Legacy: Beyond the Veil

A sea of blood

There were flames, and there was blood. There was screaming, and there were claws, fangs, and eyes.

Cai couldn't tell where any one of these things ended and the next started, but they were all there, swirling around him in a gory, violent inferno.

The blood, as hot as the core of a star, washed over him like a tidal wave. He fought against it, but his efforts were futile. He could taste nothing but the thick, scorching viscera surrounding him, and his screams did little more than to form a number of meaningless bubbles in the crimson maelstrom.

The blood assaulted his ears, screaming directly into them. A cacophony of a thousand voices wailing out in terror. Cai felt his eardrums burst, yet the sound only grew louder in response.

Cai still fought, but the currents had made him lose his bearings. He tried to swim, hoping to reach either the surface or the bottom, but the pressure on his limbs was so great that to simply move them felt like torture. He felt like a ragdoll in a blast test, helpless to control even his own motion.

The air he still had in his lungs was starting to run out. He managed to resist the urge to try to breathe for about a minute more, the toxins building up in his muscles only adding to the pain, then his instincts took the reins and sucked his lungs full of the scalding red, causing Cai to double over in agony.

Now realizing that fresh air was not likely to present itself anytime soon, his body shifted its metabolism to survival mode.

Cai's consciousness wanted to fade, but there was something keeping him awake, something more powerful than even the pain. He looked up, knowing that it was the eyes. The eyes were all that was visible through the scarlet murk of blood. There were hundreds of them, floating freely through the sea of blood, though only a few remained fixated on him. The rest spun wildly and erratically. Cai wasn't sure if they were suffering like him, or rather reveling in the pain. Cai could tell they had something to do with this place, this gory ocean. He vaguely remembered seeing them before. One of the eyeballs drifted past him, blinking at something Cai couldn't see.

He hit something, or something hit him. A blunt, spiked object smashed right through his left shoulder, separating his arm from its socket with the flash of tearing sinew and breaking bone.

Cai couldn't even try to scream anymore. He weakly brought his remaining arm to the stump, a sliver of his medical training pushing its way to the fore. He had to assess the damage, to stop the bleeding as much as he could. Only when his fingers made contact with where the wound should be, he found his arm completely unharmed.

Perplexed, he flexed the digits of his previously missing limb. This was no phantom pain. Everything was still there. Only the agony still etched into his nerves proved that something had happened at all, and even that was rapidly being blotted out by the constant, excruciating pain Cai felt all around as his skin started to melt in the fiery blood covering it.

He was struck again. A razor-sharp blade or claw, this time. It bit into his midsection and went through him like a plasma torch through dry ice.

Cai's eyes shot wide open as he was eviscerated. His torso and his lower body had been separated. It would take a miracle for him to survive such damage even in the best of conditions. Cai almost wished for the attack to kill him, for the pain to ebb away and his soul to join with his ancestors.

He discarded the thought out of hand. His life was the currency with which the Runora would buy their way back to greatness. He refused to sell it so cheaply.

With a roar of defiance Cai willed to swing his mysteriously regenerated arm in the direction of his attacker, finding that the two parts of his abdomen had similarly reattached with not even a seam to show that they had ever been apart. His fist connected with nothing, only leaving a vortex of blood in its wake. Something brushed past Cai's leg and he kicked down without thinking, feeling the cracking of chitin as his heel connected with something huge, bulbous, and sharp. Whatever he had hit recoiled violently, scraping past his foot and leaving a deep gash which had already healed by the time Cai took notice of it.