I kept finding myself back in that eerie nothingness over and over again, my body still screaming at all the accumulated pain I had put it through.
After some point, all I remembered was my mind begging for it to stop. And yet the darkness never relented, each death simply following the same way.
It never gave me a single chance to recover, shifting around me over and over again, until it became nothing more than a cold and certain reminder of what waited for me next.
First there was a house. I burned inside it, clawing at walls that would not give, until my fingers left blood on them and the smoke took me before the fire did.
Then a swamp, the water thick and oppressive, a serpent coiling around me and crushing until nothing of me remained.
Then a battlefield, things I could not properly describe closing over me all at once, and then only scraps of me left.
Then a coldness so severe that the blood inside me froze.
Then a fall.
Then teeth.
Somewhere in there I began losing count, my mind turning numb to the pain itself, each death arriving in some new inventive way I had never even deemed possible.
I was burned, bound, frozen, buried under the ground with no way out, skewered through countless places as I bled to death.
And with every death I kept returning, but deep down some part of me did die, never to return again.
In the beginning I still had something like resolve, some quiet belief that with enough time and enough attempts, a scenario might show up that would turn in my favour. That I would find a way to survive.
God, I had been so naive.
Looking back, maybe that resolve was the only thing that had kept me going. That, and maybe an ounce of hope.
But with every death I watched it wear down, something I did not even realise until most of it was already gone.
And then somewhere after a dozen deaths, or maybe even more, I finally understood with cold and complete certainty that I was not walking away from this.
There was a limit to what the human mind could take before it simply stopped holding itself together.
And I knew for a fact that I was approaching it, or that I had passed it some time ago.
Actually, maybe it was not so bad after all. I had already died once before and I could do it again. What was even the point of clinging to life when all that waited for me was boundless suffering?
My mind seemed to have reached for that thought on its own, and no part of me, for some reason, retaliated. It was the only excuse I had, an excuse to finally see all of it stop.
I knew, genuinely, that I could not take it anymore. The pain had become something I could no longer push through.
The darkness shifted around me once again, and I realised I could not even make sense of how many times I had watched it happen now.
A few dozen. Maybe even a few hundred.
My mind refused to hold a single coherent thought, fragments of deaths flashing behind my eyes, the pain of each bleeding into the next before my mind gave up on trying to process it at all.
I failed to even register the shape the world around me was taking as I fell to my knees, my legs going numb beneath my own weight.
The particular calm that never arrives before death, but only once you have finally stopped fighting the idea of it.
"I am done. Kill me all you want, you fuck."
I spat it, willing my throat to scream, and all it managed was a pitiful whisper.
My arms fell limp by my sides as the runes emerged before me.
YOUR FATE
THE MAN WHO ACCEPTED DEATH
Well, aren’t you a bright one.
A small chuckle cracked out of my throat.
"I tried. I actually fucking tried, you know."
"What do you even want from me? How the hell am I supposed to beat something like that?"
I shouted the words at the empty dark ahead of me, my voice cracking halfway through.
My eyes fell on the waves beside me, my knees pressed into soft sand that seemed to cling to my feet.
A beach.
The waves reached me from my left, the sound of them somehow calming despite the fate I already knew was waiting.
My laughter only grew, cracking out in uneven bursts I did not even want to make, my body shaking under the force of it.
And somewhere between it all, I realised I was no longer laughing.
I was crying, tears cutting hot lines down my face while my body kept shaking under all of it.
Then I saw it standing before me, the figure sending a shiver down my spine.
It was me.
Or rather, the me from Earth.
My breathing dulled as the same eyes I had looked into for all those years in my own reflection now looked back at me.
Only this was not a reflection.
And kneeling there in front of him, I understood why it had chosen this shape.
It had run out of things that could still reach me. But it had found one thing left in this world that could still put something in my chest.
The man who had written all of it.
I wanted to say something, to ask him what any of this meant. But deep down I knew this was just my soul twisting my mind further.
Or maybe I simply did not have the energy left in me to form words at all.
He took a step toward me, raising his arms out on both sides. And then I felt it, something latching around my skin almost instantly, cutting slightly into it.
Threads. Countless of them, almost resembling the lines that ran down my forearms, only these were binding me, winding around my arms.
Their grip tightened as they pulled, a groan escaping me as they bit into my skin and drew blood, my body rising until my feet finally dangled above the sand.
He simply kept walking toward me, his eyes blank, and I noticed the threads wound back to his own arms as though he had willed them into existence himself.
The threads pulled me higher, my arms still stretched straight out by my sides, and I could hear my blood dropping into the sand below.
Some part of me tried retaliating on instinct, my shoulder pulling against the thread slightly, my feet kicking for the ground that was no longer there.
But I knew it would not have mattered. It had never mattered, not once, in however many times I had tried it by now. So I stopped it, closing my eyes instead.
Not as an act of defiance. Rather one of acceptance.
A few seconds passed as I waited for the pain to come, the way it always had, my mind already braced for it.
But it never came.
I opened my eyes in confusion, and he was still standing there, his eyes as blank as before. And then it happened. His figure began shifting under my gaze, first the skin, then the eyes, even the hair.
He unravelled in front of me, breaking apart into nothing but countless threads. Every colour that had held him together drained away, until all that remained was a loom of threads in the shape of the man who had stood there.
What the fuck is going on?
And then the threads moved, jittering through the air in quick bursts.
My confusion did not last, because I realised where they had been trying to get to.
They looped around my arms, around the Mark I carried there, my skin burning under their onslaught as I understood that they were entering me, passing into my body through those grey streaks.
They kept winding, more and more of them converging and vanishing into my skin. The burn did not fade at all; it only spread further, as if the threads were inside me now and moving through my body.
And then they were all gone, as I fell back onto the sand, collapsing onto my knees and buckling over.
The warmth inside me kept churning before finally converging and settling somewhere in my abdomen.
That was when I understood. It had not killed me. The realisation landed with a quiet and brutal clarity.
This trial had never been about breaking fate at all.
The thought rang through my head, almost cruel in how obvious it suddenly felt.
Every death. Every single way I had been torn apart, burned, drowned, crushed, every one of them still sitting vivid in my memory. All of it had been pointless. Not because I had failed, but because I had been fighting a trial that was never about surviving to begin with.
It had been about acceptance. About accepting the fate you were handed, even when that fate was the death waiting for you.
Something had shifted in me somewhere in there, and I knew deep down that it was not going to shift back.
"At what fucking cost?" I muttered, barely audible even to myself.
The beach was gone. Where the sand had been there was only the same familiar darkness I had grown sick of looking at.
Before I could move, the space around me shattered, breaking apart like glass, and my own consciousness followed it out a moment later.