The Awakening

The air was thick with the scent of blood and burning flesh. Smoke curled into the sky, twisting and writhing like the anguished spirits of the dead. Azibo Anwar lay motionless among the slain, his body drenched in the warmth of his own blood, though his wounds had long since closed.

He should have been dead.

He had died.

The memory was vivid—a blade piercing his heart, his brothers’ screams fading into silence, the world dimming to black. Yet now, his lungs burned with breath, his pulse thrummed beneath his skin, and his eyes fluttered open to a world that should have forgotten him.

He gasped, his body seizing as if rejecting its unnatural return. His limbs ached with the stiffness of the grave, and his hands trembled as he pushed himself up. Around him, the battlefield was a graveyard—his brothers, his clan, the people he had sworn to protect, all slaughtered.

The weight of it crushed him.

A sob choked in his throat, his hands clawing at his face, his chest heaving with grief. He reached out, fingers grazing his brother’s lifeless hand, his body still warm, yet empty.

“Why am I alive?“

His voice was raw, barely a whisper against the howling winds. Why had the gods spared him? He had no answer—only an unbearable truth. He was alone.

The sun had begun to set, painting the sky in hues of crimson and gold, a mockery of the blood that stained the earth. The desert stretched beyond the carnage, endless and merciless. Without thought, without direction, Azibo ran.

He ran until his legs gave out, until his breath was fire in his lungs, until the world blurred into nothing but sand and sorrow.

That night, the nightmares began.

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The first dream came like a phantom in the dark.

Azibo stood in a city of towering stone, its streets lined with faceless figures. A shadow loomed behind him. A blade slid across his throat.

He woke gasping, hands flying to his neck, expecting to feel the warmth of blood. But there was nothing. Just the whisper of the wind and the endless desert around him.

The next night, another death.

And the night after that.

Night after night, year after year—Azibo died. A thousand deaths in a thousand ways.

He was burned at the stake, his flesh peeling from his bones in excruciating agony.
He was drowned in an abyss, lungs filling with water as he reached for the surface that never came.
He was buried alive, his screams swallowed by the earth, his breath stolen by suffocating darkness.
He was flayed, impaled, dismembered, torn apart by beasts, crushed under falling stones, poisoned, stoned, strangled—every night a new horror, a new fate, a new curse.

The dreams followed him like a shadow, an unrelenting tormentor.

For a decade, he wandered—a recluse, a ghost of a man who refused to die.

He became a whisper among travelers who passed through the desert, a figure seen only in fleeting moments—a lone man sitting atop the dunes, staring at the stars, his eyes hollow with an ancient grief.

But no matter how far he ran, the dreams followed. The curse was in his blood. And no matter how many times he died, he would always awaken, breathless, waiting for the next nightmare to claim him.

Waiting for death to take him, only to spit him back out once more.