Pain flared across Flynn's mind leaving him a muddled incoherent mess. He felt that power beyond his comprehension ripped him apart at the seams, only to fuse him whole again. A nightmare far worse started cycling as the fabric of his soul melded and fractured over and over within his psyche, breaking his soul and body.
Unaware of its surroundings, a husk floated in an endless sea of black. Memories and things that had been oh so important flitted by like shattered glass. The husk groaned and moaned as time swirled. Slowly as eons or perhaps seconds passed, the husk remembered.
Blurry eyes blinked desperately against the darkness that had threatened them for so long. a milky landscape formed in front of the pain-addled soul. The being, unaware of himself and reality, stared in confusion. It was a familiar scene. One that lurked in the back of his mind.
He watched the landscape in front of him for a minute that bled into an hour. His mind was a muddled mess. 'who was he?' He idly wondered as the sun started to set below the rolling hills in the distance, and as if it was planned, clarity overtook him.
Memories flooded into his mind like rapids, and he once again knew. The first thing that came to his mind was this very sunset. It was the last sunset he had seen on earth before being swept away into the trials. It seemed ironic to see it again at the end like this. To see the thing he longed for the most. To once again see the earth.
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He went to move the tendril-like energy that was his soul, but movement caught his attention. Five appendages attached to a long cylinder reached out towards the cascading light. It took Flynn's racing mind more than a few moments to catch up. He flexed and moved the appendages, a perplexed look across his face.
A hand? He tilted his head, his mind still clouded from the pain. He narrowed his eyes to slits. "That's not right?" The words came out as a question, and panic flooded Flynn's mind. The words came out. On instinct, his hand moved to his mouth, and dry lips greeted his fingertips.
The entire ordeal was almost too much, and the small amount of sensation almost sent him catatonic once more. Fortunately, Flynn's mind held on as realization dawned. The idea that started to spread through his mind hit him like a runaway truck wrapping itself around a tree.
Flynn fell to his knees as the memories and thoughts played across his mind. Blurry eyes only got worse as tears streamed down his face. Sobs of primal emotions ripped from his throat upon the small grassy hill, and if anyone was around him, they'd have called him a mad man.
Flynn did not care as he let emotions he didn't even understand run through him, and only one truth came to his mind through the jumbled mess that was his psyche. He was back. Somehow, unexplainably he was back.
Flynn sat up after regaining his composure. He closed his eyes, searching his mind. Flynn Blackwater once again knew who he was, where he was, and he could remember almost anything. Everything that had happened before the trials recalled to him in stark clarity. It was as if he had a perfect recall of his entire early life. Faces, hidden text from books, anything was just a thought away, making him uncomfortable.
His memory felt like someone had rewired it. The only problem was when he started to think forward. He knew of the trials and even had a large portion of the first phase clearly within his memory. The problem came after. The closer he got to the end of the first phase of the trials, his mind became like fragmented glass and whisps of memories that faded away into confusion and fog. There was only really one thing circling through his psyche despite all of this.
What the hell was going on?