He chokes on the fumes as red-hot fire veins out across his father's skin, grasping futilely at him but earning himself little more than scalded fingertips. Each breath is laborious and racked with short, hyperventilated sobs as his fist again thuds uselessly against the coffin's lid.
"This isn't real, this isn't real..." he repeats to himself, a thoughtless, necessary mantra to stave off the horror of what he's just witnessed. Something he couldn't fight, a man he couldn't help. Any chance of reversing a memory that claws at his insides burns up along with a large amount of what little oxygen still remains for him to breathe and each inhale strains newly ashy lungs further.
His heart's hammering in his chest when his eyes lower to the only source of light in his cramped box, one radiating heat and energy, and his options melt away. The ring of his ancestors sears his skin when he grabs for it, stuttering out his pain as he forces it down over a finger that turns immediately red and raw at every point of contact. A new pressure blooms in his rib cage and at the base of his skull.
Then everything goes dark.
The sudden pain that overtakes him is unlike anything he's ever felt before, ripping him apart from the inside with shining white fingers that calcify and decay everything they touch while voices whisper his unworthiness in his ear. He recognizes his father's. Still the fire sinks and spreads as it consumes him, a failed king, the Chosen by mistake and not by proper destiny, and the last twinges of fear that he feels cement that idea in his mind.
The torture only stops when he has no nerves left to experience it with and his eyes open slowly then, reformed and undamaged. Soot streaks his bare skin, remnants of his father's ashes and his own alike, the last remainders of a long and proud line and the evidence of the tracks it's left on his own life. Light reflects in blue as he again focuses on that ring, silent and exhausted. The dread within him grows with each passing second -- minute? hour? -- until he realizes just how much he wants to be away from it. It's becoming fucking unbearable and his next strike upward is far stronger even if his words are quieter.
"Hey! Please... I'm calm, I can talk again. I can't stay in here... We can talk about what you want."
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"This isn't real, this isn't real..." he repeats to himself, a thoughtless, necessary mantra to stave off the horror of what he's just witnessed. Something he couldn't fight, a man he couldn't help. Any chance of reversing a memory that claws at his insides burns up along with a large amount of what little oxygen still remains for him to breathe and each inhale strains newly ashy lungs further.
His heart's hammering in his chest when his eyes lower to the only source of light in his cramped box, one radiating heat and energy, and his options melt away. The ring of his ancestors sears his skin when he grabs for it, stuttering out his pain as he forces it down over a finger that turns immediately red and raw at every point of contact. A new pressure blooms in his rib cage and at the base of his skull.
Then everything goes dark.
The sudden pain that overtakes him is unlike anything he's ever felt before, ripping him apart from the inside with shining white fingers that calcify and decay everything they touch while voices whisper his unworthiness in his ear. He recognizes his father's. Still the fire sinks and spreads as it consumes him, a failed king, the Chosen by mistake and not by proper destiny, and the last twinges of fear that he feels cement that idea in his mind.
The torture only stops when he has no nerves left to experience it with and his eyes open slowly then, reformed and undamaged. Soot streaks his bare skin, remnants of his father's ashes and his own alike, the last remainders of a long and proud line and the evidence of the tracks it's left on his own life. Light reflects in blue as he again focuses on that ring, silent and exhausted. The dread within him grows with each passing second -- minute? hour? -- until he realizes just how much he wants to be away from it. It's becoming fucking unbearable and his next strike upward is far stronger even if his words are quieter.
"Hey! Please... I'm calm, I can talk again. I can't stay in here... We can talk about what you want."