Sovereign of the Karmic System

When Der opened his eyes, he realized that he was not floating in open space anymore, but he was standing on a small pathway made out of stone slabs. His surroundings were foreign to him, but not completely, for while he did not recognize the place, he felt some sort of underlying familiarity with it. One that had been buried in the deepest recesses of his mind, as if happily forgotten.

This feeling of familiarity, he thought, was not a pleasant one. Not by a long shot.

All around him was a blurry expanse of buildings whose exact architecture he could not fully make out. Only two details were clear for him to see. A gray wall, and a wooden door, behind which noises of odd nature played out continuously.

At the sight of this door Der's knuckles started to ache. He quickly brought them up to his eyes to examine them, but he found no injuries, nor problems with his bones. Nevertheless he could still feel a pulsating sharp pain wash over his body, almost as if he had been punching something with all his might, unbothered by the damage his hands could receive.

As he felt this familiar pain wash over his body, he once again turned to observe his surroundings. His eyes lingered in the empty ground that was a few steps away from him.. Patches of stone on which he had felt someone's presence. The absence of this 'someone' was of great discomfort for him.. Almost as if he had just realized that he was by himself, but he shouldn't have been.

He could not remember how he had gotten here, nor what he was doing before his eyes opened, but one thing he knew for sure. He hated this place. It brought a feeling of uncontrollable rage and anxiousness that were uncharacteristic of the current him, and which he did not believe belonged to him.

It was as if he was experiencing the emotions of another person by possessing their body. Someone who had come to this place in the company of people he trusted, and whose absence made him feel alone.. The anxiousness, pure murderous rage and aching bones he felt became accentuated the longer he stared at the door.

These odd feelings were a source of great confusion for him, or at least, until he heard something. A woman's scream came from the other side of the door, one that sent chills down his spine.

"Mea?" Der whimpered with utter terror.

Like a crouching tiger, he leaped at the door and began banging on its smooth surface. "Mea?! MEA!" He shouted as once again the young woman's screams pierced past the door and reached the very core of his existence.

*BANG BANG BANG* In utter panic the man started to slam his fists against the door, but no matter how much he tried, the punches could not leave any sort of damage on it, leaving it strong and undisturbed.

Der's worry rapidly evolved into anxiousness as the screams became louder, and more panicked. Whoever or whatever was causing the girl to scream, had picked up the pace, almost as if in response to the man's state of mind, or the young girl's very own horrifying screams. *BANG BANG BANG!!*

In a desperate attempt to stop whatever was going on beyond the door, Der kept bashing it, increasing the output of his power beyond the limits of his body. Blood started to splatter everywhere, and fragments of bone split from the whole, causing the sharp pain Der had been feeling before, but this time, justified.

For hours Der kept striking the door more and more desperately, and to a point where the bones of his hands were now visible.. Yet all his attempts had failed.

Brought to hysteria by the blood curdling screams, he fell back. His rough hands instinctively moved over his ears, hoping to block the screams Der believed to be the worst torture imaginable.. And to his surprise, the moment his hands covered his ears, the screaming indeed came to an end.

Unwilling to hear such a painful sound resume, Der fell on the floor. His knees pressed onto his chest as his forehead gently tapped against the floor. He feared that the moment his hands would relax even slightly, the blood-curdling screams would resume.

As he prepared to wait this torture out, his eyes opened, and he noticed that something had changed. His surroundings, once blurry yet bright, had become completely dark. Not a darkness that signified the lack of natural or artificial light, but a darkness that signified nothingness. The same feeling humans attributed to something that they could not see, or did not know existed.. Like what lay beyond a door they had never gone through before.

The only place that had retained some semblance of light was the area around the wooden door, which, at some point, had cracked open.

The sight of the door opening was not as much of a good sight as Der had thought, for the moment he saw it open, an immense feeling of worry washed over his body. He slowly let go of his ears, and hurriedly crawled on the cold pavement.. He then sprung up on his feet and swung the door open.

What appeared in front of him was something that threatened to send him over the edge of insanity.

The room that appeared beyond the door was a dimly lit stone room with a single gray pillar in the middle. Inside it, were dozens of torture instruments covered in blood, with the one in the very middle being hidden behind a tattered curtain.

From behind the curtain Der could make out the shape of this torture instrument, which appeared to be a high rectangular table, just big enough for a man to lay onto. From its edges copious amounts of blood kept dripping onto the floor, forming a pool that split into the crevices of the tiles and suspiciously moved in Der's direction.

The middle-aged man ignored the pool of blood at his feet, and quickly walked towards the middle of the room. With haste he moved the tattered curtain aside, and there he saw them.. Someone's remains.

