Charon didn’t know how much ti was passing.
He faded in and out of consciousness, his world revolving around quick snippets of light and darkness. He still felt uncomfortably warm, but it was interspaced with monts of a blessed chill pressing into him from an unknown source.
Every ti it left, he wanted nothing more than to reach out and drag it back, no matter the cost.
His limbs felt hollow, emptied of contents by the lava that had ravaged his system. He had tried to move them a few tis, but they never responded, choosing to leave him in his isolation.
It was hard to think at first, his mind hazy and unfocused, but it cleared with ti, allowing him to contemplate everything that was going on.
’Did... I die? Did the cultist manage to kill through so trick? Poison, perhaps?’
He thought back on the chanical hand, how it had tightened around his jugular. How easy it would have been to coat it in a contact toxin that would seep into his bloodstream on first contact, guaranteeing the death of any who wandered close enough.
’This must be it then. No ball of glory, no galactic announcent of the fall of a hero, not even the knowledge of my friends’ well-being.’
It was a dreary, forlorn kind of thing, with no hope of changing the future for the better.
The kind of fate Charon had prayed to avoid a thousand tis over.
’I should have struggled more, fought harder, tried different solutions. There are so many things I wanted to do, and never did.’
He had never confird the safety of the Mistress, Roger, or any of his other friends from the orphanage. It had been the first thing he wanted to do after the battle, yet he had never found the opportunity, thrust into a different realm all too soon.
After that, he had wanted to exact vengeance for his people. The abominable Elves had brought him nothing but misery and pain, and now they would be let off scot free.
’Where is the justice? The fairness? They get to rampage across the stars, anwhile I got to die in a land without friends!’
He knew that wasn’t fair; he had Erius, and to a lesser extent, the other mbers of his group, but he had only known them for a few weeks.
Nothing like the years with his other friends.
Above everything, though, he had wanted to be a hero. Sothing for everyone to rember, the herald of a legacy to span generations.
It was the first thought in his head every day. It guided his actions, pushing him to continue his pointless struggle for power.
For anyone else, it would have been laughable to see an orphan try and beco a household na, yet Charon didn’t want to let his status drag him down.
He had earned the elent of Soul, after all.
Rare, reviled, and powerful, it was his first taste of true power.
It was the gateway to everything he had ever wanted; all he had to do was survive long enough to master its secrets.
’And I failed in that. I let myself get carried away with frivolous things. I have an ability I haven’t even properly utilized, all because I wanted to hear the cheers of the Stadia!’
It was unfair for him to judge himself so harshly, especially after all of the effort he had put into strengthening his body and magic, but it was hard not to be critical when he assud he was dead.
The chill ca again, slowing his thoughts as he revelled in the sensation.
’Is this the gaze of Death brushing over ? Banishing my ailnts and bringing peace?’
He tried to smile, but his muscles wouldn’t listen.
Still, it didn’t dampen his elation. It was no small comfort to expect the embrace of a god, especially if it was so relaxing.
’I had never expected to worship Death, and maybe my experience with him was minimal, but I still appreciate everything he did for . He didn’t have to give this elent, nor does he have to watch over now. It’s more than any of the other gods can say.’
His appreciation towards the God of Death awakened sothing inside him, a mixture of disappointnt and annoyance.
It ca from a part of his brain that he didn’t know existed, even when he acknowledged it. It simply slipped away the mont he tried to grasp anything regarding it, as if it were never ant to be seen.
Without a logical outlet, he assud the thoughts were his own.
They challenged his notion that Death was the cause of his growth.
’What has he explicitly done for ?’
The easy answer was his elent, Soul, but he didn’t like to use that one. It felt wrong, incorrect, despite everything he knew about magic pointing towards the gods being in charge of the elents they awarded.
It made sense from everything he had seen and heard.
The Mistress had spoken about it before, although Charon was barely listening at the ti. She credited the gods with the benefits of magic, thanking them for their gifts, but scorning them at the sa ti.
She blad them for allowing so much chaos and suffering to infect the empire, burdening humanity with unprecedented challenges.
More personally, she blad them for not granting her an elent, nor one for her orphans. She believed none of them had a good excuse for abandoning the least fortunate in their ti of need, a view Charon had once shared, until he grew old enough to care more about heroes than the eternally distant pantheon.
’If she judged them, why shouldn’t I? If Death cared enough to aid with this power, why couldn’t he have aided against the cultist as well?’
He taphorically grabbed at his head as he grappled with his blended thoughts, realizing that this path wasn’t the one he was supposed to follow as well.
There wasn’t a secret hatred in him for all the gods, nor was there any deep-seated love. He simply saw them as the grand arbiters of magic, a group to be respected, but not devoutly worshipped.
It was as if there was another will inside him, imprinting its opinions, but only on select topics. As if there were things it could ignore, while others were too important.
The most difficult part of it was that it gave no indicators of what it wished to alter.
Stuck in the darkness, Charon jerked and spun himself around, trying to put himself back together so he could face the other being properly.
It was an impossible task, his consciousness too fragnted to have any hope of restoration, yet he struggled on, possibly due to that very state of being: he was too splintered to properly consider what he was doing.
Still, it gave him purpose in an otherwise unchanging field.
He recognized fleeting aspects of himself as he saw them whizz by. His happiness, his ambition, his sadness, even his strength. They were all present and accounted for, bouncing like little mories, waiting for him to scoop them up and place them where they belonged.
At so point, he felt himself be moved, an unexpected stimulus in his current situation, but he ignored it. Right now, he had a different item to complete, and anything outside that was secondary.
He grew numb to the warmth, only noticing it when the blissful chill returned, its timing always coinciding with another fragnt being sewn back into position.
Like a puzzle of a million pieces, Charon slowly gave each part its place, relishing the feeling of finding success in his task.
It was infinite, unsolvable with a thousand lifetis or a thousand perspectives, yet it was still his own all the sa.
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