throat and hunger roared inside of his stomach. He had to find water and food.
The nameless man got up slowly and then looked around.
The look of his surroundings sent cold chill down his spine. He was in the middle of a dry meadow surrounded by a dead looking forest with short and twisted, leafless trees. The undefined feeling of autumn and sadness filled the meadow and forest. In the distance and to the south there was a mountain chain with peaks surmounted by snow. None of these things made him feel sick. But the corpses did.
The dead bodies were all around him. There were at least three dozens of them on the meadow. Their decayed, brown flesh exposed the bones beneath and their empty eye sockets gazed calmly at him. He didn’t feel fear at this sight for he had no experience nor relation with death whatsoever. But he felt disgusted. It was deep, primal emotion, older than him and his missing memories. He made a step back in a desperate attempt to get away from the disturning scene before him. His bare foot stepped into something dry and strange to the touch. He knew it was probably a corpse and didn't even dare to look at the ground. The urge to vomit rose to his throat but his stomach was empty.
The man tried to ease his shivering by looking down at his own body. And there he was met with yet another unpleasant surprise.
His abdomen was covered in ugly scars and there were strange signs in an unknown language tattooed on his chest. He was wearing only a pair of ragged pants so he could see the wounds on his feet which weren’t fully healed. Upon the back of his palms there were engraved - with a sharp blade, by the looks of it - two bizarre and identical marks. They were probably the source of the intense pain that he felt. A term came to his mind when he looked at them, although he didn't know its meaning. The Changelings' Brand.
The nameless man saw the proof that he is an Undone One in that very moment, while he was looking at the signs on his arms. He didn't know what they stood for or what kind of life they doomed him to have. But he would soon face the horrible reality that was the existence as an Undone One. And in the depths of his heart, darkened by pain and misery, would grow a hatred towards the Changelings. A hatred as deep as that of a man seeing his family killed before his eyes and swearing to end the life of the killer. Or perhaps his hatred was even deeper. But besides the Changelings he would also grow to despise any kind of people and eventually himself. He could only loathe the ones who pitied him and took him for a crippled - both mentally and physically - man. His hatred towards those who ignored him or thought of him as a useless creature would be even more intense. But he would mostly detest himself because he couldn't do anything to make his miserable life better.
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Alas, all this intense hatred lied in the misty depths of the future. For now the only thing the nameless man could do was to get out of the corpse-filled meadow. And he did so rather quickly and while trying not to succumb to the disgust growing inside of him. The urge to vomit rose again and again, but he did his best to ignore it. He also did his best not to look at the dead bodies but failed multiple times. He soon noticed that all of the bodies beared the same scars as him, and also the Changelings' Brand. Were they the same as him? And if so, how was he the only one alive amongst dozens of people? As with all of the other questions within his mind at that time, he didn't have an answer to this one either.
The nameless man entered the dead forest surrounding the meadow and wandered in its quiet and dark depths for hours until nightfall. He found no animals nor any sign of life, but he stumbled upon few streams. The water was warm and muddy but he still drank to his heart's content.
Fierce hunger was still torturing him when he saw an old road among the trees. He immediately followed it, although it seemed long abandoned. He soon lost sense of time in attempt to ignore his hunger and pain. It felt like he was already walking for hours when the forest surrendered to a field covered with short grasses. The wind grew colder and a pale red moon rose up in the sky slowly and elegantly as a nymph awoken from her sleep. But the nameless man did not care about any of this. He continued on the path in a desperate attempt to find something that could feed him.
The break of dawn caught him resting on the side of the road with his back against the trunk of a large tree. Upon the wood were engraved countless names of the people that had travelled on this road in the past. The nameless man had already looked at them several times. Many were in languages he couldn't understand. But not all.
Now he hoped for someone - or something - to appear on this forgotten road and save him. His power to walk forward was depleted and the warm, golden sunrays from the east couldn't bring it back. He didn't have anything anymore besides hope. Hope and his new name, actually. He was not nameless anymore.
One of the names engraved upon the tree behind him was now his. He liked it. It sounded new and strange, and yet he felt it closer than any other name that he could read there. Now he had to get used to it. So he repeated it over and over again like some ancient incantation. His raspy voice filled the air.
"Ehrir", he said once more. "Ehrir".
After some time somewhere far north, where the road merged with the horizon, appeared a dark dot. It slowly grew and turned into a group of separate figures. It took some time for Ehrir to see them and even more to recognize that they were caravans. There was nearly a dozen of them, all painted in dark colors. Every one of them was moved by a pair of jet black horses. On top of the leading caravan hanged a flag with a symbol unrecognized by Ehrir.
When the caravans got near him, he slowly got up and rose his hand in the air as if his very presence wasn’t enough for him to be noticed. The caravaneer of the first one in the procession - a middle-aged man, wearing all black clothes and broad-brimmed gray hat - looked straight at him and his mouth twisted into an ugly smile.
"Come on, get in the caravan from the back", he said calmly. "The great Order of Hasthan welcomes all."
And so began Ehrir’s experience with just one of the countless organizations in the Outer Fantasy whose members were insane to a degree. In the following days the Order of Hasthan fed him and gave him a place to sleep in its caravans. The strange members of the cult – for a lack of a better term for this organization – even treated him well, although they soon noticed that he is an Undone One. They introduced him to the meaning of this term and also said that he’d face a lot of hatred in the world with the Changelings’ Brand upon his palms. But they also told him that among their ranks he’ll find only true brotherhood and a fine way of living. And then they started to preach to him their weird philosophy.
“The dead are the only thing that’s worth our attention in this world”, Ehrir would hear in the next days over and over again. “We care for the dead. In more than one way they are our family. We bury them with honor and according to their wishes. We do that with the rich who fear that their children would abandon their corpses without proper funerals. We do that with the poor who have no money to even have their dead body burned or buried. You may ask why. And I’ll tell you. We do it because in the eyes of the great Hasthan, Lord of the Unliving, only those that live alongside dead are deemed worthy.” These word were spoken by the leader of the caravan procession and high-ranking member of the Order. He told them – or similar ones – to Ehrir every morning. And then suddenly one day he asked him to join the organization.
Ehrir, a man with shattered mind and erased memories, without any previous touch to the civilization, was visibly confused by the philosophies of the Order. How could these lunatics look at the rotting piles of flesh, similar to the ones on the meadow he awoke in, and think of them as beautiful and exalted? He quickly refused the invitation because of these thoughts. And then came the fists.
The members of the Order of Hasthan almost killed him. They broke a few of his ribs and covered his body with bruises. They kicked him and hit him for hours before leaving him at the gates of a nearby city. “You are an Undone One. You are below the rest of mankind. You are trash. You can’t even repay our kindness. The great Hasthan won’t welcome you into his palace”, they told him. And he would not forget these words, because they first ignited his hatred towards the common people.
Ehrir chose to live in the city at whose gates he was left by the Order. He felt that there was no place beneath the sky that was fit for him, that was fit for an Undone One. Why would this city be any worse than any other place in the Outer Fantasy?
And so he remained there for months before the hatred of the locals made him move elsewhere. And so began his miserable life, spent in moving from city to city and from kingdom to kingdom in a desperate attempt to find a place in which he wouldn’t meet ignorant – or hateful – gazes. And that kind of existence continued for years, and his hatred towards all living, breathing humans continued to rise with each passing month. Until one day, in a city by the name of Borhael, at the coast of a sea with water as calm as the skies above it, he found something that would change him – for the better or worse – forever.