The mind is an estate of endless doors and countless rooms. Each room is a memory—a moment of life—carefully sealed away, the walls are barriers barring access, and every door is a connection that sparks a remembrance. As time goes on, the estate withers, decays, and breaks down. Repairs are done: doors are oiled, pathways are secured, and walls are rebuilt. 

Sometimes, in the event of a cataclysm, the estate can be shaken to its foundations without hope of it ever being rebuilt, but the mind has a will of its own, and will endeavor on even if the soul is unwilling to do so. Portals will be framed, roofs will be patched, and stairs will be straightened. Broken walls rise anew, and sometimes those walls appear where doorways had once been. Those rooms, those memories, are sealed off. In time, they are forgotten completely.

For a man like me, a man who'd been immortal and had survived for more than a thousand human lifetimes, the estate of my mind is a world of its own creation. It is a manor with pillars drawn to stand in the time of creation, and where there should be a ceiling, there is only a yawning expanse where the cosmos lap upon my thoughts like waves. There are entire wings I hadn't trod through in centuries, their rugs covered in filth and their chandeliers wrapped in veils of cobwebs.

When the mage struck my head, my mind was jarred. Dust was shaken from furniture, all the lights flickered, and in the farthest corridors where the walls were primitive and comprised of stone, cracks appeared in the mortar, and bricks gave way. I stepped over the rubble and winced as a light that hadn't come on in eons burst to life. 

Obscuring fog still clung to the edges of my vision—but I was walking, body locked into the movements of the memory. I was in a garden with low bushes and kept plants, all the leaves an odd mixture of rich green and metallic gold, while the path crossing the beds was made of crushed, alabaster stone. The air swam with the scent of blooming flowers I couldn't recall the names of. 

I wore boots with hard soles, and pants that tucked into the tops where the iron buckles encircled my calves. The coat I wore was created from a thick, fitted material and was belted about the middle, while the collar was flat and rough against the skin of my neck. The hem fell below my waist, but it was slit at my left hip as to not be a hindrance if I were to reach for the sword at my side. It was a long blade of shined metal with a smooth, deadly curve. 

My hands were different. Though no less strong, the bones were thinner and the fingernails had been replaced by honed talons. 

I walked without purpose, swaggering through the gardens despite the weight of the boots and my attire. There were many columns in the gardens rising up toward the canvas of the sky painted in the warms hues of sunset. Each was topped with a thick crescent, and I couldn't remember what they were for or what they meant.

I couldn't even remember where I was.

Wherever this memory occurred, I must have known it well because I moved without true thought and came upon a fountain gushing with bright silver water. I dipped my strange fingers in the gentle current—feeling nothing, because I couldn't remember the texture of it or the temperature.

A voice spoke above. "You look a sight." 

The speaker was seated in one of those lifted crescents, eclipsed by the fog of my mind. He tipped from his perch and—though the drop was more than fifteen feet—landed easily at the fountain's opposing side. Holding a thick scroll under one arm, he used his free hand to toss back a white hood. 

Sethan.

My brother had always been slighter than I was, thinner in proportion with large eyes and a narrower chest, though he was an inch or so taller in height. Robes of white embellished in gold thread fell to his knees, parting in the front to reveal his red tunic and a belt meant to harness bound rolls of parchment, not blades. His ears were tipped with elongated points, as were his teeth. 

He was Absolian. His facial markers were clear. This was a memory of Absolia.

"I've had another bout with Gadrid," I said, hand patting the shined pommel of my sword, amusement audible in my distant voice. "Came to see if you two wanted to try your hand next."

Sethan responded, but his words were lost to a crackle of white noise overcoming my hearing. A burning heat swept through me as a sharp pain spiraled outward from the base of my skull. The memory warbled but persisted, colors bleeding together as the saturation was skewed and I laughed at whatever Sethan had said.

From around one of the bushes emerged another tall, fierce-looking Absolian. Like Sethan, I recognized the man—but I didn't know him. His name again drifted unbidden to my mind just as my lips moved and the name "Aurelius," emerged.

He was the man who'd called himself my brother. His brumal eyes were hard and unyielding, though his mouth pulled itself into a condescending smirk. He had an animal grace about him, a lightness to his step that was unsettling even within the confines of a memory. He wore clothes like my own with the collar left undone, his boots scuffed and beaten as if he hadn't taken the time to clear them. There was a spear made entirely of polished crystal in his hand.

A ponderous weight formed within the memory and settled itself in the pit of my stomach. Careful, my intuition mouthed, no louder than the susurration of a roving win. Careful, careful.

"I'll fight you," he said, his teeth bright in the fading rays of sunlight. "Whenever you'd like, brother."

My head tipped as my hand rose from my sword's pommel. "Perhaps later."

"Afraid, Darius?"

"No. Simply tired of patching you up when you take things too far."

The Absolian—Aurelius—scoffed as he lifted the spear and leaned it against his shoulder. He was closer to me than to Sethan in appearance, but he had Sethan's willowier build and height. Even so, he wielded that weapon with a deft hand. I imagined his skill had only compounded over the long years.

