A sharp pain coming from my left flank wakes me up and I try to scream but there’s something in my mouth that stifles it, turning it into a muffled groan instead. My vision is extremely blurry and I can barely make out what’s happening around me. There’s several shadows surrounding me and standing over me, speaking to each other in agitated tones but I can’t seem to make out what it is they’re saying exactly. I think I’m lying down on my back but I can’t move my arms or my legs because it appears the shadows are holding me down as well. There’s bright orange light shining from behind them which only obscures their faces and with how blurry my eyes are, there’s no way to tell who these shadows are.

As my head starts to clear, those strange noises I couldn’t understand before start sounding familiar again and I can hear someone shouting firmly, “Hold him down tightly! The bleeding hasn’t stopped and we’ll need to burn the wound closed. He’s going to start thrashing around like a pig being slaughtered when I start burning it in a moment and if you two knuckleheads don’t hold him down with everything you have, he’ll kill himself with his struggling. Now, get ready, we’re starting.”

There’s an anxiousness brewing up inside me because whatever’s about to happen, I won’t like it. I try to move my arms and legs in an attempt to sit up and stop them but my whole body feels weak. I can barely put any strength into my limbs and with two shadows on each side of me, holding me down, I can’t move a single inch. I try to voice my disapproval of everything that’s happening but whatever’s in my mouth is hindering my ability to speak and only distorted whimpers are leaking out. A moment later, a larger shadow holding something red in its hands approaches me and the two shadows holding me down tighten their grip.

The larger shadow pauses when he sees me awake and says, “Isaac, I don’t know if you’re completely lucid right now but you’ve lost a lot of blood and we need to close that wound or else you’re going to die. This is going to be incredibly painful but seeing those burn marks on your shoulder, you shouldn’t be a stranger to what’s about to happen. If you need to bite, go ahead and bite down. I’ve stuffed a leather strap into your mouth and your tongue should be fine. I’m going to start now, good luck.”

A second later, an excruciating pain explodes from my left flank. I try to scream with everything I have but nothing comes out and it only makes my throat hurt. I can feel my body spasming and squirming around without any input from me directly. A grotesque but familiar smell fills my nostrils and it sickens me to realize it’s the smell of my own flesh burning. Once the pain reached its apex, everything around me went dark once more.

…

I’ve always had great expectations for myself ever since I was a child. Though from an outside perspective, it could be said I wasn’t appreciative enough of what I did have and always dreamed of impossible goals. But the stories my mother used to read to me before bed every night always filled me with wonder and soon an insatiable yearning for achieving greatness quietly grew within me. What sort of greatness? I had no idea but I dreamt big and I knew I would never be satisfied with just being a farmer’s son.

I was never taught how to read because a farmer’s son doesn’t need to be able to read to plow a field. But my mother was the daughter of a small merchant in a town near the village my father lived in and she learned how to read from her father. Reading was one of her passions and every night she would regale me with those stories she read, enjoying them just as much as I did as she read them to me. However, her dissatisfaction and boredom with her life on the farm grew each day and one night, she just left without a word.

When my father and mother met each other, I was accidentally conceived during their first meeting. With how different their social situations were, I was supposed to have been birthed secretly to maintain my mother’s standing in town and given up for adoption at the town’s orphanage, my father completely unaware of my existence. But my mother was a bit of a… romantic I suppose. Instead of going through with the discreet birth like her father wanted her to, she instead ran away and eloped with my father; a love story for the ages. However, unlike how all those love stories had happy endings, our story ended tepidly with barely a whimper.

After my mother left, my father became indifferent to my existence. Perhaps it was his own way of getting back at his former wife for leaving him but I ended up bearing the full brunt of his revenge. It was like he pretended I didn’t exist. Every morning he would make breakfast for himself before heading out to work on the farm for the day and every night he would make dinner for himself before heading to bed only to repeat it all the next morning. The entire day he wouldn’t acknowledge me at all and I was left to scrape together his leftovers for my own sustenance.

No matter how hard I tried to get his attention or plead with him to just look at me, he ignored me like I wasn’t even there. The warm man who always had a smile on his face and would lift me up by my armpits before twirling me through the air was gone and in his place was a stone cold stranger. It was a difficult life and the one thing that kept me alive throughout my childhood and my teenage years were my mother’s stories. Instead of the heroes or heroines that would slay dragons, rescue princesses, and save kingdoms, I replaced them as the protagonist in every single one of those stories. Narcissistic? Absolutely. But it’s how I was able to survive.

