Darkness. Everything is black. Why is everything so black? So dark? Where am I? What happened to me? Wait.....I remember..... what do I remember? Pain. I remember pain. Why do I remember pain? Why is all that I remember?
Suddenly I was faced with the scorching red hot fiery demon Pain. He was all consuming and angry. I opened my mouth to scream but nothing could escape from my between my scorched lips so I screamed a soundless scream as the fiery demon Pain devoured me whole. Then the darkness once more claimed me.
Time seemed endless in the darkness eclipsed by my periodic battle with the fiery demon Pain. After awhile the sense and need to panic constantly even when battling the demon Pain lessened and eventually disappeared altogether. It also became apparent that the demon Pain couldn't kill me just inflict immense pain.
So now it became a matter of why was the demon Pain trying to keep me in the darkness? How do I over come Pain? As I contemplated the answer, I let myself drift through the darkness. Suddenly, the darkness encompasses my body like a suit of armor and I rushed through to the fiery realm of the demon Pain engulfing everything in darkness as I passed.
Then there was once again nothing. However it wasn't the nothing of the darkness. This was more like the nothing right after one regains consciousness after a dream right before all the real world noise kicks in.
I wasn't as prepared for the onslaught of real world noise as I thought I was. My ears was assaulted by a loud roaring noise that reminded me of a video of Niagara Falls. My eyes were too heavy to open but there was a searing blinding white light that penetrated my eyelids and my nose was assaulted with the sharp smell of sterility. The only other noise sounded like the steady pounding of war drums.
I was struggling to open my eyes in a hope of quenching my thirst when the angry demon Pain attacked me, once again dragging me down into the deep depths of darkness. When I next made it through the darkness and past Pain, I was able to open my eyes and that's when I noticed several strange things.
The intense smell of sterility had almost ceased to exist and was caused by the fact that I was currently lying in an infirmary bed. The load roaring of a waterfall had died to almost nothing as well as was chalked up to being my blood rushing in my ears. The blinding searing white light was nothing more than a dull flicker as the over head lights blinked in and out of existence on their march to death.
A quick glance around the room did not solve the mystery of the pounding war drums though one could easily assume that the sound had been the monitoring station that I was currently still hooked up to though it was now a dead blank black screen. I had no recollection of how I had ended up in the infirmary. Nor why there seemed to be an issue with the power in this part of Castle Smrt. I began to wonder if it was just this part of the castle that I was currently in or the entirety of the estate. It took time for me to be able to leave the infirmary. My first attempts at escape from my bed where failures that resulted in me blacking out from the pain. I have no clue as to how long I was in the infirmary. Nor how long it took me to escape.
When I finally did managed to escape the infirmary, I couldn't believe what I found. The entire medical wing was a disaster. Walls were blown apart or missing chunks. The roof had caved-in in several sections. Black scorch marks could be seen everywhere. Bullet casings and corpses littered the ground everywhere. The strangest thing of all was the corpses all of which were in various stages of decay. Some where almost completely skeletons while others where only missing chunks of flesh. It was obvious that a massive bloody battle had taken place here at Castle Smrt while I was unconscious in the infirmary.
How I managed to survive I don't know. But the problem with the corpses is that as decayed as a lot of them seemed to be, it would mean that the battle would have had to take place years ago. Maybe even a decade or more. But that would be impossible. There's no way that I had been unconscious in the infirmary for that long. This just made me even more curious as to what happened. So I decided that it would be in my best interests if I could find a clue as to what happened to Castle Smrt and everyone in it. So the first place I decided to look which is also the first place to hold the most obvious answers as to what was going on and also one of the first places I visited when I first got to Castle Smrt, was The Security Wing.
This time when I regained consciousness, I was even more confused than before. First off, the image I had seen burned into the back of my retinas before I lost consciousness was no longer there as if no more than a pain induced illusion. Second I was no longer sprawled out atop the strange cable in The Security Wing. I had awoken to find myself laying atop a mountain of books in The Educational Wing.
Or what was left of it. The Grand Library was THE biggest in the world. Or at least it was. Like the rest of Castle Smrt, The Grand Library had suffered damage from whatever had happened here. Confused as I was on how I had gotten to The Educational Wing from The Security Wing with no memory of making the trip ever which in of itself was strange due to each perspective Wing being on opposite ends of Castle Smrt, but I had mixed feelings when I learned of the destruction of The Grand Library.
I had visited The Grand Library only a handful of times and always accompanied by my uncle or one of his ' tutors '. I was never permitted inside by myself and when I asked why, I was answered with a beating that left me lying on the ground gasping for breath, not from the pain but from the anger of it. I had thought I had mastered my pain tolerance but over the past course of events I had realized that there was whole new undiscovered levels of pain that I didn't even know existed until then.
As I had laid there I was also told this:
" Enter not this Grand Library on your own. Forbidden you are. There is knowledge here not for the likes of you maggot."
I was excited to finally be in The Grand Library on my own, but its destruction was another matter entirely. I wasn't sure as to how that made me feel, whether to be angry or sad. Probably a mixture of both. It wasn't called The Grand Library for nothing. I remembered what I had seen when I had first visited The Grand Library. Floor to ceiling book shelves ran the length of the entirety of The Grand Library. It was so massive that it actually demanded its own Wing. One of the few tidbits that I had been given about The Grand Library freely was that the books here went as far back as the beginning of The New World.
This revelation sparked a curiosity and prompted me to ask ' The beginning of The New World? Was there something before The New World?' That prompted another beating. In fact all my questions I verbally asked were answered with a beating usually followed by an answer of some kind to my question. However, this time I only got the beating. My excitement at my discovery prompted me quickly into action to search The Grand Library for clues.
Clues of any kind. Honestly my curiosity in general won out and I spent hours upon hours browsing The Grand Library. I felt like I was in a dream as I browsed from shelf to shelf learning about anything and everything I could possibly get my hands on in that exact moment. That is until the roar of my stomach brought me crashing back to reality. Stopping quickly I made the decision to make The Grand Library my current base of operations as I currently have nowhere else to go.
After a quick browse thru my memory banks I recalled the location of The Food Wing simply named because anything and everything to do with food could be found there. After settling my stomach, I decided no harm in setting up a routine. Stay in shape. Stay healthy. Exercise Mind and Body. The Grand Library would be my base. The Medical Wing would keep me healthy and alive. The Food Wing would sustain me for 10 years or longer if need be.
In fact I saw no reason why as I seemed to be the sole survivor and Jim was my uncle to not just claim the entire estate of Castle Smrt as my own. After making this decision, I next organized my learning into priorities starting with learning how to repair my new home. With this settled, days turned into weeks. Weeks into months. Slowly as time went on, I learned what I could from the ruins of The Grand Library and set to work on repairing my home.
However with the onset of winter around the corner, I only had time to winterize one area and I chose The Grand Library. I loaded up with enough food and supplies and boarded up and winterized The Grand Library, settling in for the winter months to learn, grow, and stay fit. As spring broke out and winter loosened her icy grip, I changed my routine to encompass the rest of the estate and the repairs to Castle Smrt doing what I could.