Of Gods and Games ✅ (#ONC2019)

*One*

It was white.

Everywhere. The sort of white that was almost nothing. Not a color but an absence of it. He closed his eyes, and then opened them again.

Nothing.

Theoddar Byrne was used to the nothing that came with darkness. They had a lot of lightless nights at home. Which made sense, because when the stars did appear, they filled the whole sky, incandescent. Old stories said that the stars were the souls of sprites- the ones who had lost their wings on their way to Heaven, rendered trapped in the sky. That he could understand.

But this was a new type of nothing.

He thought back to the duel. He had died. Of course he had. It was hard to get impaled by a sixteen-inch sabre and remain alive. He had been so close to killing the scum. A second longer, a breath closer to the bastard's jugular, and McCarthy would be the one trapped in this ghastly atmosphere. Theoddar even remembered dying; remembered the agony and the stickiness of the blood. The jolts of breath that had skewered his lungs.

So, he was dead.

Was this...Heaven?

The thought almost made him laugh at loud. Heaven was for those who didn't end up in late night brawls in hidden taverns, for one. But Hell was meant to be dark. Rivers filled with blood, rocks coated with acid, the whole deal. This wasn't that.

Theoddar Byrne hadn't meant to die. It had all started because that Gilligan McCarthy had challenged him to a duel. As if he would turn him down- even if he had been sober and not so exhausted- after that time when Gilligan had released a pack of pixies on him last summer. And when Theoddar had been trapped in the bottom of the Glen on Sylvester, and had almost frozen to death. Not to mention that McCarthy's father had stolen his father's place on the village council.

Yes, it would have been much better if Gilligan had died instead.

He hurt. A lot. Everywhere was painful. His back, his legs, his head. An incessant ache that seemed to accumulate to a forte; an appassionato of cacophonies that seemed to have dissolved in his very blood. Theoddar groaned, and then turned over. He rapped the floor experimentally, but it made no sound, and even that small action sent waves of agony racing through every bone in his body. He curled up and drew his knees to his chest. He wanted to block everything out, to cradle the wound where it hurt. But it was everything, and it was everywhere. Pain that you couldn't go to a Healer and point at, because it was as if you were the pain; as if every particle in your body was a small ball of fire.

So lay there, and he moaned and groaned, and finally, spent of the energy to even do that, he merely whimpered and shuddered.

And he waited for something to happen.