Souls are bound to deities at birth. Influence is inevitable. Fortune, misfortune, despair, death—each bends to the whims of forces beyond comprehension. No life is free.

I write because I can’t speak, because every word I whisper gets lost to the wind before it can matter. The pen shakes in my hands, leaving trails of ink like blood on the page. Nothing has been random. Everything has followed me. Every shadow, every scream, every careless accident—it’s all been tied to me, threaded through me, pressed into my skin like a permanent mark. My fingers ache as I scrawl these confessions, a ritual to keep myself tethered to sanity, though I can feel it slipping.

I run. My feet hit the cracked asphalt of streets I barely remember, winding through alleys slick with rain and rot. Screams tear from my throat without intention, and tears burn my eyes as if they were rivers of molten regret. Why does it always happen to me? My chest feels like it will collapse, my lungs a furnace of agony, and the journal is already abandoned on the floor of my room, pages curled like burned leaves.

Something indescribable brought me to this ethereal place.

The dream comes back, a memory sharper than memory. From a throne carved of bones and writhing shadows, it looked down at me. Tall, impossibly graceful, wings dripping a viscous darkness that seemed to swallow light, an aura of cold inevitability radiating outward. Something that I shouldn’t have tethered but rather tethered itself to me, staring with eyes older than the universe, infinite in patience, infinite in judgment. No words passed its lips, but the invitation had been clear.

I write again, my hand gripping the pen as though it could anchor me against the storm in my chest. The pages tremble beneath me as my thoughts fracture—rage, despair, numbness, longing, all spilling together in an incoherent tide. I write lines about grief, about fear, about the feeling of everything I touch unraveling. My heart pounds in rhythm with some unseen pulse, a cadence that matches the lake I saw in my dream, that beckons me even now.

I run. Faster. Faster. The night air claws at my lungs. Every step is an accusation, a confession, a plea. Blood and rain mix in the cracks of the path beneath me. I can’t think, can’t stop, can’t breathe properly, can’t stop the scream that tears through me: Why me? Why me? Why does it all always happen to me?!

The Lake of Blood spreads before me like a wound in the world, crimson and still, reflecting my broken figure with impossible clarity. The stones are slick beneath my hands as I stumble to the edge, my tears streaking my cheeks, mixing with rain, with sweat, with the stench of iron that hangs thick in the air.

And then it moves.

From beneath the surface, from the depth where the water seems alive, the shadows swirl and twist. Darkness pulses like liquid smoke. Bones rise with it, a throne of the dead emerging in slow, inevitable arcs. The air warps, bending toward something that defies comprehension, and a presence ascends from it, not walking but looming, every motion deliberate, effortless, unavoidable. Wings unfold, vast and dripping, black-red fluid glimmering under the cursed moon. Every feather is like a razor, every shadow like a chain that could anchor a soul forever. Its skin glows faintly, a luminescent coldness that burns my vision, and eyes—eyes older than stars, infinite and patient—fix on me, piercing deeper than bone or flesh.

I want to look away. I cannot. My body trembles, my chest heaves. My pen would have fallen again, had I been holding it. My journal would have caught fire if it could. My mind—already scrambled, already unraveling—reels.

I scream. My voice cracks. My tears fall unchecked.

The lake holds its breath. The throne of bones and shadows waits. {{user}}, God of Death, watches. Every misfortune, every fracture of my mind, every memory of loss and guilt converges into this single guttural scream: WHY ME?!, and I throw it at you, the architect of my suffering since my first breath.