“Ezrael! Ezrael!” The sound sounded so far off. Ezrael couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. All he could see was a never-ending cloud of darkness that surrounded him on all sides.

Ezrael tried to claw through the darkness, but to no avail. Despite the fact that he was terrified by the seemingly endless darkness surrounding him, it was quiet, peaceful. For the first time in what felt like forever, he wasn’t being pestered by awful visions of the grim future. Ezrael allowed himself to settle in to the darkness, welcoming the stillness of it all. He could hear someone calling his name, but it continued to grow even more distant.

Ezrael’s eyes shot open once more as he really heard the voice finally, realizing that he recognized it. He turned towards it and listened in, finding that the voice reminded him of something. After a moment, it finally came to him. The voice was Misra’s voice, his sister. How had he forgotten the voice of his sister…? The answer alluded him, but he was determined to find the voice now. He had to find her and get back to normal.

He stumbled through the darkness for what felt like hours, but with no luck. He didn’t seem to be any closer to finding Misra than when he’d started. She even seemed to have gotten further away. Ezrael tried to call out, but he had no voice. He was truly all alone, wherever he was.

Ezrael collapsed to the ground and began to silently weep until suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, he saw a bright light off in the distance. It started off small, but it soon, it was getting larger. Ezrael quickly realized that the light was getting closer and he embraced it, approaching the light until he was consumed by it. Once he had been, Misra’s voice returned, but it was different than before. It was now full of concern. Ezrael turned his head all around, but his vision was still consumed by light.

After a few moments, his vision began to change and take on new colors in large splotches. Over time, the splotches became more refined and adopted new colors until Ezrael was finally able to see clearly. He was laying in bed in his room, surrounded on all sides by his family. Someone seemed to be missing though, Viktor. It then all came flooding back to him. How Viktor had left, how he’d torn out his cursed eye.

The thought caused his hand to shoot up to his face, feeling bandages covering almost the entire left side of his face. Underneath them, he could tell that there was now a vacancy within his head where his cursed eye had previously been. However, thanks to that vacancy, his head was quite just like it had been in the dark void. Ezrael had never known the feeling of true silence, but he was happy to finally be able to feel it.

His family made way as another individual in medical attire entered the room and began to check up on Ezrael. She ran through all kinds of tests, informing him along the way that he had been out for 11 months. During that time, the family had been split between constantly checking to ensure that Ezrael was okay and trying to find Viktor, but they hadn’t had much luck on that front. It was at that point that Ezrael noticed that Dameria Amelia were not standing next to each other. They were on opposite sides of the bed from each other. This distressed Ezrael a bit, but he doubted there was anything that he could do about this.

“Ezrael… my little angel… I’m so happy you’re finally back to us. We kept thinking the worst… believing that you may never…” tears began to fill Amelia’s eyes as she spoke. Dameria looked like she wanted to try and comfort her, but she held herself back.

Once the doctor was finished with all of the test, they declared that Ezrael was in perfectly fine help, other than a bit of residual scarring around the left side of his face, but other than that, things seemed to be as in order as they were going to be.

With that all out of the way, Ezrael decided to go back to sleep to rest up. When he did, he once again found himself inside of the dark void. Before he could even question why he was here, he began to hear whispers echoing all around him. There were too many to make out, but they seemed familiar somehow. The whispers continued to grow in volume until it was clear that they weren’t whispers, they were the screams of those in pain. Images began to flash in front of Ezrael of his village in flames, a dark creature lurking around just behind the engulfing flames. Ezrael wanted to look away, but he wasn’t able to. The screams only grew louder and the visions more terrible with each passing second.

Ezrael shot awake, whipping his head all around as he tried to confirm that he was actually in his room and not in a gruesome hallucination. Once he’d confirmed that he was really awake, he stumbled out of bed and over to his bed, rummaging through his notes as the screams continued inside of his head. He searched and searched through all of his notes, but nowhere did he see anything about the village being destroyed by some dark creature. Ezrael grabbed a pen and began to quickly scrawl out every detail of what he had seen in his visions. Once he was done, he collapsed to the death, clutching his head and trying to get the screams to stop, but it didn’t seem to help.

Ezrael began to stumble around his room, writhing in anguish until finally, just like that, the voices stopped all together. Ezrael let out a sigh of relief before grabbing his bag from next to his desk. He stuffed a journal and several pens inside before making his way downstairs silently. He grabbed a few basic provisions and then headed in to the basement to grab whatever weapon he could find. He stuffed everything in to his bag and slung it over his shoulder before stepping out of the front door and stumbling off in to the forest as the sun was rising, signaling the new day. He turned back towards the village and sighed.

“Goodbye everyone…”