What was the reason behind living? If every moment brought pain, then why did he bother living?
Death, as he understood it, would be a peaceful slumber free from all forms of suffering and pain, yet he hadn't allowed his body that respite.
His entire existence was excruciating, and yet he wanted to survive.
Why? Was it simply a denial of his destiny? Did he foolishly decide to fight his fate?
Even though he pondered these questions, he already knew the answer: he wanted to gaze upon this beautiful world a little longer.
Even with his mind and body being burnt up, as his soul was in the process of being scorched, he wanted to live.
He wanted to survive until he could see the beauty of nature once more.
He didn't want to die surrounded by hellish flames and a black sun, but with every step he managed, more of his willpower was turned to smoke.
His very essence, everything from his physical form, his mental identity, and his spiritual self, it was all being used as fuel for the torturous flames that ate away at him.
With each step he lost more of his self.
His flesh and skin melted and sloughed off. His blood and fat boiled and coagulated a deep black. His muscles shrunk around his bones, cracking them. His eyes had melted into a goop that dripped down his cheeks like tears.
His nerves were a fast burning candle wick, but he could still feel pain.
His memories and emotions were similarly under assault, and yet it was nearly impossible to recognize their absence in that instance.
His brain could only register pain.
He had never been aware of his soul before, but as it was consumed by the flames of hell, he could feel it vanish. A instinctual primal terror twisted at what little was left of his self.
Until finally, his corpse came to a stop.
His body could no longer support his desire. He had no longer possessed a sense of time, balance, or even of his own form, and yet he knew that he had fallen down and would die in just another second.
Unable to form thoughts, his very sound cried out. 'I don't want to die!'
Even if it meant you would no longer suffer? The flames themselves seemed to ask him.
'I don't want to die!'
His knowledge of a singular personal identity, a refusal, a desire, and the very meaning of death, these were the only things that had yet to be ereased form his self.
The flames flickered and fizzled out.
The black lump in the center of a corpse pulsed, even though it ran dry.
There wasn't anything else he could accomplish, he was simply a child who didn't want to die. Although some would say it was a miracle he had survived for so along, that didn't change the result, he would die.
He could feel it, with the flames of pain gone, the chill of death seeped into his self. The embers of his life, his self, was being snuffed out.
'I… don't… want… to… die…'
Why? The chill of death seemed to ask as it stopped crawling.
And yet he couldn't answer, his reason had already been consumed by the flames. He couldn't remember the memories of his life, nor the accompanying emotions.
After not receiving an answer, the chill of death froze everything in an instant.
'No…'
In a last ditch effort he clung to the fading black embers of pain (life).
…
…
A golden light, brighter and warmer than the sun, melted death and ignited the embers of life (pain).
His body reformed. That golden light illuminated the hollow cavity of his soul and the black embers, and he felt it reform into something new.
An emptiness was filled with golden life / black pain.
However, his mind was left virtually unchanged.
Through the eyes of his reformed body, the world fell past his mind and sunk down into his soul.
The expanse of the pitch black night sky and the dazzling stars, amounted to nothing when compared to the radiance of a crying yet smiling face.
His soul reformed his mind. Perhaps it was envy or admiration, but whichever it was, he wanted to smile like that too.
That smile held unimaginable anguish and unbridled joy.
It was a thin ray of light that had pieced the abyss itself.
Alongside the flames of hell, that smile was also burnt onto his essence.
Shifting from the reoccurring dream of his memories from years ago and into the waking world was instantaneous, and if he wasn't already familiar with it, he might have found the experience jarring.
However, he had years of waking up from the same dream. It had only been for the first couple of years that he required drugs to not jolt back awake the moment he found himself back it that hellscape.
The light of the early morning sun had illuminated the small cluttered shed he found himself in.
As a side effect of having a reoccurring dream, he had developed a habit of suppressing it, and linking together the thoughts he had before falling asleep with his current thoughts.
Like cutting out a scene from a film roll and stitching the new ends together, it was like his mind had simply skipped over the night.
Within under a minute, he resumed his activities as if he had never fallen asleep.
Sitting crossed legged, in his hands he held a steel pipe, and then he recalled his past, he forced a phantom pain to crawl along his nerves. The hideous scenery of pain flashed through his mind and soul.
The embers of his trauma flared up and a torrent of Curse Energy pumped forth form his soul. The mystical energy seemed to seer and char his body, but in actuality he was unharmed.
He attempted to temper it and channel it into the pipe in his hands, but he was unsuccessful.
