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[h1][color=royalblue]XEGA[/color][/h1]
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[i]”Wh-why…? Why here? I was not meant...not here...I can’t...die…”

Pale, thin hands grasped futilely at the haft of the spear sticking out of his chest. Even touching it sent waves of pain through him. He vomited, his own blood. Suddenly he was on the ground--why weren’t his legs working? Everything...was...cold...and…[/i]

Cracked lips parted and drew breath. Lungs that had atrophied, shriveled, suddenly began to inflate again, their long dried flesh somehow filled with life giving blood again, their veins beginning to swell. A heart beat, forcing new life through the mummified tissues like squeezing water through a dry-rotted hose. Violent coughing, a body jerking in agony as muscles unused for who knew how long were forced to spasm and stretch. A scream. A sucking chest wound began to exhale as it pushed out a rusty spearhead. The corroded metal clattered to the ground.

Xega opened his eyes, blue sparks dancing through them. 

He suddenly jerked up, as if from a dream. As he did so, the corpses he was lying underneath rolled away, further down the pile, until they landed with a splash in a pool of fetid, blood-hued fluid. Was it water, stained by the blood of the corpses? Or something else, dripping and flowing from some ungodly creature’s lair?

“...How?” He opened and closed his fingers, felt his arms. He had been dead. He knew it. He had been dead, and yet now he was not. Now his wounds were gone and he was alive and he could [i]breathe[/i]. He did so now, a deep, shuddering breath. He looked around the room, taking everything in.

Piles of corpses. Stone floors...some unspeakable, nameless mass of flesh suspended from up high. A tower of some sort. Stairs, a walkway. Braziers...still burning. Who was here?

Movement, near the wall. He snapped his head around, holding up one hand...a woman, with a sword. Pink hair. Small of frame, but something about the way she stood with the rusty implement that spoke of training. Fear and confusion in her face.

“Who are you?” he spoke, pushing on the corpses below himself to stand up. His voice carried a tone of superiority, despite his uncertainty--for indeed, if anything was certain, it was that he, Xega, had already apparently trumped Death once, and that he would not be cowed by fear of the unknown, not on his pride as a researcher. “What is this place?” He almost stumbled as he made his way down the pile, his robes--now tattered and torn--catching on a limb and his feet unsteady on the pliant, dead flesh of others. But soon he stood on solid ground--his legs shook, but he hid it with a sweep of his cape--and faced the woman. He waited for her to answer, his eyes casting further glances about the room. Where was his staff? His foci? Their protective runes should have kept robbers from them, and they had been with him when he fell...