Hundreds of years might have passed by now. Most of the people he met during his life could be dead. His name and fame forgotten, a life he worked so hard to achieve in tatters. Kolost didn’t care about it, he didn’t really care about anything these days. He just lay unmoving, arms spread out across the floor. Looking up at the ceiling light, shining bright as always.

Always.

Kolost tried to get up and extinguish the light, maybe this time it will work. Maybe this time he thinks. Maybe.

But a problem has occurred to Kolost, he can’t move his legs or his arms or his head or his anything. None of his extremities were working. He tried and tried again to no avail. So Kolost did the most reasonable thing he could think of. He panicked.

“To be trapped in hell for an eternity in hell, only to be in turn imprisoned in my own flesh and blood. A crueller fate surely cannot be.”

He lay there on the floor looking up at the ceiling light illuminate the walls, which he correctly assumed were still there. Still barren and still white, just like the ceiling above and the floor below. Kolost never liked winter as it drove him to seek actual shelter from the elements, now he thought he’ll never get to enjoy snow the way he used to.

In his mind’s eye he was cracking up quite thoroughly, but his body -as it is- didn’t move.

“What a sight that would be, to see a dead man laughing.”

The thought just makes him giggle even more.

Through his pondering and inability to do anything at all, Kolost came to a very interesting discover. After many many tries, he moved. Not his body mind you no, his soul moved. He had manged to detach his soul from his cold corpse and move around freely in his cell. He had no idea how or why it did but he didn’t care.

The ability to move after an imagined millennium of stiffness, made Kolost possibly the happiest man alive. Or not. But he didn’t care about specifics, he could MOVE. His elation was crushed however when he saw his own dead body. A harrowing sight for any man to witness his likeness cold and drained. He had seen dead bodies of the sick and even some of the damned in Gray Haven who got too old to mine and their bodies just gave out. He’d gotten used to it at some point. He would never get used to seeing his own limp body. Never.

Kolost felt an ever-increasing fury start to build within him, nothing new it had always been there. Silently cursing the gods for their wrongful judgment, his comrades whose lives he’d saved turned their backs as he fell. He swore on the last thing he had left, his very own soul, that he would have vengeance in this life or the next. The gods will fall along with their champions, their places will crumble, and their families will hang. ALL that will be left of them is ash drifting in the wind.

But before this renegade’s revenge can start, first he must get out of prison. He must escape hell.

Having experimented on his new ability to slip in and out of his body at will he was now a self-proclaimed expert on the subject. Which was the truth as no mortal before him has had this ability him, Kolost just took another step towards divinity. In the wrong direction but a step none the less.

For most the gods their divinity was a closely guarded secret, as it revealed their true nature. Or the story of their ascension into god hood. Strictly speaking only one of the current gods is a true born god. An ideal or notion manifest into a shape, the others are people who took or were granted the truth. Very insignificant for an occupant of hell.

Kolost liked being his soul more, it made his senses dull. The bright light didn’t bother him as much. The walls seemed blurry and not so constricting as before. Apart from this Kolost also tried to meld his soul into shapes, he had gotten very close to making an appendage like a hand. He couldn’t feel anything when he touched the walls, but he slowly increased his control over his soul anyway.

He didn’t have anything else to do.

A few more hours or decades later Kolost looked up from his hibernation, this skill had come in very useful when he’s outside his body. He can just stop his thoughts and relax, reach a kind of enlightenment. No spectres of memories haunted him. Nor did his white-hot anger seep into his thoughts, urging Kolost to hurt, to make the very walls of his prison bleed.

This meditation did amazing work on his temperament, he was still in a deep despair about his inescapable prison and the actions that took him here. But –

Kolost froze

Something was happening

A sound

A slow scraping of stone behind him. Then silence

Slowly, Kolost rotated himself and saw something terrifying

Darkness

A gap in the walls had opened. Seeing a new colour after so long startled him, it looked so dark and dingy outside compared to his eternal prison

Then without a second thought Kolost burst through the gap and into the darkness beyond