Something thick and slippery coated my fingers and my hand ... my arm ... my shoulder. The entire left side of my body was numb by the time I awoke and opened my eyes. Darkness pushed against my eyes, and for a moment I wondered—oddly detached, for some reason—whether I had gone blind. The possibility left me feeling unfazed, which left me both confused and curious as the blackness around me became shadows and outlines. My hearing and sense of smell, the absence of which I felt surprised to not have noticed in the fist place, renewed themselves along with my eyesight. For a moment, I wondered why I smelled blood.

The heavy throb of pain coursed through my left side the moment I tried to move my arm, but I ignored it with an exceptional method of pain avoidance I had learned in my years as a bounty hunter, mercenary, and master swordsman. I screamed my goddamn head off. It felt like a wolf had eviscerated that side of my body, and I would know. The screaming gradually receded into a series of gasping, half-whimpering breaths and unashamed tears. Whoever the hell had done this to me was going to burn in a series of custom-made hells specifically meant for the torture only used car salesmen had ever imagined. The pain disappeared as soon as my breathing had become mostly calm, and I blinked the blurry tears from my eyes, which had already adjusted to the darkness.

It is impossible to put a pin on just how long I lay in the darkness. Running on just what I could assume at the time, I assumed it was a few minutes, but darkness and disorientation have the odd tendency of killing the perception of time. The fear of moving gradually faded once again, born in part from my natural curiosity, and I found myself trying to look down my body. The clothing I wore on my torso had disappeared, and I was coated from my shoulder to my fingertips in dried blood, as well as from my armpit to my waist. That was not what shocked me.

The clinical explanation for what my left side had become would be saying that I was suffering from nineteen open lacerations on my left arm, a puncture wound in my left shoulder, and three long lacerations down by left side. The instinctual explanation for what my left side had become would be saying that it was now a lump of drying, dirty, disgusting wounds that made that side of my body look like it had been part of a torture session. The tool that had done it was startlingly obvious. A red-stained katana was still jutting from my shoulder. Surprisingly, the screaming did not return, but was replaced instead by sharp breaths and a sudden desire to be anywhere else in the entire universe. I would take heaven, hell, purgatory, the otherworld, the Dome, a desert, an ocean, a nest of sharks. My basic survival instinct told me that even the nest of sharks would be safer than here for one reason, and one reason only: whatever had done this to me had left me alive. It had left me wherever I was. It knew how to find me again.

I stood with considerable difficulty. The difficulty arose from the katana. What I had not noticed at first glance was that it was imbedded almost halfway in my shoulder, which was pinned to a stone floor. Blade had been shoved through my shoulder and into that stone floor, and getting loose was both painful—hence, more screaming—and nigh impossible. I have a talent for doing things that are nigh-impossible, as I did when I finally worked the weapon out of my shoulder and tossed it onto the ground near me. I stood and swayed like a reed for a few moments before toppling forward against the door. It splintered, broke, and gave way beneath me, falling together with my body into a dirty corridor.

For an irrational second, I contemplated whether or not to just kill myself and have done. The sane parts of my mind pushed me back into a state of self-awareness long enough to set my hands on the katana and make my stumbling way into the dimly lit halls. Pain be damned.

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[Graphics by Me.]

[The signature links to Aleksandr Sokoll.]
["I believe in sleeping." ~ Bruce Lee]