White.

Everything is white.

Kolost is currently sitting in the corner of a completely white cell. No windows, no bricks visible in the walls even the door melted back into the wall. The smooth white abyss had only one feature, a small but bright lamp attached to the ceiling. Always on.

Always.

Kolost was in hell. He knew this as he had not eaten since the door was locked, and he didn’t need to either. The huger pangs he knew as a child never came. He had tried to slam his head against the wall. He didn’t feel any pain. He didn’t feel anything at all to be honest.

The perfectly square room had started unsettling Kolost much faster than he wanted to believe.

“This is not what I imagined what hell would look like.” Kolost thought

He was right of course; he was in the penthouse of hell. The other normal damned, morally dubious people and monsters are kept in the vast plains before the palace of Gléowyn. They wander the plains looking for God knows what or who. Spending eternity lost and confused until their lives come unbound and their memory is wiped from this world. Most of them are disembodied souls but a few -mostly monsters- have kept their physique. These legendary beasts still hope within their hearts that one day they might roam free and reap their vengeance upon the world.

So what injustice had Kolost committed against the Gods to justify such a horrifying prison? What great genocide or acts of terrible violence had he committed to throw a damned into hell, then throw away the key? He had said some unsavoury things about the Gods in his younger years, but all that was redeemed severalfold during his travels. Or was the sin which dammed him simply too grave to forgive? Kolost looked around seeking an answer. The walls kept their silence.

Kolost asked himself questions often. He had an eternity to do so.

Kolost opened his eyes, he didn’t need to sleep but closing his eyes was the only thing he could do that shut out this pale reality. Sometimes he dreamt of the past, sometimes the future he could’ve had.

In his mind’s eye he saw the swampy ground west of Tialha, he never had parents to tell him so but even as a child he knew not to go near the marshes. Stories of children stepping into the wrong puddle and sinking into the marsh never to be seen again terrified the young man. So he roamed the busy streets instead, picking pockets is less dangerous work than working for the gangs or gods forbid the mines. If you don’t get caught that is.

Kolost chuckled to himself remembering his first attempt at thieving something other than spare change. It was a run-down house at the edge of the slums. A terrible place to burgle, the town watch can reliably reach the house if needed and remembering the disrepair the house was in; nothing valuable could be looted from it.

Kolost broke the lock on the back door which should have alerted anyone living inside. Young and brazen, he didn’t know or care about that. He pushed on, searching rooms finding some food and many useless trinkets. At least he didn’t have to go hungry tonight. He crept up the stairs and slowly opened the bedroom door, only to find an old man on the floor. He had been dead for some time as the stench was terrible even with the window open.

Kolost saw the dead body and froze in place.

This was the first the time he had seen a dead body up close. Not wanting to have anything to do with the eventual discovery a body. He slowly closed the door and crept back down the stairs carefully looking over the room again downstairs. Finding no more valuables, he left through the door he came and ever so carefully crept home.

Only now did Kolost come to the realisation that he was a greave robber even before he became a burglar.

“Add another sin to the list” he thought.

Kolost began losing time. He no longer had any internal clock to orient himself with, dreams and hallucinations came and went. Sometimes places he visited beckoned him or people he met greeted him. Some of his old friends in Tialha even stopped to chat with him. “How nice of them“ he thought.

Not all these phantoms were so friendly however. The guards at Grey haven sneered and snickered with their horrifically deranged smiles, always smiling. Smiling at his misfortune.

“You had it comin’ scum”.

Kolost lashed out at his shadow trying to strangle the guards, to wipe their smiles off their smug faces. Then he heard another sound, he turned and to his horror he was in a courtroom. The judge’s hammer striking hardwood, the verdict is in. “You will serve your natural and unnatural life stuck forever in hell. Good day gentlemen!” Kolost was on his knees begging the judge to reconsider, anything but a life sentence. His pleas fell on deaf ears as the judge and his entourage melted back into the right wall. The rest of the room merged into the left.

Kolost wept or tried. No tears fell from his dead eyes, looking empty and oh so cold.

But the phantoms didn’t let up on Kolost, they swooped over him in waves. A young beggar whose life he ruined by outing him to the town watch, a smart but lethal move to get rid of the competition. Kolost never forgot his screams when he was being dragged off by the watch and now, they sounded much more harrowing.

As the beggar escape his cell a swarm of damned mobbed the downed Kolost, screaming about gods knows what. Most of them faceless their only uniform feature was their brand. A circle with lines running through it, akin to a cart’s wheel burned into their forehead mostly. Only a select few damned have the money or influence to have their brands hidden so there’s a chance to start a new life in the Outlands.

Most damned don’t have this luxury, they slave away for their right to live, beg on the streets for lifetimes. The smart and able-bodied ones turned to crime or prostitution. Such a life was destined for Kolost, but he had escaped the poverty and the decay. He had left all his old friends in the dust, now their ghosts have come back to haunt him.

Kolost curled up into a ball to try and weather the storm.