It is so cold… Unaware was I of just how bitter the chill these starless nights could be. Crippled, weak, hopeless, I feel no reason to continue on. I’ve pulled myself for what seems like an eternity, foolishly testing my leg every few hours. It’s destroyed, there will be no way to repair it, no way to walk on it for some time if I do not rest… Alas, I am so very hungry. For three days, my gut has quivered and growled like a sick dog snapping for his master’s scraps. For three agonizing days, I have thought of nothing but revenge, a bittersweet satiation that has kept me moving, kept me crawling though my fingers are bony and limp, and their nails absent, destroyed by my perpetual motion. It hurts so much to move, just to pull myself one more step sends horrid shocks up through the core of my hands all the way to the knuckle and back.
Perhaps this parchment, this charred twig, these letters do not exist at all. Perhaps this is a cranial fabrication spawned out of fanaticism and desperation. It matters not, my words still echo within the confines of my wailing head, and therefore I must exist in one form or another. If this is to be Vektarren, then it is to be absent of demonic hordes, vanguards of an endless set of predetermined deaths. It is absent of everything; everything but corpses. I have crawled for ages, and all I have seen are corpses. Rotting bodies teeming with festering maggots birthed of the grotesque flies that continuously assault me.
I cannot take this.
I hate being alone.
And that was when I saw it.
The Wraith.
It watched me from the horizon, slowly drawing nearer as I crawled towards it with hatred burning in my veins. I wished for nothing more than to destroy it, just as it had destroyed me… That wretched valkyrie, so slow and mysterious. Like an oil-stained angel: faceless, enigmatic, terrible yet beautiful all at the same time. It has followed me, now, and I have followed it. I can’t move anymore… It’s so dark. It’s so cold…
Why can’t I die?
Why can’t I silence this pain?
Why has Caldrock damned me to Vektarren?
Perhaps existing to begin with is the darkest hell. How could you experience pain without once experiencing happiness? The Knight defeated me, not with strength, but with wit… For years I prided myself with my intelligence, my irrefutable and flawless logic; how ironic that now, only when consumed by hatred, that I can see what is true in this world. How I had forsaken common sense for the sanctity of assurance in myself, a futile defensive construct that made of me a hypocrite, an everyman.
It is now, as I lie here in a pool of muck and what I would presume is my own feces, that I confess unto tear-stained sheets that I truthfully cannot conjecture whether to be of this existence or not, that I bear so much hatred towards the one who robbed me of everything. The one who tore my every little pleasure away from me, burned it, spat on it, utterly destroyed it. The only one who crushed everything I had ever believed in within the course of three nights. The one I hate most… Is myself.
I hate hypocrisy.
I hate the world again.
The only way I will ever kill it all is to die, myself… that would make it go away, yes.
That would make everything finally silence, the hypocrisy would finally end.
Now all I must do is die…
How can I die?
How can it be so simple? Death is an eternal sleep, yet every time I shut my eyes, all I feel is more hatred. I cannot give up, even when my blood has ceased flowing, my skin has shriveled into an ivory shroud over withering muscle, I cannot die.
I cannot die.
I am a failure.
Die.

Rain. Decadent, beautiful rain that shimmered like pulchritudinous silver as it fell from the sky, coating Samuel’s cold and weakened body in a slick, moist veil. Pale blue eyes shuttered open and winced upon the gentle grace of the water. It was charming, in a way, this cascade of tender gems, yet it was cold. So very cold. Every droplet stung like acid, biting Samuel’s frail skin like the tiniest of spearheads, borne of frost and glacial ice.
Samuel tried to raise his hand to shield his eyes, yet it dropped no more than a few inches back into the fetid muck that acted as his festering cradle. He groaned, weakly turning his head to the side. Pain gripped at his knee, the only thing he could really feel, an atrocious and impossible burning sensation that seemed to roll liberally about the cap. Three nights had fallen, soon to be four, and only once had he made the mistake of looking at his wound. Though the skin had not broken, his flesh expanded and twirled unnaturally in a way that just thinking about it made him want to heave. Yet, despite his strongest of efforts to purge himself of the memory, it never left him. Nor did the nausea.
Time passed. There was no moon in the skies, just a churning purple aurora that mocked Samuel, dancing so freely and unpredictably like the fireflies that once inhabited the plains and fields. It was free to do as it pleased, twirling, twisting, caressing the onyx firmament without a worry or a care. All he could do was watch as the rain passed. Dull indigo illuminated the horizon, a subtle sign that the sun was soon rising. Another night, not alive but not dead…
He knew how the Death Guard felt, and how he thought. Samuel had pondered for days the logic imparted upon him, and just how right it may have been. With such pain present… How could any other logic be right? If it would save him, spare him of such agony, perhaps all he had to do was embrace it.
