XI

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.