The sky wept, not with gentle tears, but with crimson ichor. Far from maps, in an unnamable nation, the rain was blood. It dripped from shattered ceilings, from the vacant eyes of silenced children. It stained the mud where rats feasted on fresh corpses. No thunder, no screams. Just the slow, wet applause of decay.
In this slum, where light recoiled and hope was a forgotten dialect, the heavens bled not from sorrow, but from a terrifying awakening beneath. What stirred was no longer human. It was something… more.
The chamber was a cramped, suffocating tomb, its stone walls weeping mildew. A solitary, sickly bulb swung above, casting grotesque shadows. Laughter, low and guttural, resonated within, devoid of human mirth. Men, their skin slick with sweat, their garments saturated with fresh slaughter, occupied crates and rusted chairs. It was a canvas painted in screams, splattered in sin.
Before them, a boy. Broken, yet breathing. His wrists raw from iron shackles. A split lip. One eye swollen shut. He sat hunched on a half-shattered wooden chair, barely upright, but still upright.
Beside him, a girl lay, young and already claimed by death. Her neck, a grotesque sculpture of unnatural angles, her face turned skyward, a silent plea to gods long deafened.
They had defiled her, then silenced her. Yet, in that room, no gaze lingered upon her. She was a closed chapter. The men, their laughter a guttural symphony, found their amusement elsewhere.... in the boy, in his defiant silence.
Both of the boy's hands were ruined. Not merely fractured, but shattered with an indifference so profound that bone, stark and white, pierced through skin like malevolent weeds in a garden of rot. Most of his teeth were gone, the few survivors hanging loose in gums awash with blood. And yet, his head, a testament to an unyielding spirit, was tilted upward, towards the flickering bulb. A cracked eye, barely open, still perceived. He lived. A cruel twist of fate.
The men who had wrought this ruin were not truly men. They were cogs in the grinding machinery of this lawless city, a system without a face, a mafia without masks. They held dominion over the streets, the instruments of death, the innocence of girls, the pervasive fear, and the suffocating silence. Here, justice was a forgotten whisper, and escape, a fable whispered by the dead.
Any who dared to resist became precisely what he was now: a symbol, brutally carved from living flesh. And the girl beside him, murdered, twisted.... she was but a footnote in this grim ledger.
He spoke no words; his jaw, a shattered mechanism, refused. But deep within the ruined citadel of his ribs, a thought, dark and potent, rose like the stench of rot from a grave:
"My fate… will you ever grant me even the illusion of happiness?"
He had once clung to the belief in second chances, had once seen reincarnation as a path to redemption. He remembered the end of his first life: crushed, betrayed, mutilated by the very world he had sought to serve. He had believed death to be the ultimate suffering.
He had hoped this life would be different. But now? A laugh, silent, reverberated within his skull, a macabre echo in the rotting theater of his mind.
"I am still the same. The same fool from my first life. Naive, Sentimental... Shallow. Veythor, the idiot who believed that pain had a purpose." There was no purpose, no meaning. Only repetition. Only the grim, unending loop.
Veythor's eyes closed slowly. No resistance in the motion, no dramatic flourish, no defiant last breath. Only the quiet submission of a soul that had finally comprehended: there is no exit. Not from the pain. Not from the cycle. Not even from the memory of a belief in escape.
He knew not if this was death, sleep, or merely another turn of the knife. But it no longer mattered. Somewhere deep within, buried beneath shattered bone and profound humiliation, a trembling ember still flickered: a dream. Crushed, diseased, half-dead… but not yet extinguished.
A dream that one day, in some distant life or forgotten corner of reality, a moment might exist untouched by betrayal. A smile not honed into a trap. A kindness not followed by mocking laughter. But even as he clung to it, he knew that dream was the cruelest part of his punishment.
And now… now it was over. The second life, the second lie, the second fall. No gods would descend. No justice would arrive, belated. No voice would whisper redemption. Only this silence, this cold, suffocating quiet, as if the world itself had turned its back, not in rage, but in absolute indifference.
This is how it ends, he thought, a grim echo in the cavern of his skull. The idiot dies again, still clinging to the phantom of mercy. Still hoping, with a fool's persistence, that someone might choose not to inflict pain, still waiting for justice in a world that gorges itself on the naive. There was no tragedy in this, only the relentless, grinding wheel of repetition.
And repetition, in the end, is the cruelest form of Hell.
Then, a voice. It did not emanate from the world outside, nor from the tortured landscape of his own mind. It came from somewhere deeper, a place beyond thought, beyond the very fabric of memory.
A realm from which no living soul should ever hear. It was not loud, yet it hammered against the confines of his skull like war drums fashioned from bone, each syllable a splintering crack in the oppressive silence, like teeth grinding in the abyssal dark.
"You will never, ever be happy."
The words were not merely spoken; they were branded, seared into the very essence of his being.
"There is no light for you.Only the abyss awaits for you.
Veythor, a prisoner within his own ravaged form, could not move. He could not scream. He could not even flinch. The agony was too profound, too absolute for such trivial expressions.
"There is only one thing left for you—"
The voice descended, sinking lower, colder than the embrace of death, older than the ancient gods themselves. It whispered, a vile caress, like worms tunneling through the decaying flesh of a corpse.
"Suffer."
"Suffer."
"And suffer."
"No matter how hard you try."
"No matter how many lives you crawl through."
"You will never escape."
"You were made to break."
"And break."
"And break."
"Until the cycle eats itself and still finds your name."
This was no mere curse, but an undeniable truth, a law of the universe older than the very stars themselves, carved deep into the bones of reality.
Veythor, his spirit battered yet unbroken, found himself with nothing left to utter. Silence descended, profound and absolute, accompanied by a chilling horror that heralded the genesis of a third life.... a life birthed in the lingering echo of that tormenting voice, and forever bound to the memory of a world that, with cruel indifference, refused to release him from its grasp.