And forever be doomed a hypocrite.
“Rrahrh… Siioooo shkt… Iiiiiaeee…”
A faint voice spoke to him, distant and haunting, utterly inhuman yet it was not that of the Knight’s. Samuel’s eyes fluttered open again, and he found himself being shaded by a featureless figure, shrouded in black merely staring at him. Lord Death had come at last… Or so he had hoped.
“Nirrr… rrruiiiet’s get you… babaaba…. Your feet.”
Samuel blinked, unable to link the words being spoken to him. Even through the distortion of delirium, Samuel could trace an obscure accent; this figure was hard to understand. He felt pressure at his collar and before he knew it, he was airborne. Pain spontaneously jerked at him again, causing him to wail instinctively.
“Srrrrhhh… -ey’ll hear oo…”
The man wailed again, but was swiftly silenced as something firm, crunchy, entered his mouth. A carrot, the dirty taste familiar even when his lips and tongue were dry as a raisin. He tried to bite down, yet his jaws would not move. More words assaulted his eardrums, words he couldn’t even begin to fully comprehend.
“Dnnnnnnnt rie… at ao.”
Samuel groaned, unable to say any more, he drooped into a bittersweet sleep. Oddly calm, he let his limbs relax, his chest slowly rising and falling against a rough and tattered cloth. Though darkness embraced him again, this time it felt warmer. Not as cold as before, not as deathly still, but swift and careful. He awoke at times, watching the ground sweep past in a dizzying blur that forced him back into the calming embrace of moderate rest. Once he had awoken with a carrot in his mouth, again without it, then once more with the carrot back in. He came to enjoy the carrot’s company, so much so that even while asleep he would be aware of its presence, his teeth’s weakened pressure on its rough surface, and especially when it would fall from his jaws into the shifting abyss beneath him. Yet no matter what, it would always return to him, halted between his yellow stained teeth.
Much time passed, time Samuel conjectured felt like years, yet time the ambience of Gaddain proved had only been hours. Samuel found himself now away from the racing flow of dirt and air, and instead set gently down in a cot of old leathers and wooly cloths. The crackle of a familiar sound had awoken him, and made him nibble the carrot in an almost defensive, protective manner.  His eyes focused somewhat, and he groaned again.
“Mate, y’need be sit ‘n m’ bed ‘n get y’rself s’m rest b’fre y’ h’rt y’slf.”
Samuel blinked and groaned again, reclining a bit more.
“S’ jest th’ f’re.”
A loud crack emanated from the source of the growling flame, likely a small fireplace outside of Samuel’s view. His host drifted from the bedside, off into the abyss where the fire must exist. He shuffled around noisily for a moment before returning and plopping down on the floor at the edge of the bed. The man drew back his hood to expose a head of shaggy gray hair and a mottled beard of light brown and shifting grays. Piercing blue eyes flickered at Samuel, accented by leathery skin adorned by many, many scars. The man snorted and spat to the side.
“Ah w’nt ask f’r y’r name, ah kn’w y’ can’t talk m’ch, bet I b’ Pride.”
Another crack from nearby, thus causing the man to grumble and arise once more. Crashing echoed from the unseen world before the man identified as Pride returned. He plopped back down and shuffled around his pockets for a moment. Pride wore leathers, undoubtedly rotten to the core yet tanned and cured to be of obvious strength. Fangs curved and laced into an intricate weave through the leather, linking together individual hides into obvious plates, and thus reinforcing it further. Sharp fur hung from his back, a dark brown with black tips and a putrid green base, a skin Samuel recognized, but could not identify in his entropy.
“H’re,” Pride grunted, stuffing a piece of paper into Samuel’s hand. “F’nd it on y’. C’nt read ‘t.”
Samuel blinked, looking down at the paper, then back at Pride with confusion in his eyes. Pride glared back, an undying strength that drowned everything else out resonating from beneath the shallow surface of his glassy blue orbs. “Sl’p, I’ll w’ke y’ wh’n d’nnr’s d’n.”
The man didn’t have to speak again. Samuel’s head tilted to the side and the world drowned away, twirling into an unfamiliar darkness under an unfamiliar ceiling. There was nothing but blackness, yet this time there was warmth. The cold had faded, replaced inside by a humble, glowing warmth. Though he knew the carrot had fallen from his jaws, Samuel knew it was nearby, and for a while he felt safe. No dreams came to him, only thoughts and recollection, however dark they may be, he still felt safe.
For once in eight years, he felt safe.
And nothing could take that away from him.
Not yet.