When I became an adult, I left my father’s farm and I registered with the adventurers’ guild in the town my mother used to live in. She and her father had long left the town due to the scorn they received from the other merchants residing there for the whole lowborn elopement fiasco. I even knew where they went after they left but I didn’t really want to look for them with us being estranged for so long. I only knew about all of that because it turns out I was adept at gathering information and parsing through rumors. One rumor in particular though, would lead me to utter despair and drop me into the pits of hell.

One of the Nasaar Kingdom’s nobles residing in Ocean’s Rest was searching for his missing son. His son had gone missing years ago while traveling from Ocean’s Rest to Everview to receive a medal for his military accomplishments and he was largely suspected to have disappeared somewhere inside the Plainheart Woods. The search had been ongoing for years by the time I came across that information but even after all that time, the noble was still offering a generous bounty of 300 gold coins for the safe return of his son. The reason that bounty was never claimed is because the Plainheart Woods is widely considered one of the most dangerous places in the entire kingdom and even with such a generous bounty, not many were willing to risk their lives for it. For the ones brave enough to attempt to venture into the woods, either they came back empty handed or didn’t return at all.

Even though it’s a forest located directly in between two of the kingdom’s largest, wealthiest cities, one of them being the capital, Everview, thousands of people go missing in it every year. Whether they go missing because they get lost or whether they’re killed by bandits, no one really knows for sure, but it’s said if you strayed too far away from the main roads, you’d forfeit your life for your complacency. But it was because of a rumor regarding these woods that led me into searching for the missing son. I heard a rumor that a bandit group who were fashioning themselves as a cult were quickly rising to prominence. They were known for capturing lost wanderers and recruiting them into their cult. It was rumored that the noble’s son was captured by precisely that cult and was being held captive by them.

From everything that I could find about it, it seemed like a reliable rumor and the yearning for achieving greatness inside of me exploded outwards. I was going to find the cult who were doing the kidnappings and I was going to find the noble’s son before escaping with him. I had it all planned out and I knew not many would be able to piece together the fragmented bits of information like I could, meaning not many knew about the possibility of the noble’s missing son being inside the cult. This was my opportunity to complete a magnificent quest and have my name spread throughout the kingdom, forever immortalizing my name in children’s bedtime stories. But it wasn’t until I arrived at the bottom of The Pit did I realize I was in over my head.

The noble’s missing son turned out to be The Pit’s insane king, Corbin. Or should I call him by his full name, Corbin Pearridge of the noble house Pearridge. His face was horribly disfigured from years of torture and abuse by The Pit’s previous king as shown by the countless scars that covered his face. Unfortunately, his outer physical appearance directly reflected his inner wellbeing. He had lost his mind years ago and he was no longer the same gallant Corbin Pearridge who was supposed to receive honors from the king himself for his achievements on the Nasaar/Ribier border. He was now just Corbin, king of The Pit who ruled using violence and terror.

When I explained to him who I was and what I was there for, all he did was smirk at me before punching me in the face repeatedly, shattering my nose on our first meeting. From that point on, I became his lackey and he didn’t allow any of those under him to attempt to leave The Pit by climbing upwards. The ones who tried to do it anyways were punished in inhuman ways that frightened me to my core. He forced me to live under his thumb and at his beck and call for years.

When he died, I thought it was finally my chance to be in charge of The Pit. It was finally my time to achieve greatness and I would become The Pit’s new king. Me! But Corbin’s other surviving lackeys didn’t have the foresight to envision the bright future they’d have if they would just follow my leadership, my greatness. They fought me at every step and our division amongst ourselves let some small, red haired upstart vie for control over The Pit.

I lived under the terror that is Corbin for years just for this moment. Why would I come down here in the first place if not to become The Pit’s king? This is my chance to become great and be remembered for all of eternity. My mother would be so proud of me. My father would finally smile at me again and tell me he loved me.

But why am I on the ground, on my hands and knees? Why is my hair being pulled backwards while the upstart slices my throat open? Why is my vision getting darker with each passing moment? What about my dreams? What about the stories of Mercer the Great being read to children before bedtime? What about…