The traitor awoke slowly, very slowly, his limbs aching, the pain from broken bones being supported by the burning senstion of the knots that tied his hand and feet. Light invaded his mind like the edge of a jagged sword, bringing searing pain from his eyes into his skull. Slowly, he got accustimed to the light, coming from one signle torch, on the side of what apperaed to be a round chamber. He moved his head around, as best as he could from the pain that accompanied his every move, stinging into his nerves like a thousand searing-hot pins. The floor was covered with something that reminded him of sand, at least, from touch. Its color was more like that of day-old dried blood, yet, it smelled of roting sea-grass. Around the traitor was a circle, drawn in deep purple, that seemed to syphon away the light from the torch, becoming darker and darker as he looked at it, and it seemed to move around him, slithering like a hungry snake. Frightened by the moving patterns, he took his gaze of the floor, and up to the ceiling. It was criss-crossed by little arches and broken pieces of what appeared to be a former gothic decoration. There was something very uncany about it, he thought. Its jagged surface was completely covered in strange, glowing, dark red runes, and they, along with the breaks if the decoration, almost looked like a dragons head, about to spit fire upon him. From the ceiling, huge tapestries were hanging down, all in dark cloros, red and blue and green, decipting what he was sure must be scenes from Helheims deeper pits, vile beasts tearing at the honourless dead, and the spiders venom dripping from the rooftops as it will after Ragnarok. From the very center of the ceiling, where the throat of the dragon seemed to be, illuminted by red runes, hung a globe, blacker than the blackest night, not reflecting, but devouring all light that tuched it, creating a smoke-like shroud around itself. The traitor could feel the cold emmiting from the globe, feel his own warmth sucked away slowly. The cold terrified him even more than the snake-like thing around him, and finally, he tried to rest his gaze on the walls.
In vain. The walls were painted, or covered, or sprayed, he could not tell, with the same dark green and red and purple and blue colors like the rest of the room, arrayed with strange runes he had never before seen, and even more alien curves and lines that danced all around him. The whole room was a sickening visual cacophony of glowing dark colors, sucking black globes and sand-lines, and ever-dancing scripts and drawings. He closed his eyes, but the glow and sickening movement penetrated under his eyelids, the patterns etched into his skull with a blade of fire, or at least, so he felt.
The pain, thundering somewhere in the back of his self while he observed his prison, returned now, amplified by the sickening dance, a hundred times stronger than before. He tired to cry out, but no sound left his mouth. He was used to pain, searing, blunt, or sharp, but this was a thousand times more than what he could take. It tore at his very mind, ripping it apart slwoly, inch-by-inch, filling the places of thoughts with hot, searing pain, clod, freezing pain, stinging pain, blunt pain, sharp pain, until he felt like being made up of nothing but a little sack of flesh and pain inside.
Far away, somewhere past this shower of horror, he could hear a door open, and the muffled noise of human speech came to his ears, distorted and weak.
I see, you have woken up, scum. Oh, yes, the pain. Do not worry, soon, you will not feel a thing.
A shudder crossed the traitors mind. Was he about to die?
Death? Oh, no, death would be too kind a punishment for your sin.
The traitors guts froze. What? To live in this state? No, Gods, please, no! I am only a lost soul!
You dare call up the gods! You, who went agianst their plans! Oh, and dont be surprised, here, I can hear your thoughts. You claim to be a lost soul, when you are a dullard at best! Oh, yes, you should fear.
At these word,s the traitor tried to move, crawl away from Bureus, and doing so, he crossed the sand-snake. A thousand poisoned mouts bit into his soul, sending him back into the middle.
Fool! Now, stand still, I hate it when the mouse tries to spoil the play for the cat.
Bureus reached down onto the sand-like substance, and he seemed to pet that line that bit the traitor. He murmured a few words, and then, he guided the line, closing it, as if a snake bit its tail. The very moment the line was thus sealed shut, the traitor felt the globe of void slowly descend upon him. Or was it the dragon that devoured him?
The next second, the pain was gone. Then, he felt other things go. His feelings were the first to be sucked away. He could see them in the void, anger, hate, love, sorrow, all dancing away in a miriad of stange colours, sucked into a glowing point far away on the horizon. Horizon?! That world lost its meaning. He was swimming, floating in a sea of blakcness. After his feelings, his senses were the next. He could no longer feel the faint after-glow on the sand on his fingers, no longer feel the scents of the room in his nostrils. His tounge tasted nothing. His eyes saw nothing. Yet, he did see every part of him being sucked away with a sight somehow higher than the physical one. The void around him invaded his self. It made its palce towards the holow holes left behind by his feelings, filling them out, yet ceating only an even stronger, tormenting after-echo. It invaded his eyes, his ears, his skin, his mouth, his nostrils, living blackness crawling all along his body. Memories, images, words, and concepts went next, all sucked out of him, repalced by that yearning, unyielding emptiness of the void.
Yet, he remained there. An after-glow of a person. A long-shed spider-husk, a decaying snake-skin of a soul. He did not exsist, yet, death eluded him, and everything became a hole, filled with the Void. It would have been the utter torment, had he not lost his ability to feel. Now, he only glided trough the Void, feeling nothing but hollowness, and after-images, each hole more yearning and shadow-painfull than the other. As his last parts left him, he could hear, or feel, or at least, somehow understand the distorted words of Bureus:
Enjoy your stay on the Plane Of Void.
After these word,s his "world" began to light up, diffent shades of pitch distinguishing themselves against the vene darker, even colder back-ground, places of things, people, feelings he had lost in this state, each only enough the strenghten the need for his soul-holes to be filled, yet only deepening them. On the edge of his horizon, he could see other figures. Other beings of non-being, other shadows and husks, floating around in the Great Nothing.
Forever.
