Enjoy my new addition to the chapters!

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I had dreams, nightmares, and sometimes memories. All these played in my mind like a flute, from one pitch to the next, from a low baritone to a high C. The sounds in my mind screamed at me, telling me to let them out. The familiar voices of my mother, the children of the villages, everyone I knew enough to know the tone of their voice.

They all cried out at me for help.

The nightmares would not stop with just that. I would often be tortured by a huge huge man with 4 horns that jutted out of his head similar to a goat’s horns. His laughter often shook the very chambers he liked to play in, and the playful questions such as “are you ready?” or “Count to three?” often followed after his low, deep laughter. After each time the 5th lash streaked across my back, I often became confused with the very realistic dream and reality.

Everytime. Every time I was lashed upon, I would hear Mother’s voice crying out for help, Fang’s howls echoing in the background. To some, this would torment their mind to the extreme. But for me, I saw it as another hope, another reason to get through the nightmare. The screams and wailing of my mother, let me believe she was still alive.

After each nightmare, I would always be in a single dreamscape, a small park I often visited as a kid. Ice sculptures were laid out before me, each of a different creature that didn’t exist in reality, and only in mythology. A dragon, the phoenix, the kraken, a hydra, the hippogriff. All these sculptures that looked almost lifelike to me, stayed upon platforms of ice in a very long line of creatures.

I would often have my head laying up on the ground, the clear, blue sky expanded across my vision. I sighed sometimes, other times I yawned at the comfort, and after that motion a woman would tilt in from above my face.

We would both look into each other’s eyes, and then smile a sad, sad smile, like we knew a secret that would hurt us both. Her smile was dazzling no matter which number of dreams I entered, and her skin was similar to that a pale white, with multiple colors sometimes rising to the surface of her skin and then receding back into her body. Her hair flowed with the colors of the rainbow, and danced, when there was no wind.

She would always look at me, and give me a choice.

“Choose what is to be, or not to be.”

Each and every time she spoke those words, I would always point into the same direction. Up. To the clear, blue sky. And after every time I did that, the sound of ice shattering would prickle my ears.

Then the pain from before all this, before the madness, the horror, the clear blue sky, before all of that, would return to my body as strong as I first received the whip from the nightmare.

Each time I felt that pain, I felt something leaving me, something extremely important in a sense. The things I left behind on that world, the things I left behind on Earth.

My life slowly began to lose the drive and focus I needed, as I began to lose an important reason for my existence. But that’s all that happened. It began.

It didn’t get worse, it never became better, I only knew that I lost something important, but I wouldn’t be able to remember such a thing as I can’t… remember.

I know my name, for I am Tom, a human from planet Earth. I am a man, and I must do what I must do to survive, and reclaim what is rightly mine.

I will reclaim what is lost, but where do I start?

“Where… do… I… start?”

I feel the vestige of the light entering the cracks in my eyelids, the sun from above striking down upon my body, and the cool air of the night sweeping over my body.

With the cracking of my eyelids, the pain I felt in my nightmares began to disappear, as if banished from my body. The sounds of my joints snapping when I began to move my body, and the sound of them creaking were audible to only my ears.

I grimaced slightly, but the pain from the dreams outweighed the tired muscles I had gained from not moving. I shuffle my feet towards me, and raise myself up steadily, leaning my hand out to find purchase on something, only to find a cool wall within my grasp.

That’s when my eyes open fully, and the only light that’s coming in is from a window barred similar to that of a jail cell. The light illuminated my body, the warmth allowing my blood to flow better within my body, making me less lethargic. Although, I still felt slow no matter what I did, as if I was a statue for a very long time.

I shuffle slowly to the door with the window in it, the sand under my feet allowing me to do this easily. The cool night air blows towards me, as if telling me to cool off and relax, everything is fine. But I only shake my head to the wind, and finally reach the door through effort alone. I reach to pull the door, only to have my body push against it. I began to fall, and with a very audible creak, the door falls with me, as if I was the final push it needed to take a rest.

I fall with the door, and with a grunt I fall onto the metal door. Sand explodes from underneath the door, covering me in a smog of sand. Yet that dissipates quickly as gravity and wind work their magic, just enough for me to see the place I was brought to by Borin.

I expected to see a bustling town full of dwarves, with blacksmiths pounding upon anvils, with little dwarves dancing and singing horribly with no beards on their faces. What I did not expect to see, was a place so…

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Deserted.

