PAIN...AGONY...BURNING...I feel the flesh melting off my bones, my blood boiling in my veins. I feel like a piece of steel in the fires of my forge. I haven't felt pain like this since...stop thinking the memory is too much right now, damn it's coming...the eyes stare down at me, cold, calculating, devoid of any humanity at all. The eyes of my brother Maddac. Ever since he had come home from the Underdark with the waraxe they had found after defeating a group of duegar he had changed, he stopped laughing, then the fights started, then the disapperances...looks like I am the next one to vanish. The axe head catches aflame and Maddac presses it into my ribs,the flesh burning, my screams echo in the small cave we are in. The axe raising over his head for my death blow. Surprise in his eyes as the arrow hits him in the chest and he staggers back, two more arrows next to the first. He turns away and falls behind a stone outcropping, the cleric pushes forward trying to heal the many burns and cuts on my body but he is shaken by what he sees and his prayers are weak, my body is a mass of scars now. One of the warriors find an opening behind the outcropping and inside the remains of half a dozen missing dwarves. My brother had escaped. Home again, my father refuses to believe, never Maddac, I am lying, the others are lying...it was me, it was my fault that Madac became what he had, my fault. It should have been me that fell prey to that evil axe, turned cruel and wicked.
The fire is not as hot now. The pain is almost tolerable, the memories have made this pain easier to handle. I slowly come back to myself, the heated stone under my back feels pleasant. I feel different, what happened...oh yeah the Phoenix said this might hurt. He had killed us as he remade us with his power, completely burned us to ash to begin again. My skin feels weird, i can't figure out why until I slid my hand under my mail, my skin is whole, unblemished, my scars are gone. I have been reborn. |
