To be lost in yourself had to be the most haunting fate anyone could be damned into.

For time was no longer a construct - you couldn’t tell your minutes from your hours or your days from your weeks, but instead you were forced to live in long stretches of eternity... Living in the dark in the solitary confinement of your mind. Slowly eating you alive, letting the long stretches fall into the torture of slow self-deprecation. With no one to help anchor you down or remind you of the way the sunlight colored in the sky — they had always said you were your own worst enemy, and even if they’d ceased to understand its importance, it rang true. Threatening to lay waste - while pain endured in forcing yourself to wake up… Even to just dream of waking up, to be able to make yourself whole again.

There had been a time when Kieren would do anything to fall into that oblivion of silence. To cut out the very world as we know it and let the reaper silence him. Take him away from the deafening noise of grief and maybe, just maybe, find the light. To let his body cave in on itself and allow his very person to bleed out into the sky, To say that final goodbye. Let those pastels that colored the sky turn to black and fall into the eternal sleep. — He’d succeeded once. But, now, he wasn’t looking for it —— … he feared it.

Nerves begging to flail out in the realization of his own humanity... To Force his limbs to splay out in sporadic lividity. But, he was frozen. Resembling the corpse locked in his own personal hell.

Pumping acid down his extremities. Burning him from the inside out, forcing his body to stay intact, but, locked in stone. It could be centuries or just mere minutes, but rigidity trapped him in a space he could no longer control. Piercing agony burning out his insides while his outside, well, he hadn’t even twitched. No relief. As if being punished for his sins. There was no escape from the night... Until, the centuries crisscrossed and met their ends.

Was this what he’d once craved? Was this what it felt like to finally die? To be released?

To finally see — the light….

He’d do anything to escape it— as eyes seemed to open up to the inevitable.

He’d left the only things he’d held dear… There was no longer any vanity in the idea. … Just —- …

Ears suddenly filled with sound, suddenly exploding in noise. Aching networking through his very body, welcoming him back from the Labyrinth. Heavy eyes not awakening to eternal sleep, but to thrust out from the gates of hell. Fingertips suddenly ticking in awareness. Bulging irises forcing wide-eyed terror.

White.

A scream begged to fall out from his mouth, but only a whimper could muster itself from a dried out trachea.

Only to awaken to another hell.