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Description
A priest lies, dying, somewhere on the field of battle.
The leaves above his face area lready growing fuzzy and dark in his sight; he cannot regain his focus, and dimly he wonders if his sister has lived. He entertains the faint hope that they might meet again.
A thick black shadow appears under the leaves; he cannot make out the shape. Already he feels the universe slipping away from him.
He knows he is beyond help, yet a vestige of his will to survive remains, and he forces himself to breathe.
The shadow descends, and he is sure the end has come. Then the shadow covers him wholly with its stifling weight, and the priest cries out. Nobody told him that death would hurt so, or be so slow. He shudders convulsively.
Seconds pass, then minutes, each as excruciating as the last. He has not yet died, and this puzzles him. Death is the end of pain, he thinks.
But something lukewarm and viscous dribbles between his slack lips, slithers, sluglike, over his tongue and teeth, and trickles into his throat, as if by a will of its own. The pain he feels slowly dulls to a faint ache on the side of his neck, and he thinks, as the shadow lightens (though he can hardly tell, when all is now so remote from him), that the moment has come at last.

He wakes as suddenly as though slapped.
The shadow of his last moments is no longer there.
Death is the end of pain, he tells himself, but his throat burns, and his hands are agony, and his ears have surely been shredded.
He prays to Illyfue that this is a terrible nightmare, that when he wakes, he shall be dead, and in the place that the temple has promised him.
He lifts a hand to pinch himself, and screams at the sight of it; mangled, skeletal. When he moves it, it gives a horrible crack that threatens to throw him back into the darkness.
Before his eyes his fingers lengthen and turn from pink to grey to a colour worthy of the attentions of a medic, or a mortician; in horrified fascination he is compelled to watch them become dreadful, uncouth, clawlike things, for he is too unwilling to think instead of the transformations passing, far too quickly, through the rest of him, nor of the sensation of his own blood flowing in streams with his saliva down to join the horrid, slimy, half-coagulated ichor that has brought him to this state as his teeth grow and sharpen to spear points. As quickly as he began, he stops screaming.

If death is the end of pain, he thinks,
what is this life I have been given?

Description
A priest lies, dying, somewhere on the field of battle.
The leaves above his face area lready growing fuzzy and dark in his sight; he cannot regain his focus, and dimly he wonders if his sister has lived. He entertains the faint hope that they might meet again.
A thick black shadow appears under the leaves; he cannot make out the shape. Already he feels the universe slipping away from him.
He knows he is beyond help, yet a vestige of his will to survive remains, and he forces himself to breathe.
The shadow descends, and he is sure the end has come. Then the shadow covers him wholly with its stifling weight, and the priest cries out. Nobody told him that death would hurt so, or be so slow. He shudders convulsively.
Seconds pass, then minutes, each as excruciating as the last. He has not yet died, and this puzzles him. Death is the end of pain, he thinks.
But something lukewarm and viscous dribbles between his slack lips, slithers, sluglike, over his tongue and teeth, and trickles into his throat, as if by a will of its own. The pain he feels slowly dulls to a faint ache on the side of his neck, and he thinks, as the shadow lightens (though he can hardly tell, when all is now so remote from him), that the moment has come at last.

He wakes as suddenly as though slapped.
The shadow of his last moments is no longer there.
Death is the end of pain, he tells himself, but his throat burns, and his hands are agony, and his ears have surely been shredded.
He prays to Illyfue that this is a terrible nightmare, that when he wakes, he shall be dead, and in the place that the temple has promised him.
He lifts a hand to pinch himself, and screams at the sight of it; mangled, skeletal. When he moves it, it gives a horrible crack that threatens to throw him back into the darkness.
Before his eyes his fingers lengthen and turn from pink to grey to a colour worthy of the attentions of a medic, or a mortician; in horrified fascination he is compelled to watch them become dreadful, uncouth, clawlike things, for he is too unwilling to think instead of the transformations passing, far too quickly, through the rest of him, nor of the sensation of his own blood flowing in streams with his saliva down to join the horrid, slimy, half-coagulated ichor that has brought him to this state as his teeth grow and sharpen to spear points. As quickly as he began, he stops screaming.

If death is the end of pain, he thinks,
what is this life I have been given?