When Ashen came out of the Slaughter of Souls, his body was no longer human.
The flesh covering him looked like it was made of tangled scars, pulsing with crimson light.
But as soon as he took a step forward, the light around him shattered, and the world turned into a living hell.
The sky split open — not with sound, but with bleeding.
Rain of hot blood fell from above, and every drop turned into fire when it touched the ground.
The earth itself was bleeding — opening wide wounds that released rivers of boiling blood,
twisting and screaming as if it had lungs and a throat.
And in the middle of this madness stood Ashen.
His body began to melt from the first moment.
His fingers burned and fused together like melting candles,
his skin turned into ashes sticking to his bones,
and the bones themselves caught fire with black flames that could not be extinguished.
He screamed.
And for the first time in centuries, his scream was not a sign of weakness…
but the echo of a new birth.
Every time he burned, he was rebuilt from the same ashes — but in a more chaotic, harsher form.
It was as if the fire was reshaping him, not to destroy him, but to strip away the last trace of his humanity.
The air was living embers.
Every breath he took ignited his chest from within,
as if his lungs opened into an ocean of magma.
He could no longer see with his eyes — they had melted with the first storm of flames.
But he still saw —
with another eye born inside him,
an eye made from the savage will itself.
That eye did not see the fire as torment, but as a method.
Every flame was a thought. Every burning was a lesson.
And between every explosion of pain,
he heard the old voice again — the one that had never left him since the first trials:
> "If you don't learn to laugh… you will burn forever."
---
Fifty years passed in that hell,
or maybe not even a moment.
In this place, time was nothing but more fuel for the fire.
Ashen no longer fell.
He learned how to walk on the flames as if he were part of them.
His skin became black as coal, but each step he took released sparks of blood.
The fire devoured him and rebuilt him in the same instant,
feeding itself with his blood, while his soul fed on it.
He began to notice that the flames were not burning only his body, but also his memories.
Each time a part of him burned, a memory vanished —
a face from the past, a scream from a battle, a dream from long ago.
The fire erased, it did not kill.
And after decades in that inferno,
came the day when he stopped screaming.
He sat in the middle of a sea of burning blood,
his breath releasing thick red steam,
his eyes seeing nothing but fire.
He raised his hand — it was completely burned, its fingers just charred bones —
then he began to laugh.
His laugh was rough, coming from a hole in his chest.
It was not mockery, but understanding.
He laughed because he realized that pain cannot be escaped…
but it can be controlled.
Each time he laughed, the flames around him dimmed.
Then he noticed something:
the fire that dimmed did not disappear — it entered him.
The heat became part of his blood.
And his blood began to boil without burning.
It was as if it had turned into a furnace of fiery awareness.
Then he heard a voice inside him —
but this time, it wasn't the voice of the savage will…
it was his own, transformed:
> "I used to fear the fire… because I didn't understand it.
Now I am it."
He lifted his arms toward the bloody sky,
screamed from the depths of his being, and the heavens burned even brighter.
But instead of consuming him,
the flames wrapped around him like a cloak of red light,
circling and flowing around his body,
as if acknowledging his rule over them.
For the first time since the beginning of the trials,
pain was under his control — not the other way around.
A century passed.
In the end, nothing remained in that world but fire.
The sky melted, the ground burned, the air turned to ash.
Everything disappeared — except him.
Ashen stood in the heart of a boundless inferno,
his eyes burning like twin stars of blood,
his body radiating heat that made the void itself scream.
Then the fire whispered to him.
It was no longer blind flame, but a conscious being,
feeding on what was left of his "humanity."
> "Give me the mercy inside you, and I will end your pain forever."
The words were like bait to a starving man.
One moment of weakness, and everything could have ended.
But he smiled.
He remembered all the ages he had fallen through, every moment of pain that rebuilt him.
Then he whispered slowly:
> "Without pain… existence has no meaning."
With those words, he drove his hand into his chest.
He grabbed his heart — a burning mass of blood —
and raised it toward the flames.
> "This is the last of my mercy."
Then he crushed it in his hand.
The fire exploded.
A colossal scream shook the sky and the earth,
then silence — a silence this world had never known — spread.
When the smoke cleared,
Ashen stood in the middle of dead ashes,
his body completely charred, but he did not fall.
From the cracks in his skin came a glowing red light,
as if he had been reborn — not from flesh, but from the fire itself.
In that dead silence, he spoke softly, as if writing a final judgment upon himself:
"Through fire, pain, and suffering, I will drown the world in a flood of despair and blood."
Then he walked through the ashes.
Every step left behind a trace of embers,
and every trace pulsed like a new heart for the world.
This was not his exit from the trial…
but his entry into a new level of madness —
where pain becomes the only language of existence.