Death…it's inevitable for a normal person and for a guy like me it's a relief and a way out. They say there is heaven and hell and a void in between, most people think the void is this very earth we walk on, but i think we live at the deepest level of the hell and the void is the person’s mind, you know void is the place where you can travel freely and decide that if you want to stay here in this hell or do you want to transcend and die.

  The room was dark, illuminated only by a single candle flickering between them. Its weak light cast long, dancing shadows against walls that seemed to stretch endlessly upward into blackness.

  Veynar sat back down in his chair, the wood creaking softly in the silence. He watched Lucius with the detached interest of a scientist observing an experiment, waiting for the subject to process the revelations that had just been delivered.

  "How deep were you?" Veynar asked.

  Lucius stared at him, confusion clouding his gaze. The question made no sense. Deep? In the void? In memory?

  Veynar leaned forward, locking his gaze with Lucius's. He kept staring. And staring.

  And suddenly, the sensation returned.

  Lucius felt his lungs filling with water. He tried to gasp, to cough, to expel the fluid drowning him from the inside, but he couldn't move. He was chained to the chair—stripped, naked, vulnerable. His revolver was gone. His strength was gone. He was helpless before the man who had killed him on the execution platform.

  Veynar held the stare until Lucius's vision began to spot with darkness, until the drowning felt absolute. Then, abruptly, he looked away.

  The sensation vanished.

  Lucius gasped, sucking in air that tasted of damp stone and old fear. He coughed violently, his body convulsing against the restraints.

  "How deep did you go?" Veynar asked again, his tone unchanged.

  Lucius collected his breath, his chest heaving. "I saw... I saw my father telling me what Lightbringer was. And then I saw him hanging on a pole. Dead."

  "Good," Veynar said, nodding slowly. "But this is just the surface, Lucius. What is the original sin that you tried to bury?"

  Lucius hesitated.

  The surface? He had relived the massacre of a village. He had seen himself kill a king. He had watched himself slaughter a child with the very blade his father had given him. How could that be merely the surface? What could possibly lie deeper than that?

  "I don't... I don't know what you mean," Lucius whispered.

  Veynar sighed—a sound of disappointment, perhaps, or pity. "You think killing a king was your sin? You think slaughtering a village was your burden? Those were consequences, Lucius. Symptoms of a disease. But the disease itself... the original sin... that lies much deeper."

  He leaned closer to the candlelight, his face illuminated from below, casting his features into sharp relief.

  "Why did your father die, Lucius? Who killed him? And why were you the one holding the sword in that memory?"

  The questions hung in the air like smoke.

  Lucius tried to remember. Tried to push past the image of his father hanging from the pole. Tried to see what had happened before the massacre, before the rage, before the blood. But there was a wall in his mind. A barrier he had constructed centuries ago to protect himself from a truth too terrible to bear.

  "I don't know," Lucius said, his voice trembling.

  "You do," Veynar countered softly. "You just haven't gone deep enough yet."

  He reached for the candle.

  "Shall we try again?"

  Lucius stared at Veynar, confusion warring with fear. He didn't understand. The original sin? The depth of his own memory? It felt like he was trying to read a book written in a language he had forgotten centuries ago.

  Veynar stood and walked to a dark corner of the room. When he returned, he held Lucius's revolver—the brusnium weapon with the foot-long barrel. He sat back down across from Lucius, the heavy weapon resting easily in his hand.

  "Interesting piece," Veynar said, turning the revolver over in the candlelight. "I believe you made it with all the time you had on your hands. As we both know, you can't die."

  The tone was sarcastic, brutal, stripped of any pretense of respect.

  "I like your design," Veynar continued. "The trigger. It's very philosophical, you know. A common man can't even fire it. But let's be honest, Lucius... when you know you are immortal, the physical strength cap is suddenly removed. To you, it's just like any other revolver."

  He looked up, meeting Lucius's gaze with cold amusement.

  "You can't fool me, Lucius, like you fooled Seris. You built this not because you wanted a weapon that required a decision. You built it because for someone like you—someone whose body defies the limits of mortality—this is the only weapon that feels real. You wanted to feel strong again. You wanted to feel powerful."

  Lucius looked at Veynar, astonishment breaking through his fear. Seris had believed him. Seris had seen the philosophy, the morality. But Veynar saw only the arrogance of immortality.

  "The fact that you are still tied to that chair means you haven't figured it out yet," Veynar said, shaking his head slightly. "When I saw your revolver, I thought you had grown physically too. Turning brusnium into a weapon is something a normal man can't achieve. But I guess I was wrong. You are still naive."

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  He raised the revolver.

  The long barrel pointed directly at Lucius's head.

  "It's time for you to dive deeper."

  Veynar pulled the heavy trigger with casual ease, as if the weapon recognized him, as if he possessed the same unnatural strength that Lucius did.

  Bang.

  The sound was deafening in the small room. The muzzle flash illuminated Veynar's face for a split second—calm, expectant, knowing.

  The bullet struck Lucius.

  And the darkness returned, pulling him down, down, down into the depths he had been trying to escape.

  This time, there was no void. No darkness. No pale beauty with blue eyes waiting to comfort him.

  Lucius stood in the sunflower field.

  The sun shone bright above. The air smelled of grass and pollen. Before him, the battle raged—his comrades fighting the flank battalion, the chaos of combat frozen in a tableau of violence. Sable. Lanze. Chyros. Varaxis. All of them moving, striking, bleeding.

  He looked around, baffled. It felt like a nightmare painted in daylight.