To call what Der was looking at a corpse would have been quite a stretch, for the body had been dismembered into very small parts, and left on the table to maintain the shape of the whole body. On the skin of each piece were burnt marks, uncountable cuts, and so many pins stabbed into the flesh that some parts appeared not much different than pin cushions.

However, one part seemed to have been spared from such a gruesome and painful fate. The corpse's head. The head of a young woman whose expression told the story of how she had felt every single torture whoever had done this had inflicted upon her.

As Der saw this head, his heart broke.. For he could remember when the horrified expression on it was an innocent and lovable smile. The young woman was, of course, his daughter Mea.

The entire universe seemed to fall on Der's shoulders, and he stood still, for he lacked the strength to even react. Yet, as time passed, his arms inched towards the abused corpse. Instinctively he wanted to touch his daughter, the same way a beast would prod their young one's body with their nose.. But he did not know how.

He had fallen into a sort of post-traumatic clarity, where he could think outside of his own body. His heart was bursting out of his chest, his face was morphed into a true expression of pain, and his legs and shoulders felt like they were about to give out, yet his mind was oddly calm.

But then, after a few seconds of slowly inching towards his daughter's remains, something odd happened.

The blood that had pooled on the ground had begun to retreat, then jump up in the air in an upwards stream. The extinguished candles that were scattered all over the room were lit again, and their bodies started to rise as droplets of warm wax were reabsorbed into the candle's original shape.

As this happened, the dismembered pieces of the girl's body were one by one reconnected, just before the uncountable pins that made her a porcupine were extracted and the cuts that covered her body closed up. Throughout this the young girl had woken up, showing her father an inverse reaction to the torture she had gone through.

After a minute of this painful sight, the young girl was laying on the table naked, whole and untouched.. Yet, next to her, a man dressed solely in a butcher's apron had appeared.

Der immediately recognized him as the person that must have tortured his daughter, but as he tried to peer his facial features, he realized that it was impossible. The top of his head was shrouded in darkness, masking his appearance from the shoulders up.

As the man appeared, every feeling of anger, pain and distress Der had felt so far began to emerge in the form of a thick layer of emotional aura that visibly oozed from his skin. His fists tightened to the hardness of diamonds, and he lunged at his daughter's torturer furiously, but as his fist came in contact with the man's face, he suddenly blanked out.

When he regained his bearings, moments later, he found himself still in the torture room. Yet, he was not standing where he had been standing before any longer. His daughter, still chained to the torture table, was laying in front of him.

Finding this odd, he looked down, and found himself standing in between two trays. One of which held hundreds of metallic pins, while on the other, was a bonesaw. Luckily, the torturer seemed to have disappeared from within the room, leaving the young girl intact and seemingly asleep.

A spark of happiness began to lighten Der's mind, as he reached towards his daughter in an attempt to wake her up, but as his hand moved forward, he noticed that he was holding a skinning knife. But what horrified him the most was not the fact that he was carrying it, but the fact that he was holding it to his daughter's body.. And could not stop.

"No.. no no no.." he began to mutter in a panic.. But nothing changed. "NOOOOOOO!! NOOOOOOOO!" No amount of screaming was able to stop him from slicing, piercing, and chopping the body of the person he cared for the most.

—--

Similarly to how Der had found himself in his own personal nightmare, so had Roley. His situation, however, had been different.

When he woke up, he was still floating in space, but he stood at the head of an almost infinite number of elementals. So many of them were there, in fact, that most of the view behind him was covered in their bodies, and in the gaseous multicolored aura that their bodies produced. A spectacle he could not deny, was quite breathtaking.

He could not tell who these elementals were, for he did not recognize any of them. Yet he somehow knew that he was leading them, and that together, they were ready for the war that was to come.

As he turned towards the horizon, he soon noticed a small number of lights in the distance. Lights which, had they not moved, would have merged with the rest of the scenery. Yet these lights belonged to someone, and they were approaching at a high speed.

At the sight of these few lights Roley could not help but feel nervous. He felt like a general at war, a feeling he was most familiar with, but he also felt as if meeting the four incoming individuals was the most anticipated and difficult moment of what he felt like the past several millions years. That he had not lived that long, did not seem to matter.

These lights kept approaching, until soon after, they started hiding behind the body of the entities they followed. Then, all of a sudden, they disappeared, revealing the bodies of four individuals.

Roley was shocked.. For he knew these four individuals.. A cold young girl, two similar looking muscular young men, and at the head of the four, a third young man with short black hair, and eyes tainted by a poisonous golden hue.