The pain came again, lancing through my head like a fiery poker rooting through my flesh and bones. The vision before me stuttered and skipped, fraying about the edges as my body and the bodies of my brothers moved in discordant leaps and bounds. One instant we were by the fountain, and in the next we were across the garden walking through a stone gate, our voices interwoven in easy, familial conversation. 

Sethan touched my shoulder, laughing. Sethan. My brother. I beheld his face anew, took in his sparkling blue eyes and humored visage, cursing the agony exploding within my heart and mind. Sethan, my brother, my kin. The brother I'd killed with my own two hands.

The scene bled with color as the pain amounted to sheer torment and my vision began to wane. The three of us walked below that stone gate—and pitched ourselves headlong from a cliff's edge into the waiting mist below. The wind roared as the cold hit me fully and magic poured through my veins. A new weight manifested at my back just as we dipped under the cloud line and the valley rolled out before us, bathed in the ochre hues of a dying day. A city of white stone encumbered much of the land, and at its center rested a tower of brass and iron.

Our descent slowed. My brothers had sprouted black wings dusted with crimson streaks—and I realized I had as well. Wings. We were winged.

What tremulous cord held me to the past vision of my family was severed when the lance of agony dove through my thoughts again. The memory was shredded into a million finite filaments, and those filaments ascended quickly through the obfuscating fog as I plunged into the waiting dark.

When the memory was destroyed, the pain relented. I stole ragged breaths as my throbbing pulse eased and the torment peeled away from my psyche in jagged bands. I may have been floating or kneeling—or perhaps neither as I stole bits and pieces of awareness from the maw of total oblivion. It was in that suspended state that I recognize the coming of another memory, and when the light returned, I found myself peering down into a pair of wintry cyan eyes.

Her face was spotted with rain and the moisture clung to her eyelashes in clear droplets. We'd been outside her home, in the untamed mess of her backyard, and I had watched the dawn crawl over the horizon with my thoughts full of naught but death and ruin. I'd looked at her and had told myself, "She's such an ignorant thing. Just like the rest."

But then she'd asked, "What is your name?"

Her question surprised me. I had a trove of names at my disposal, and they flitted across my tongue in rapid succession as I discarded them one by one. It'd been so long since I'd had a host, and longer yet since I'd last sought vengeance on a host's whim. For that brief interlude of time in Sara's care I'd been safe. Not alone, not hunted. Anonymous. I hadn't wanted to be known as Belial, or Raim, or Mithras—I'd wanted to be Darius.

Like the other memory, this one dissolved into the engulfing shadows—but her image persisted, stark as reality against the nothingness of my unconscious. She turned toward the dark, her thin fingers tucking her long hair behind her ear as her eyes left and she began to walk away.

Fury ignited in my middle, because I didn't want her to leave. I didn't want her to go.

"Look at me!" I snarled, willing her to stop, to return her gaze to mine. "Don't turn away from me!"

Her image didn't stop.

"Look at what you've done to me!" I yelled, every ounce of the devotion and loyalty I felt for the woman twisting into something harsh and bitter. I hated her in that instance, hated her because she'd come to define my world in such a short period of time, and because she'd stolen purpose from that world with her dying breath. I hadn't even been there.

I should've been there.

I should've stopped it, had it cost my very soul.

She returned me to life, but it was only a half-life. There was no brightness anymore. All that had defined me—my pride, my strength, my immortal indemnity—had been stripped from my being. My purpose was gone.

Time's ennui was slow, but relentless torturer. It'd been consuming me for years—but, at last, I could feel its teeth truly tearing apart what remained of my identity.

"Look at me!"

She wouldn't.

"Tell me why! Tell me why you gave up everything just to bring me back to this! Answer for what you've done!"

Destroyer. Devourer. 

"You don't get to do this to me," I raged, out of my mind with confusion and pain. "You're just a mortal girl—!"

A storm. An inferno encased in flesh, ensnared by bones.

"Come back! Come back and face me—!"

Hope. She'd been my hope, a small but vivacious glimmer promising I could be who I wished, and not be defined by my crimes or my past injustices. Hope that, to someone, I was more than just a demon worthy of execution.

She did look at me then, just as she had when I'd last seen her, when I'd pulled her hand from my person and had let it go. Her eyes were furious, burning. "Our choices define us, Darius."

Even if it wasn't real, hearing her voice address me directly grounded my mind in some inexplicable manner. My lungs no longer felt like they were straining for air, and the debilitating crushing sensation within my chest eased. The chaos of my thoughts found rhythm and sense. For the first time since my death, I felt more like myself.

"Is that all you're going to say to me, idiot girl?" I demanded, finding succor in my tone's cold stillness. "That I am defined by my choices?"

She didn't reply.

"Then listen to my choice, you infuriating, arrogant little mortal." My voice was growing steadier, firmer. "I'll figure out how to bring you back if it takes all of my remaining years. You cannot—and will not—escape into death without my leave. You've far too much to answer for...Sara Gaspard."

The woman was beginning to fade as my true body was roused and I began to awaken.

"Do you hear me, Sara?! If I have to challenge the Dying King himself, I will find a way to bring you back!"

It could have been my imagination, but just before she disappeared into my subconscious once more, I could've sworn Sara smiled.