Disownment

"No! No! NO!" Lee screamed through his tears, banging his fists down onto the marble floors, his hands slipping on the wetness as he did so, twisting his wrists.

He fell, hitting the side of his head on the cold surface, tucking his limbs to his chest.

"I did not sign up for this shit! All I wanted to do was run away from home and begin a life somewhere else!" he bawled as he curled over into a sloppy bow, his tears running all over the marble floors, the mud and sweat from his body also smeared over the white.

"Why! Why! Why! Why me?! Is this karma for running away!" he screeched out, throwing his body fully onto the ground as he fell into greater madness, unable to rationalise what was happening around him.

"My mother's probably living in the Luo household! All she did was screech and scream at me! I never complained whenever she hit me so hard I bled! Why me?! Why me!? I did everything she asked for except this! Why!?" Shen bawled into the floor, his fists still clenched.

His wails began to taper off, a litany of," why?" being the only thing he could ask the world around him.

Why was he the one to suffer this knowledge and fate?

Why was he the one always punished in life, even as he tried his hardest before to do exactly what he was always told, never good enough?

Why was he being punished for letting a girl, who he had never met, be free, but forced to live under another cruel woman, punished for leaving her alone?

"But wasn't this what you wanted?" a traitorous voice whispered in his mind, sounding just like his own voice, a voice that had plagued him constantly when he was a child, feeding his curiosity. Lee was certain the voice was not from the monster, as he repeated it out loud to himself.

This was exactly what he wanted. A mystery to solve without the restrictions which life in the village brought him, and now he had enough time to solve it.

There would be no repeat of the river rock in the field incident with this one.

The overly luxurious world of the palace bled away, this time revealing a windy, desolate cliff, and Lee almost passed out from terror when he saw himself supported by nothing, hanging in the air over desert, stained with the bodies and blood of more than a thousand dead soldiers, left alone to rot and decay after their battle was fought.

It was a sea of corpses, under him, of men in two different uniforms, one a solid black cloth with black armour and dull grey helmets and weapons, and the other dressed in the same shade of dark green which Lee wore. Most of the bodies were facing downwards, into the sand which they were slain on, with a large flock of vultures and crows picking out the eyes and tongues of the unlucky men who happened to be facing upwards.

They crowed and cawed happily, sounding as if they were laughing at the omnipresent stench of death, and the senseless carnage left behind for them to feast upon. They hopped around happily their claws sinking into the soldier's flesh wounds, blood bubbling up, whooping up and down, splashing in the puddles they made.

The vultures seemed to enjoy communally gathering over certain individuals one at a time, ones they had deemed worthy enough for their tea party, sitting comfortably around a soldier before making to discuss the tastiest parts of his body, carving up a corpse between each other, and giving out commentary on certain parts as they ate, before simply hopping to their next victim, content to keep gorging themselves on the flesh and blood of the dead.

The birds were gluttonous and happily mutilated one man's face, pecking out his eyeballs before slurping them up, nudging their way into his robes, slicing the cloth open, exposing his lacerated torso to the dead world around him.

Lee watched as his organs were gradually sucked out, with a larger piece of his one of his organs too big for the crow's beak that speared him. The hunk of meat plopped back down, sliding over the sharp edge of the beak, tempered by death, to resting on his skin, over the exact same place where it once resided, beating within the man's chest.

Lee vomited all the bile and the peanuts in his stomach that he had managed to consume, and then watched as it refused to fall from the invisible plain that he sat on. He somehow managed to spit out even more bile and saliva mix, speckled with blood, before dry heaving, eyes wide and pupils blown.

He staunchly and desperately looked back to the cliff to the side of him, his eyes filling with tears again, at the sight of more bodies just on the other side of the land.

The two men, dressed in red, stood on the outcropping, both drenched in blood, their swords out and even more stained, with slices of flesh still clinging to the metal, with small scraps of skin and hair caught between the handles of the swords, and the fists that clenched them.

One knelt down, his hair falling to hide his face, sitting within the red puddle that dripped down from him, crying silently. The other stood down, away from his twin, looking over the cliff, down at the violence and the morbid, celebratory feast of the crows.

Lee couldn't see their faces. He couldn't see their expressions.

But he could clearly tell that the man standing, looking over down the chaos below, was not remorseful in the slightest, with his shoulders back and back straight. He surveyed the land below him slowly, turning his head from right to left as he watched the soldiers below be consumed.

He recognised this man as the one that he had already met.

Lee watched the world bleed away once more, somewhat relieved and no longer dry heaving when he found himself away from the ghoulish scene, and found himself in a familiar forest.

There was a familiar wooden hut, in a familiar clearing, near a familiar river, babbling on an unpleasantly sunny day.

The sun seemed to be too bright, for the number of clouds in the sky. There was no wind, no rustle of leaves, or bushes. There were no chirps of birds, or scurrying of mice. The clouds in the sky still marched on through, travelling as if they were a fleet of ships, carried by invisible currents. But there was no wind.

It was utterly silent in the glade, with the hut looking brand new, and without any marks of time. He saw inside it there was a firepit and a pot for cooking. A bow and a sheath of arrows were propped up near the entrance, as well as a rake, and a sack of only what Lee could assume to be seeds, nearby. A blanket was also neatly folded towards the back.

Both the men stood there, facing each other, one of them standing closer to the hut closer to the other, only a single step away from the door. The one who stood further away seemed to be looking down on the other, despite being exactly the same height. His face looked to be twisted into an expression of superiority and righteous anger.

The other looked his twin in the eye, his face blank, but his eyes pleading, a wall of strength behind the pledge.

Lee didn't know what was happening.

He didn't know who these people were.

He didn't know what he was watching.

Was the monster showing him this?

Why!?

What was happening?

"Are you satisfied, brother?" the smaller of the twins asked, softly, his voice sounding as if it were made of soft winds and flute music.

"I made my decision. And you made your own," the other valiantly declared, his voice deep and booming at the judgement he had declared.

"But what will be the cost? Can you guarantee reincarnation for all those who will be killed?" the smaller one cried out, his face breaking from the blankness that had been placed on, but his eyes still remained cold and intelligent.

The other brother scoffed at the perceived display of weakness, and turned to walk away, strolling as if he owned the forest itself, dismissing the question.

"Can you guarantee yourself a successor? I can! I have a son!" the formerly crying brother screamed out, his voice hardening to the tone and pitch of the other's, a perfect mimic.

A lightning strike shot down from the sky and hit the man who stood close to the hut, who had spoken last.

The God, struck by it, screamed, throwing his arms up as spiderwebs of fire rose up to consume his body. The fire danced up, climbing higher and higher, burning hotter and hotter, as the colour of the flames transformed from a dark red into a burning gold, twisting and turning in a ferocious dance as the God's face began to become harder and harder to distinguish.

Charcoal black pieces of his body fell from the inferno, collapsing when they hit the ground, to form small, ashy black stains on the grass below.