Darkness, thick and black.
Or was there simply nothing, and hence the darkness?
'No, darkness is simply the absence of something, so it's probably both.' The warrior thought.
He continued walking in a straight line, towards nothing in particular. There was no landscape, simply an endless flat plain filled with a dark fog that clung to him, never letting him escape its clutches.
His golden eyes suddenly widened, and he felt great power coursing through his entire body through his abdomen.
'Someone is using a spell on me? And such a powerful one? It would've taken weeks to get this kind of power at the old rate. This is so weird... where is the mana even being stored? My mana circuits are destroyed, and I still can't use magic.' He thought. He looked down at his hand, feeling as if it weren't truly his, or he was piloting this body from afar. He blinked and shook his head, trying to get rid of the sensation.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't shake the feeling that he had forgotten something, needed to do something, and had some purpose to fulfill. Now that he felt the mana surging through him, he could feel a membrane in his mind, a film of some kind that the mana had allowed him to perceive. He reached his hand out, trying to feel for it in the air while imagining that he was touching the film.
He felt nothing, no membrane in front of him.
His brows furrowed, this time attempting to reach out with his mind, but no matter how disconnected he felt from his body, he felt nothing new.
He was about to give up when a thought occurred to him.
'I only got this feeling when I collected enough mana; maybe I also need to use the mana to pierce the veil!'
He extended the mana stored in every cell in his body but still felt nothing.
'Damn it! What am I doing wrong?! If this feeling gets any stronger, I'll go insane!'
He grasped his head with his hands. The feeling was getting worse, along with the pain. It felt as if his head was about to split.
All he wanted to do was reach inside his head and...
"Wait, that's it!" He shouted aloud.
"I was reaching outside of my body, but I could feel this membrane in my mind. I was going the wrong way!" His voice sounded giddy, the deep tone raising an octave.
This time the mana went inside his body, towards his soul, that which was immaterial yet always present.
He felt strange holding his soul as if in the palm of his hand. Suddenly he felt as if reality was beginning to slip. He looked down at his hands, and they felt to him as if they weren't his.
He shut his eyes, trying to ignore the feeling that he was a stranger in his own body, feeling for the membrane around his mind, and he felt it. It was located in his brain, wrapped around a massive cluster of neurons that refused to fire and were slowly breaking down. He cautiously began pressing the mana against the barrier, feeling it tear.
The brain works at a speed no man can comprehend, with billions of neuron activations occurring every millisecond.
As the mana pierced the wall between him and himself, he remembered.
...
[Now, ???, ???]
A beautiful pair of pensive golden eyes suddenly widened, darting towards the dawn sky as she raced from her radiant throne to the edge of her massive balcony.
The armor of the Vrean Sun Guard clinked softly and glittered as she left the throne room.
She stared toward the crimson sunrise, and a tear fell down her cheek.
"My existence is prolonged for just a little longer, it seems..."
...
[??? years ago, The Kingdom of Vrea, Sun Guard Training Grounds]
He trained until he couldn't move, healed himself, and trained more. Only the radiant light of the Sun God kept him from losing his sanity.
It was a neverending cycle of extreme torture and small respites, those few moments when his body didn't feel like it was being torn apart from the inside, were beautiful. He remembered every single one, how he used to reminisce on how profound his struggle truly was, how he trained like the cycle of life and death.
Though sometimes he wasn't sure if it wasn't death that was torture, but life instead.
He had been recruited to the Sun Guard at the tender age of six, he couldn't remember before then, nor did he care. He got the sense it didn't matter, as if someone told him that it wouldn't help him achieve his goal, so it was forgotten, like his name and identity. What purpose he had to achieve, he still could not remember.
Every day his body grew exponentially stronger, constantly being unmade and remade daily. This was how the ancient Sun Guardians had been trained by their patron god, Vrea the Undying Flame, and how every guardsman had trained for thousands of years.
The instructors beat him with stone clubs until all his bones had fractured, and his body was a mass of black and blue.
Then they locked him in a cage with a wild boar, and it would remain closed until only one of them remained.
Then he was grouped with his fellow warriors, hefting massive metal weights over their heads and holding them there until the sun peaked over the mountain ridge of Gruumsh's Gate.
When they were done, they marched barefoot in perfect phalanx formation over gravel until the sun reached its apex.
They battled their trainers on the battlefield until the sun touched the horizon, trying desperately to subdue them.
Afterward, they were healed and allowed time to rest. Once the sun had set fully, they would begin again, stronger than last time.
It wasn't until they could finally beat their instructors in the battle that they were allowed to graduate.
In the name of guaranteeing that Vrea's most vital and most honored unit would remain as legendary in the present as it had been in the past, all this torture had been deemed necessary.