Azriel wiped away his tears with his hands before rubbing them against the dry dirt. He felt his hand brush up against billions of years of history. He felt the sensation of erosion within the topsoil and the lack thereof just below it. It brought a smile to his face. He couldn’t help but feel overjoyed by what to others may have seemed trivial, but to him was so heartening that the mere fact he had the opportunity to have observed it and run his hands across it made his throat clench painfully.
In that realm, the dirt was of uniform consistency no matter where or how far you dug into it. The trees were exact clones of each other. The clouds consisted of only three patterns that would repeat endlessly. The grass was a consistent height regardless of where you searched. The sun never moved, and the night never came. Azriel hadn’t even conceived that such beautiful things like stars could exist, let alone that for each and every one of them, there was a unique size, color, and placement.
Back then, he had no way of knowing what it was about his unending subsistence that made him feel so null and empty, but now it was unmistakable. The thing he could not know he desperately, unendingly, incessantly yearned for was an idea that had long since been erased from his memory. The thing which he had forgotten was change.
Change was a concept that could be seen as good or bad depending on the circumstances and to whom perceived it, but in that moment, change was like an oasis in ten million miles of barren desert. It was a euphoric sensation that had enraptured Azriel so thoroughly even after six years, the feeling still remained just as prevalent.
He thought about his parents, then he thought about the village, then the people, the animals, the trees, the shrubs, the flowers by the river, the bugs he watched crawl inch by inch. His hope for so long was granted to him, the wish he unknowingly made since when he first came to that awful prison, the reason for which he never gave up, for why he never let himself falter for even an instant. It was this thing which he been granted that made him cry while laughing, smile while sniffling.
Azriel shot up to his feet, shouting into the sky with all his might.
“Thank you! God, thank you! God, thank you! God, thank you! God… thank… you.”
He went silent.
Looking down at his hands, Azriel saw their delicate, innocent figure and thought, “These hands… they look… not me… No… No, these aren’t my hands. These hands belong to whoever created this body. Are they a gift for me, for all I’ve been through? Is it a reward for what I’ve been through? Or… am I simply but a tool to suit their purposes, a means to an end? Should I be resentful towards the power that made me go through that? Should I, a tool, be upset for having been created to serve the purpose of my creator?”
Azriel fell back to the ground, ripping a blade of grass out and inspecting it closely while twiddling it between his index finger and thumb.
“No… Even… if I exist to fulfill some goal… even though I had to go through what I had… I can’t help but feel only appreciation for the opportunity I’ve been given… to exist in this world of change.”
Dropping the grass, he clenched his fist into a ball and raised it up in front of the sun.
“I’m drifting without purpose… I know not what this world or god wants from me. I don’t know if it is a call I want to heed. I don’t know if the caller is even deserving of my cooperation. I simply don’t know… but I’d like to know. I’d like to.”
Laying on his back, he thought the words, “Open status menu.”
Suddenly a bright box of light containing text appeared before him.
[Name: Azriel]
[Stigma: n/a]
[Skills: {Re} (Status Menu), {Re} (Ultimate Experience), {Re} (Sense Presence), {Re} (Enhanced Stamina), {Re} (Adept Intuition), (Enhanced Constitution), (Hastened Reflexes), (Toxin Resilience), (Double-jump), (Spirit-death trap)]
The ethereal glowing textbox that appeared before Azriel was in the form of a list that displayed his name, stigma, or lack thereof, and his skills. It took a long time for him to discover this hidden ability he had. He only discovered it a few months back by chance after having a quite fortunate string of thoughts about the inconveniences of not knowing what his skills were.
Azriel had heard from his parents that the god Logos gave its vessels the ability to construct tablets that held a database of every known skill in existence and displayed information about a person, much like the status menu had. However, such people wouldn’t be found out in the Styx.
Logos worshippers were generally scholars that locked themselves inside towers transcribing scrolls and letters all day. According to his father, every single one he had seen wore glasses for their stigmas: Logos Myopia.
In Azriel’s encyclopedic tome, there was a section on skills that explained nearly half of the skills in his status menu, and the ones that it didn’t he discovered through deduction and experimentation, all except for one, that being the portentous sounding ‘Ultimate Experience.’
“Ultimate experience,” he repeated in his mind.
