Chapter 1: Chapter 1: The monster with three faces

Are the gods even real?

 

White snow drifts lazily down towards the ground, falling from the clearing sky of an unusually warm winter’s day. The end of the season seems to have arrived.

 

Song-birds swoop through the air, chasing after each other and whistling, bringing with their chirps the first hint of a spring, which may yet come in a day not far from today.

 

However, despite their brief bursts of song, in contrast with only a few minutes ago, the world remains hauntingly silent. Now that the last man has fallen on the battlefield, which is littered with the corpses of some hundred odd people, now that the brutal skirmish has come to an end, some vague, abstract goal having been achieved — the world is quiet.

 

A small, blue bird lands on his breastplate. It tilts its head, scooting around for a moment on its twiggy legs. It pecks at his chest and then flies off, returning to its swarm.

 

The paladin, Isaiah, lays there, somewhat ironically impaled on the blade of the second to last man, who now lies dead next to himself.

 

His chest heaves, constrained in place by the thin sword, pushing in through his breastplate. The blade restricts the movements of his torso and, with each and every failed breath, his body moves up and down along its keen edge.

 

The fight for the territory has been won, but at the cost of many great things.

 

— The most expensive price of this nonsense is that the eyes of every person on this battlefield, might not ever see what a wonderful spring this year would have brought.

 

It is something very simple.

 

Isaiah feels his eyes growing dark. His last breath leaves him.

 

The gods, who he had sworn his life to, had done little to prevent the tragedy of this battle and they had done nothing to spare him from its reaping; just as they had done little to prevent him from walking the path, which had brought him here, to where he now lies.

 

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So what was the point of his lifelong, zealous faith, exactly?

 

He dies.

 

Everything that he has ever known, learned, felt, sensed and experienced becomes void.

 

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One might not be able to say for how long Isaiah sleeps. His soul drifts through the emptiness as a non-thing, as some vaguely human shaped entity, for a very long time.

 

But it is perhaps fair to assume that during this period, many springs come and go in reality. They leave together with many winters and many, many, many more generations of men and women.

 

---

 

A long time has passed.

 

The thing floats through the darkness, holding onto itself, as it drifts through the light-less ocean, as it has done forever, as far as it knows.

 

It isn’t awake.

 

It simply floats there, vaguely aware of the faintest whisper of its existence, but not ever being aware enough to ever get close to waking up.

 

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