As he finished speaking, the blood pooled in the hallway began to coalesce around its right arm, twisting and writhing like a living thing. This was the first time I had ever witnessed a forsaken being—one who had failed to control their powers and succumbed to them, transforming into a hollow, twisted shadow of their former self.
Clearly, he wanted to intimidate me, to draw out some reaction—fear, anger, anything. His movements were slow, deliberate, and dripping with malice. But all he got from me was a toothy grin.
How could I fear this? This was nothing compared to the torment I had endured.
My limbs, still splayed out and restrained by the unforgiving chains, ached as I watched him navigate through the scattered rubble of the shattered door. Each step he took seemed deliberate, his movements predatory yet slow. The faint clinking of debris under his feet echoed in the cavernous space until he came to a halt roughly thirty feet away from me.
It stood there, his blood-soaked arm pulsating with grotesque energy, as if relishing the sight of me bound and helpless. But I remained still, my gaze unwavering.
In one deliberate motion, it raised its right arm and allowed the blood of its fallen foes to form into a grotesque blade. The blade shone ruby red in the dim lighting as he gripped it between its fingers and launched it toward me.
As the blade hurtled toward me, I felt a surge of energy awaken deep within me, like a dormant power suddenly igniting. My instincts kicked in before my mind could catch up, and the world seemed to slow.
In an instant, I knew. This was it—the awakening.
Meant to unlock the potential within those strong enough to endure. But this… this was unlike anything I had imagined. It was raw, violent, and overwhelming.
Aether surged through me, ancient and untamed, threading its way into every corner of my being. Time faltered, slowing to an unbearable crawl as the air around me thickened. The blade hurtling toward me hung motionless, caught in the unnatural suspension of a world that no longer obeyed its laws. Space twisted, bending and stretching in impossible ways as if reality itself was unravelling.
My body convulsed, trembling under the sheer weight of the energy coursing through me. It wasn't mine—not yet. I could feel that much. This force was untethered, wild and unfamiliar, as though it had been waiting, lurking just beneath the surface, until this very moment. I wasn't wielding it; it was wielding me, dragging me into a storm I had no hope of controlling.
The air crackled, and my prison began to twist and warp. The walls elongated and curved, the runes that once bound me flickering as if struggling to stay coherent. I could see fragments of light and shadow spilling into the space as though time itself had fractured. Memories—some mine, some alien—rippled through my mind, colliding with images of impossible places: an endless sea beneath a sky filled with two suns, a cavern of shimmering stars that whispered secrets I couldn't comprehend.
This was the awakening, I realized, but it felt wrong. It wasn't supposed to be like this—so unrestrained. The stories are told with clarity and focus. Yet here I was, consumed by chaos, my mind unravelling as space, time, and something more profound—converged around me.
My dreams began bleeding into reality. The boundary between the real and the dream dissolved as flickers of my subconscious spilled out. Shadows of people I had imagined long ago stood at the edges of my vision, their forms shifting and fading. The golden shore I often dreamt of shimmered before me, only to fracture and dissolve into the infinite void. It was as though the power within me was reaching out, pulling threads from every corner of existence—past, future, present, real, and imagined— and weaving them into something incoherent.
It felt as I was being pulled from every direction, stretched indefinitely in all directions.
I tried to grasp the edges of this force, to tame it, to make it mine, but I felt it fight back, unwilling to be tamed or controlled.
I would not succumb to my powers, not now. I had been confined to this prison for far too long to simply vanish into oblivion. There were countless moments—what felt like years—when I dreamed of my powers, what they could become, and the possibilities they could unlock. This was my moment, the culmination of those restless nights and unyielding determination. I would not let it slip away.
The pain was unbearable. The energy surged wildly, ravaging my nervous system and rewriting my genetic code as I forced it to flow through me.
I screamed in agony as every fibre of my being begged for relief, but I refused to let go.
Over what felt like an eternity, I slowly began to adapt to the untamable force within me. Its wild, chaotic energy no longer tore through me unchecked. Bit by bit, I wrestled it into submission, shaping it, bending it to my will. It fought me at every turn, but I refused to falter. What was once an unrelenting storm was now becoming mine—a power I could wield, not as its victim, but as its master.
As I opened my eyes, the world around me snapped back into motion. Time, which had felt suspended in an eternal void, began to flow once more. The chaotic stillness was replaced by a surge of clarity, every detail around me sharp and vivid. The energy within me still roared, but now it was mine to command, no longer a force beyond my control.
My awakening had left devastation in its wake. The room around me lay in ruins, debris scattered as if a storm had passed through. The chains that once restrained me lay shattered, though the cold, unyielding shackles still clung to my arms and legs like remnants of the past.
The blade continued to hurtle toward me, but with newfound clarity and strength, I sidestepped with ease. The blade flew past my face, embedding itself into the wall with a deafening crack. My movements felt fluid, instinctual—as though the torment of imprisonment, bound by unyielding chains, had never been. It was as if my body had clung to the memory of freedom, even when my mind had teetered on the edge of forgetting.
"You don't truly understand freedom until it's ripped away," I said, my voice a low, rasping growl. The words felt foreign on my tongue, heavy with the weight of silence and suffering, yet they cut through the air with the sharpness of a blade. They weren't just words—they were a reminder, a warning, and a promise all at once.
"This trial broke me," I continued, my voice thick with the weight of raw emotion. "It swallowed my will, drained me until nothing was left. I became a hollow shell, a prince to nothing." The words hung in the air, heavy with the bitterness of defeat, but beneath them, there was something else—a flicker of defiance, still burning, even after all the torment.