The sound of it gave him the sense that it was a skill of unparalleled quality, but what precisely it did, he wasn’t sure. He came up with a few ideas, but there was only one he deemed adequate, one that nagged in the back of his mind, a possibility which he could not simply overlook.
Suddenly, he felt the presence of something small. Hopping to his feet, he took up a fighting stance. His ability ‘Sense Presence’ gave him a sort of sixth sense that allowed him to feel every movement within a few yards away from him.
A fox scrambled to get away from Azriel at first sight of him moving, scampering through a bush and out of sight, leaving the boy to consider heading back.
Making his decision, Azriel approached the ledge, and without a second thought, he jumped off the cliff, falling freely nearly twenty feet then double-jumping into a roll. He had started to really get the hang of his double-jumping ability.
Dusting off his dirtied back, he bolted out of the forest and back into the hamlet. The sun was due to set in a few hours. It was the time of day when the village children came out to play.
The kids weren’t fond of Azriel, probably for his far-out disposition, but would begrudgingly play with him anyway. They would settle for having him be their designated seeker or it.
Azriel didn’t understand that he was being targeted by the other children. He couldn’t have since he exerted such little effort in trying to understand and make emotional connections with them. Fortunately for him, he liked being it and the seeker. It let him experiment with his skills.
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Exiting the veil of trees, Azriel watched the children, both boys and girls, put down their tools, stopping to watch the tall obelisk standing in the center of the village. A smoothed stone pillar stood there adorned in glowing golden inscription. At its peak, four stone clocks held together by godly magic on each of the pillar’s four sides slowly turned in unison. The glowing gold hour hands stopped on the similarly glowing numeral five. The obelisk began to resonate, producing a sound somewhat like a low-pitch bell. It was a magic clock tower, the product of Chronos, the god of time.
The children grouped up near the towering obelisk, twelve in total, eight boys and four girls. Azriel approached, grabbing the attention of one of the boys, who immediately, upon seeing him, shouted, “You’re it.”
The children scattered, running in every direction.
Azriel gave them a minute head start before springing into an Olympian sprint. His running stride was immense for a person of his size. His sprint looked more like hopping than running, lending to his subconscious usage of the Double-jump skill when pushing off every step.
The children ran into the trees, around the houses, and out of his view as he enclosed upon one of the girls. Jumping forward, he lightly tapped her on the back. He was careful as to not hit her too hard, for had he, he knew he would be punished harshly, for what, he wasn’t quite sure. After all, he was no stranger to pain. He was accustomed to it and until recently knew not of any other state of being.
The girl yelled, “No fair! Why do you always get me first?”
Azriel was already too far away to clearly hear her bemoaning. He wouldn’t have cared enough to listen anyway.
Azriel tagged another and then another over and over until everyone grew sick of the game. Azriel was becoming too fast for the monkey in the middle routine. Even when they distorted the rules of tag so that he remained it the whole game, he managed to excel to the point that no one else was having fun.
Grouping back together, in the center of the hamlet, the children decided that they’d rather play hide and seek with Azriel, to no one’s surprise, being the seeker.
They had him count to one-hundred, one-hundred times before he could start seeking. Azriel was aware that the children couldn’t count that high and that one-hundred times one-hundred was a ludicrously long time to wait. He opted to wait five minutes instead; they wouldn’t know any better.
Azriel started by searching the regular hiding spots where he found a few of the younger ones before scouring the less common locations where he found the rest, all except two, of the older boys. One of them was Erik, and the other was his older brother Hansel, the son of Henric and the oldest child in the village at the age of thirteen. Hansel was the most well-respected kid in the group, being some kind of leader for it. He was also the most adversarial person towards Azriel, not that Azriel knew.
Searching every spot in the perimeter the kids stayed within, Azriel figured the two had been found by the others, so he returned to the center. Only when he arrived he found that none of the others were there. Even after a few minutes of waiting, after the ten kids he had found trickled back into the center, those two were still nowhere to be seen.
A few more minutes passed before Hansel suddenly broke through the grain field, out of breath and crying. His face was soaked with blood bringing the attention of the whole village. Lazarus dashed over and knelt, grabbing Hansel by the shoulders.
“What happened,” Lazarus questioned with consternation.
Through his hyperventilating, Hansel eked out, “In… the… cave.”
