[i] "Once, a scholar betrayed his fellows at Byrgenwerth...and brought forbidden blood back with him to Cainhurst Castle...”[/i] He remembered gray. Gray was the sky. It was little after dusk, and the sun had just retreated from the horizon. A warrior stood before him. An executioner wearing white garb and a golden helm, a wooden wheel covered in viscera and dripping with fleshy pink chunks in his free hand. His other held a Blunderbuss. He remembered his legs springing, crushing the corpses beneath him into a viscous paste to join the mud. The executioner screamed terribly, swinging the large wheel in a wide arc. He remembered the pain of the varnished wood slamming into his ribs and his body flailing limply though the air. He remembered the taste of blood. He remembered his hands digging into the snow to grasp at the soft mud beneath, and flinging a shower of red-brown paste at his adversary. The executioner shrieked and fired his Blunderbuss. He remembered the spray of bullets slicing the air just left of his cheek. He remembered how easily his hand tore through the executioner’s sternum; how his heart caved in inside his palm. He remembered his tenebrous armor painted red and eyes burning as he looked to the sky. A gray sky. He remembered another cry, a woman this time. His head snapped at attention and his legs tensed. He remembered the second wheel slamming into the ground in front of him, resonating a hollow crack as it met a corpse. He remembered arching his feet and letting his saber pass through the woman’s abdomen. He remembered torquing his wrist and slicing the nice cloak she wore. He remembered red on white. On their cloaks, on the ground, on their skin. He remembered seeing his comrades fall as stones. He remembered their bones being reduced to meal and their flesh pulped and flattened. He had killed so many. So many had fallen to his blade and bullet to no end. He remembered his family burning. He remembered cradling his wife’s charred corpse in his arms. He remembered his daughter becoming dust in the wind. He remembered hot tears mixing with cold blood. He remembered rage. He remembered moving like a gust of wind and pounding flesh like a battering ram. He forgot what the uses of swords and guns and armor was. He only remembered the blood from then on. He remembered metal being driven into his limbs, rusting coils constricting his bones. He remembered what it was like to be burned alive. He remembered what it was like to have no skin, no eyes, no hair. He remembered a faint whisper of death. An inky blackness that filled up all senses. He remembered being born again. He remembered the Hunt. Then, he remembered arrival. He strode through the Dojo’s gates, his past coming back to him like agonizing pulses of a wound that never healed. [spoiler]open[/spoiler]