False Start

His eyes open, eyelids sticking to his skin through the blood and sweat. His eyes open to ashes

Ashes and embers of his life burning in the wind. The embers hit him, the heating comforting. Embers of what once was his home.

Embers from the smouldering corpse of it. Blue eyes ignite with the raging flames of what once was. He realises he can't dwell on it. Not now, not with his veins bubbling with hatred, his eyes pooling with liquid sorrow and his heart beating, thumping in his chest telling him to do what he knows he has to.

To crush shred and slice whatever is in his way no thoughts wasted on mercy. Even as he wants to fall to his knees and scream and though he wants to remember the fond memories with just that he can't.

He has already set lit to them to fan the flames of revenge, a powder keg of what once was joy turnt to blind rage. And he will feed this pit whatever it needs wants desires long as it helps him.

He sees a sword, longer than the one he used. Anything was better than going bare handed into the pit with blind rage. So, he takes it. The cold of the steel making him remember the grueling hours in training. And the more he remembers

The more the inferno blazes.

Shifting through the rubble dust and corpses of people he used to know. He finds guards.

Flaming objects in their hand.

Something begins building in the empty cavity of where his stomach used to be and he feeds it through his body into his hand and out comes heat.

Armour plates melting off the heat so great. A soft sizzle of flesh, a clang of red-hot metal falling to the ground, and he begins once again.

They are alerted before he could attempt anything, chakrams raised high to throw on one and low on the other to defend whatever strike he may have attempted.

But he wasn't thinking. His brain was too busy focusing on the revelation the pain of fire brought him.

All of them, all the people he knew felt this on every single acre of their body before they died. Every single muscle tensing and every single nerve burning away, their last message being agony.

And then the memories ignite once again. Burning, glowing red.

He lets it build, pass through him, all the hairs on his skin standing. He's ready

The sword raises high, no stance to be seen and the chakrams are thrown

The blade hits them like they were always meant to hit the blade not the human behind it.

And now with one's weapons on the ground, useless no way of picking up.

He charges forward, and so does the sword, biting through the metal into the flesh of his abdomen, and as he does the other guard plunges the two blades directly into his ribs completely shredding the intercostal muscles. And his hand ablaze still reaches for the elf's face.

It was a teenager relative to elf age, his and Lute's features bearing no small amount of similarity.

Yet one's face becomes a burning pile exhausting the smell of burning flesh into the endless night, and the other grins through blood pouring out his mouth. The screams become music to one's ear once vacancy fills what's behind the eyes.

And the one with the longsword still in him yells, begging for time.

"Let me go please I beg of you, I will tell no one of this please let me go!" And Lute replies with a stare

Someone please help there's a live human here still!"

He was begging for someone to help him, when he should've been saying his goodbyes.

He lifts the sword through raising it through the lungs through the ribs and finally through the skull as blood pours and the crunch of bones reverberates.

This was his start.