No sooner had he said this, Lazarus grabbed his axe and set off running down past the farm fields toward the road out of the dale.
Azriel looked at Hansel, who had fallen to the ground crying. He could sense that the child was experiencing an emotion far removed from him. He couldn’t tell what it was, but it elicited within him another emotion he hadn’t yet come to know: empathy.
Bending forward, he grabbed a handful of dirt and worked it into his hand, coating them in the coarse brown powder. Some of the more observant villagers took note of his behavior. One, Hans, a retired veteran, recognized Azriel’s odd mannerism to mean only one thing given the context.
Hans grabbed Azriel by the arm, demanding, “You mustn’t go. It is too dangerous for a child.”
Azriel matched Hans’s gaze with a look that said nothing but somehow elicited an emotion within him that cut his words short. Without even realizing his hand, which had been holding Azriel’s arm, was now dangling awkwardly at his side.
Azriel turned back, taking a few seconds to stretch out his legs before sprinting after his father with unprecedented velocity. His mother, who had seen what happened from their doorway and came running after him, but she stood no chance of catching up. Hans and a few others restrained her, preventing her from following suit.
Azriel had almost caught up to Lazarus when he heard inhuman screaming somewhere alongside the foot of the cliff. Thereafter came squishing and cracking. Azriel knew these sounds to be the sounds of yielding flesh and bone.
Lazarus stopped to look at something before falling backward on his hind. Inside the cave were the mutilated corpses of seven wolves positioned in a manner that invoked intent. Their decapitated heads hung from the mouth of the cave held up by their own intestines. Their bodies were ripped into pieces with the parts having been arranged into a pentagram. in the center of it, placed upon a smooth flat stone sat the disembodied head of the boy, Erik, and right behind it a tall bipedal creature that looked like a rotten corpse stood eating what remained of his body.
The rotten bony creature with wolf-like qualities was what Lazarus knew to be a wendigo, a witch-type monster that would masquerade as the creatures it killed to impersonate them. Lazarus had never seen one; they were never encountered this far south.
Lazarus stood back up and took a defensive stance with his axe. He had no idea how dangerous wendigos were or how to fight them, but he never turned away from a fight, and he wasn’t going to now.
The creature noticed Lazarus, distracting it from its maleficent doings.
Violently ripping the boy’s body in half and tossing the halves aside, it slowly advanced. Its eyes were two dark holes that stared into Lazarus’s soul, its stride was stilted and creaky, its rotten flesh dangled from exposed bones, and it didn’t seem to have any hesitancy at all.
Lazarus felt afraid, but he knew there was no way out of this alive if he didn’t kill the monster there and then. He knew this, and yet…
The wendigo burst forth quickly, jabbing its bony fingers into Lazarus’s stomach. A blow that would have impaled him had he not perfectly blocked it with the flat of his axe.
The wendigo’s fingers shattered against the crude black iron causing it to howl, either in pain or in anger. Lazarus could not discern which.
The monster stepped back and silently stood. It was most definitely thinking about something nefarious, something which would put fear into the heart of any man.
It stepped forth.
Lazarus lifted his axe, his hands trembling in a way he was not used to. He had never felt such fear when fighting before now. He realized he had a lot to lose since settling down in Hildenfreide. His childhood-lover and wife, his son, the village that had welcomed in with open arms.
Suddenly, the wendigo ripped its hand off and bolted forward, grabbing Lazarus’s axe before he could move to defend himself. Slamming its handless forearm onto Lazarus’s wrist, it kneed him in the stomach, sending him flying back a few feet.
Lazarus’s wrist was broken, and so were a few of his ribs. What more, the foul-creature now held the axe in its hand, and it wasn’t dropping it.
The wendigo stomped its foot down on Lazarus’s wrist, clamping it to the ground. Quickly lifting the axe, he chopped it down on his hand, severing his finger.
Lazarus wailed in pain, powerless to stop the vengeful monster from using his own weapon against him. He shook his head, trying to get the strength to stand back up, but that strength wasn’t coming. He was afraid it never would. All he could do was yell, “Somebody, please save me!”
The wendigo shimmied its foot, lifting the axe and lining it up with his wrist. As the axe hit its mark, severing his hand Lazarus saw, with his hazy vision, a thing fall from the tree above. He wondered if what he saw could possibly be real.