Dying is hard, and dying hard is even harder.
A translator's life isn't just about meeting with politicians, businessmen, and specialists, and translating texts every day. Sometimes you're sent to the middle of nowhere because a client wants to visit Africa. Sweet, right?
But no one tells the average translator that the client isn't just a big shot, but also a targeted agent in some shadowy struggle for... power? Money? Who cares. It all ends with their brains being smashed to bits, and the translator being kidnapped to extract some important information. Honestly, there should have been a smart guy in their gang who could have explained to the mercenaries (killers?) that a translator can't know about lucrative deals or the main purpose of his client's visit... BEFORE he starts his work!..
When you're tortured for days, and experienced doctors and some shaman (Higher One, where did they even dig him up?!) keep you one step away from that coveted oblivion, you'll gladly tell everything and more. And did I mention I knew nothing? Great. It's just a shame those idiots only realized this after a week of cutting off my vital limbs or increasing the number of bones in my body by breaking larger ones into smaller ones. And then again and again, just to reinforce it.
Now I have to give the doctors credit—those monsters were professionals in their field. I survived all that hell in order to... in order to what?.. Yeah, to be saved. Uh-huh. I'm not sure that even if I'd succeeded, I would have lived even a month after what they left of me.
But they decided to burn me. And I'm serious. They took me far from civilization, tied me to a beam, doused me with gasoline, and struck a match. I never approved of smokers. And the last thing I remember from that world is being blown on me with some kind of bellows to keep me from suffocating. Burning is VERY fun, when you're trying to die quickly from suffocation, and seconds turn into eternity. But nothing lasts forever in this world, and the last thing I remember before dying was a strange black figure behind my executioners.
Lightning flashed, and I fell into darkness.