Brought to his knees before the kingdom after ten years of hiding, Kyros believed that he would be sentenced to death for the murder of his pack. His sentence would mean the end of it all - his torment, his abuse, his turmoil.
But his destiny change...
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Pain took the form of a delicate creature clothed in rags of darkness.
Drenched in agony, the sunlight could not permeate the outer layer of its being. It crept across the skin of its victim with a velvety, cold touch. It went unseen - but never unheard when it opened its jaws and latched on to its newest victim.
Kyros rolled his head back, groaning as he did so. The pain ate at his flesh like a vicious monster, and maybe it was a vicious monster. It certainly acted like so and extended no mercy to a man who possibly needed it most.
The chains tightly wrapped around his wrists dug into his skin and chafed away his epidermis. They were fastened deeply into his flesh, woven in it as if they were one. Blood crusted around the silver which bound him and the wounds that clothed his wrists never stopped bleeding.
A slow trickle of blood constantly dripped down his arms, joining the other wounds like a vein of many rivers. His knees ached from constantly being bent at a wrong angle and the open, deep lacerations on his back were starting to leak a purifying smell.
He had been whipped to what felt like to the brink of death. But they needed him alive, not dead, after all.
Was this his destiny? To be confined and chained and torn apart, like a forgotten toy? To be ripped apart at the seams only to be woven back together to repeat the same agonizing process?
Misery he wore, and miserable he was. He would be nothing more until the day of his death, until he finally would take his last breath. But what comes after death? Would he be greeted by dark beings or nothing at all? Would he wail and scream in death, too, or would he be nothing more than a corpse in the ground, forgotten yet resting with the shroud of lifelessness pulled over his eyes?
He didn't know, and he was terrified to find out. Perhaps uncertainty was the most painful, torturous thing someone could have.
Anxiety bloomed in his chest and he started to breathe heavily. Panicked and at his wit's end, he screamed. Voices suddenly pounced on him, their words tickled his ears as they wrapped their venomous claws around his throat, holding him hostage. Their forked tongues flicked out, hissing and caressing him. Little legs ghosted over his skin, crawling, crawling, crawling.
But he was nothing.
He was nothing.
And he wasn't the monster others created him to be.
Images of the lives he took surrounded him. They seemed to loom over him and haunt him, screaming and crying with contorted, ghastly sounds. Their broken faces stared at his soul, caressing the life force in which they had been stolen of.
Their milky white eyes, scabbed over from death watched him. Pale faces and scaly, menacing, clawed hands reached out to him. Tearing and clawing at the air desperately as horrifying, haunting cries and howls escaped from their broken, slackened and open jaws.
