The blood drips off his hands, fear and hatred filling its essence. How could I have become this, he thinks. How could I have done this and become this man. No, he is quick to correct himself. I am not a man, I am a creature unworthy of even an animal’s respect. His back remains bent, the weight of his sins weighing heavily upon the flesh of his body. Even that becomes a question to his fragile mind. Is he really flesh or is it just some macabre joke played on him because of the pain and torment he has incurred. Or is it something more, something much deeper that he is too alive to truly understand. After all, the realms of the dead are strange and plentiful when compared to those of the living. When thrust into its cold embrace, living creatures often find themselves unsure of what is happening or whether the truths they held so dear are truth or merely a new kind of fiction.
This drives many of the souls mad. When up is down, black is white, nothingness becomes existence itself. While this rule has never seemed to apply to the mind, it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that sanity will become insanity. A few survive the first day in this place that some refer to as hell. Of course its architect, or architects since few can remember the time of its unholy birth, never thought of it in such a fashion. It was a paradise, a place where one could be truly alone with their own thoughts. Actions would occur, of course, but they would not carry the same burden on the mind that they did in the mortal world. Enlightenment would come and then they would be released back unto the world that they were so horribly torn from as better beings.
This was shown to be impossible when the first of them arrived. Too much baggage, both spiritual and psychological, is packed in life. To have to face all of that in its unadulterated state is too much for the common being. The first few kill themselves, only to find that they are locked in an vicious cycle. Each death becomes more painful, filling them with self-loathing and pressing them beyond the known limits of insanity. Because of this fact, they continue to commit the selfish act, only to become worse and worse in their state. The force that created this place saw this miscarriage of fate and put filters in their world. When beings come here, they no longer are thrust into their former life and shown their shortcomings. Instead they are given new bodies and put in reminiscent situations with only their true personality to guide them. If they succeed where they previously failed, their memory is restored of that small piece.
As with any solution, however, there are flaws with the plan. If their personality cannot handle the experience when it belongs to them, feeling distanced and apart from it may only worsen the outcome. In such a case, the gentle, or in some cases merely gentler, souls will become paralyzed by a sin that their essence screams is beyond repulsion yet they so easily committed. Most then break down and merely remain in a catatonic daze for all eternity. Even among these souls, so damned by their creator, there are those who can always find more ways to torture themselves. Morglor is one such being.
He does not know what he was in life, only that he loved a mate and had offspring. These facts were revealed in his first days in this plain. Little else, unfortunately, has been. After growing agitated with small infantiles that are so defenseless and loving of him that he cannot bring himself to strike them in rage, he learns of his own offspring’s existence and life. That is when the heroic redemptive tale of Morglor ends and the blood chilling account of the white knight begins.
His fall begins with the exodus from the town of the infantiles where Morglor sees other damned beings mulling about. Some are so ridiculous appearing, walking on two legs and having only two eyes. Morglor would laugh if something within his green armored body did not speak against it. His own four insectoid legs scurry over the soft grass, the green sectioned armor extending even over them. The purple grass rustles against the material that feels like flesh to him yet defends like chromium alloy. His long armored arms fall to the sides, three fingers that appear more like massive claws dragging through the growth. His helmet, sloping to a rounded peak on the crown and flaying out in several serrated edges at the bottom, houses his single golden eye. The eye flits about without relent, absorbing images that he knows are not within his view yet he can somehow see. He recalls how odd he found it when first awakening in the silver colored mud weeks, or had it been days, earlier. All the same, he no longer probed its power or origin and merely accepted it as he accepts most things in this place; it is here because it is.
The massive being stops to rest and falls to his uneasy crouch over a barren spot of red earth. The color is not misconstrued with the ground being worn or contaminated by other colors; it is as red as the sky is white. Even as Morglor describes these colors, another alien word, he does not know where the vocabulary is coming from. It feels right and does not confuse him yet he does not know how he learned them or even why he thinks of himself as a “he.” He knows it conveys masculinity but he does not know how that masculinity is appears in his mind. Deciding not to evoke another headache, he merely accepts it as existing because it does and rests on his massive back, staring into the blank sky.
A shrill scream splits the silence in half, causing the armored being to shift.