  Then, suddenly, everything stopped.

  Motion ceased. Butterflies hung suspended in the air, their wings frozen mid-beat. Swords remained locked in arcs of steel. Enemies hung in time, expressions of fear and rage captured like insects in amber. The world became a stillness so profound it hurt the ears.

  Then came the drops.

  Not rain. Not water. Blood.

  It started to rain from the sunny sky—thick, viscous drops of pure blood falling onto the sunflowers, onto the frozen warriors, onto Lucius's face. The scent of copper filled the air, overwhelming the smell of the field.

  And then he saw him.

  The sword-bearing Lucius emerged from behind Sable. He walked through the frozen battle as if time held no sway over him. His face was black shadow, featureless except for his eyes—glowing blood red, burning with a hunger that transcended centuries. In his hand, the katana shone with its own dark light.

  Lucius tried to run.

  He turned, pushed, willed his legs to move. But he was stuck. He looked down to see what held him.

  Hands.

  Dozens of them. Gripping his ankles, his calves, clawing at his legs from the earth itself. They were bloodied, mangled, the hands of the dead. And from the soil, pulling himself up by those gripping hands, came a boy.

  The same boy.

  The child Lucius had struck down in his memory. The one split from shoulder to hip. The one who had reached out and whispered "Lightbringer." The boy's face was pale, his eyes wide and accusing, his mouth open in a silent scream.

  Lucius looked up in fear.

  The sword-bearing Lucius stood directly in front of him now. Close enough to touch. Close enough to smell the ancient blood on him.

  Before Lucius could say anything—before he could scream or beg or ask why—the katana came rushing down.

  A flash of steel.

  And Lucius was back in the chair.

  Gasping. Sweating. His heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. The dark room. The single candle. Veynar sitting across from him, the smoking revolver still in his hand, watching with that same terrible patience.

  Veynar studied him, noting the sweat, the rapid breathing, the terror that lingered in Lucius's eyes.

  "I see that your psyche is resisting," Veynar said calmly. "So how about I share a story that would help you relax, Lucius?"

  Lucius nodded—a frantic, desperate motion. Anything to stop the drowning. Anything to stop the memories.

  Veynar stood up and began to pace across the small room, his footsteps echoing softly on the stone floor. He moved with the measured cadence of a man who had walked through centuries without hurry.

  "So, Lucius," Veynar began, "what do you think death is? A peaceful afterlife? A void? Or do you believe in rebirth?"

  Lucius opened his mouth to speak, to offer some answer born of his own fractured experiences, but Veynar continued before a sound could emerge.

  "None of the answers you give matter because you haven't seen death. Matter of fact, even I can't see death."

  He stopped pacing and turned, leaning closer to Lucius's face until they were inches apart. The candlelight reflected in Veynar's eyes, revealing a depth that mirrored the void Lucius knew so well.

  "As a matter of fact," Veynar whispered, "I am just like you, Lucius. I can't die. I yearn for death. I have been serving Morrowind long before you even came into existence."

  He leaned back, watching the shock register on Lucius's face.

  "When House Lightbringer was founded," Veynar said, a small, cruel smile playing on his lips, "I was one of the founding members, you know. I created your destiny, Lucius."

  The words struck with the force of a physical blow. Founding member. Creator of destiny. The man who had just shot him, the man who held him prisoner, was not merely an enemy—he was an architect. An architect of the very burden that had crushed Lucius, that had driven him to madness, that had birthed the Lightbringer legacy.

  "You..." Lucius stammered. "You created it?"

  "I wrote the oath," Veynar said simply. "I forged the first blade. I whispered the first necessity of guiding kings into the ears of your ancestors. I built the cage you've been living in for centuries, Lucius."

  He paused, letting the weight of history settle in the room.

  "And now," Veynar added, raising the revolver once more, "I'm going to show you why."

  "But before you go into your memories," Veynar said, pausing with the revolver held loosely in his hand, "I will tell you something interesting. Something so interesting that you might wet your pants by the thought of it."

  He leaned against the wall, the candlelight casting half his face in shadow.

  "You see, when immortality is granted to a person, a counter is created for him. A final exit, if one truly wants to die. You see, death is not cruel—it's a mercy which looks violent at first, but if you look at the core of it, it's really peaceful."

  Veynar's eyes seemed to drift, as if he were looking past Lucius at something distant and longed-for.

  "Anyway, this counter I was talking about... is a person. You see, there is a saying: for every immortal man, there is a snail. A snail which can't die, just like the immortal man. And this snail knows exactly where the immortal man is. And the irony is, this snail also wants to die. So it chases the immortal man. And when they come in touch... both the snail and the immortal man die."

  He looked back at Lucius, a glint of dark amusement in his eyes.

  "So, Lucius... good news for you is I already know who your snail is."

  Lucius felt a chill that had nothing to do with the damp room. A counter. An exit. A person whose touch meant finality.

  "And the bad news is," Veynar continued, raising the revolver, "I can't tell you until you dive deeper."

  The hammer clicked back.

  "Find the sin, Lucius. Find the moment it all broke. Then come back to me, and perhaps I'll tell you the name of the one person who can finally give you rest."

  Bang.

  When he pulled the trigger after telling me about the snail i hoped it was him, if only it was him then i would have had find my peace and he would have found his, but the death is an elusive bastard, it tries to stay out of your sight when you desire it most and when you feel like you are comfortable in this hell only then it reveals itself and drags you down to a deeper level.

  What happens when death can't find you? You try to die and fail,

  What can a man do if he has lost his snail?