Rows of houses dotted my eyesight, the houses themselves made from what looks to be a harder form of sandstone. The orangish colors that danced upon my sight were dull in comparison to the bright sand of the desert that fell in from the roof.

Wait, the roof? I look up to find a trickle of sand flowing to the bottom floor of this odd town. The ceiling itself was underground, but the sand poured downwards to the floor, with a shining quality to them that acted almost like a miniature sun. Which gave the light needed in this town beneath the sands.

I push myself off of the metal door, the metal beginning to burn my hand slightly despite the lack of a natural sun. I stand up on my own two feet, and with a wobble I begin to shuffle my feet forwards, the sand sliding between my toes.

That’s when the inhabitants of the town decided to show themselves, beards and all.

In my eyesight, I could make out an unimaginable amount of figures peeping out from below window sills, from underneath cellar doors, and even from stone trash cans that looked similar to those from Earth. Some of these dwarven inhabitants slowly and steadily began to move out from their hiding spots, but none wore the armor I began to familiarize myself with. Borin’s form was nowhere to be seen, yet.

I continue my slow hobbling shuffle down the street, time slowly losing its effect on me. I was still slow, as all the dwarves, adult and child, began to swarm the streets as if I was just a street stall vendor. Naturally, this began to irk me as I only recieved weird glances from every person that walked past me in their rushed walk.

Taking nearly a good portion of my strength, I was able to make it to what seemed to be a town square, where a dried up fountain lay in the middle of this square. I trudged towards the fountain’s little basin, and I sat my ass down as carefully as I could against its cold stone exterior.

But something got in the way of my own attempt at sitting, something underneath me. I fall over fairly quickly into the basin, my feet poking up into the air. The blow upon the floor slightly stuns me, but my eyesight begins to focus on what is above me.

My feet, and my legs.

One of my legs and feet were completely not human, or maybe a variation I couldn’t consider or know. It was covered in some blue film, with my foot itself no longer being my typical five-toed foot. Instead, it was three-toed, and instead of normal nails, there were a good inch long claw, or talon for a more specific word.

My other foot was completely human though, as it looked like it once did before.

In between these two legs of mine lay something else. It was long, skinny at one end and thick at the other, and was as blue filmed as my other new leg. Slowly but steadily, the film that covered these two things began to disappear, by shattering every time I tried to move from my position. Very similar to the ice I sometimes played with on Earth, the new skin underneath began to show itself off from underneath the blue film.

The new thing between my legs fell limp across my crotch, almost reaching where my belly button was. I tried to move myself to a sitting posture, only to have the thing reach out to the ledge I fell off of and pull me up to my previous sitting position.

I fall ass first onto the ledge, just in time to see a familiar armored figure walk up towards me. Each step he took gave me reassurance, until I saw a massive bastard sword gripped in his hands, the tip pointed at where my neck was.

With a hidden anger barely concealed, Borin asks me in a low tone of voice.

“What on Vernier hav’ yer’ done.”

I look up at him in a way that showed I had no idea what I had done, my eyebrow raised with worry spelt out in my eyes.

“What do you mean Borin? I just woke up from that ‘progression’.”

“Don’t mess with meh, it could onlay be yer’ fault!”

With a quick twitch to his hands, the sword draws blood from my chin. I hold up my hands, to assure him I meant him no harm. Crazed people are often unable to understand any situation.

“I still don’t know what you mean Borin. What do you think I’ve done?”

“Yer’ killed da village chieftain in cold blood, that’s what yer’ did! If yer’ don’t believe meh, look at yer’ hand!”

Following Borin’s instructions, I look at my right arm, the cybernetic arm. It was as clean as dust allowed it to be, the black steel still holding the strange bones in the casing. I look back at Borin, to find him looking at my other arm, my human arm.

Following his gaze I look in confidence at what my proof in innocence was. But that quickly faded away as I saw my said human arm covered in a blue film that was slowing peeling and falling off. The talons I saw on my feet too the place of my fingernails, and the blue skin began to show off a scaly appearance, the cracks in the skin sometimes lifting up and clacking together when I moved my hand. I look back to Borin to find him staring straight at me.

“I still don’t know what you mean Borin, I just got out of that prison you put me in. I can’t commit murder when I was in there.”

“That’s what yer’ say, but it ain’t true. Someone witnessed yer’ savage killin technique on my own brotha!”

Connecting the dots, I widen my eyes, and I begin to shake my head to answer to his accusation. But as the adults said when there was unexpected pregnancy in families, ‘shit just hit the fan’.