The steel pipe cracked from another unsuccessful attempt at filling an object with Cursed Energy to strengthen it.
For just about an hour, he continued to fail at one of the few Cursed Techniques taught to him. At the end of his training, he forced the remaining unused Curse Energy back down into the depths of his soul.
"Ahh, haaah." He let out a yawn and he stretched and the memories of pain faded away.
His failure didn't weigh him down, or if it did then his body showed no signs of it. And even if one was to scan his mind, they would be hard pressed to find what he thought about his ineptitude.
Currently his thoughts were about what ingredients he had in his fridge and pantry, what meals he should prepare, and reviewing the materials that might be covered at school today.
Almost mechanically his body operated as he cooked, as if he was a fine tuned puppet he carried about his task with no wasted effort.
He only paused once, as he had felt the confined Cursed Energy within his soul nearly explodes outwards, but he suppressed it back down below the depths.
He almost wished he had been taught a different method, or that he had enough time to spend the excess, however unfortunately he had no other alternative to dealing with the waste.
After being taught the properties of Cursed Energy, and how Cursed Spirits were formed by ambient energy coalescing, he had ensured that not a single mote of it left his body when he wasn't training.
It was only in the strudy shed in his backyard that he released it, if something formed there then he would deal with it.
Perhaps this was detrimental for his thinking capacity, since recently he had to allocate a large amount of his brain power and focus to confine the excess energy with his soul.
He didn't even have the ability to form stray thoughts anymore, but those were unnecessary and he would rather not contribute to forming a harmful entity. Giving form to something like that ran counter to his goal.
His… goal…
A brilliant bright moon and a peaceful expression.
A burning black sun and a captivating smile.
The scenery and expression flashed through his mind and the slip in his focus sent pain through the shell of his soul, his body.
Sharp flames, like claws, tried to escape his self. After snuffing out the rebelling energy, he ate breakfast and left for school.
And like a marionette, he acted out the role of an average student.
He pretended to be normal.
This was an ordinary day, one not that different from any other, and yet it was also the last day of its kind.
On his way home from school, he caught the scent blood and the stench of a Cursed Spirit. He broke off into a dash, and chased down the orgin of the smells.
Down the backstreets, hidden in an alley, he found a large demonic whale-like creature with countless tentacles chewing on what remained of a fresh corpse.
The next few seconds were a blur, but regardless of the order of events, the moment the monster became aware of him, his heart had already been pierced.
The instant his heart was pierced, thorns flooded his body, his brain was skewered, and he could no longer suppress the accumulated Cursed Energy from his trauma that he had stored for years.
The embers of his desire to live were reignited, and pain suffused his entire being.
'I don't want to die.'
And on their own, his lips muttered a Curse he didn't know.
"Verg… Avesta."
The instant the words left his mouth, the whale-like creature retraced its barbed tentacle as it shrieked and flailed for a second before it collapsed, unmoving.
Although one might assume it had been killed, that would be incorrect. The Curse Technique he had just muttered held absolutely zero lethal capabilities, all it did was reflect the pain the attacker had dealt back to them.
He didn't know this Curse Technique.
As the riddled holes in his body leaked out his life, his minced brain couldn't form proper thoughts. So it was only loosely that he felt the Cursed Energy that he had been suppressing began circulating throughout his body.
A land of crumbled buildings, charred corpses and a red inferno was his first memory.
A smile of unimaginable anguish and unbridled joy was his second memory.
A hospital room of safe and sterile white was his third memory.
A beautiful endless blue sky was his fourth memory.
Apparently a great fire had engulfed a few city blocks, and he had miraculously been saved by a passing stranger, however he had lost his memory from the trauma.
"I'm Kiritsugu Emiya, and I'm a sorcerer." A man with disheveled hair and a rather unkempt appearance had stopped by. "Would you be willing to accept being adopted by me?" The man who had saved him wasn't currently smiling.
He wanted to see that smile again, to understand how he could replicate that expression, how he could find joy after experiencing hell, so he didn't need to give the offer much consideration. "Sure." Even his own voice felt foreign.
He had lost everything in that fire except for his life and the last fragment of his old self, his name. However, his family name had been burned up alongside his own parents, presumably at least.
He held no objective to taking on the last name of the man who had saved and adopted him.
That was amongst the first steps on how Shirou Emiya's self was formed.
The first few years after being adopted were obviously the roughest, mostly because of the unending nightmares.
A burning black sun, a boiling black mud, a desire to live that resonated. A void of emptiness had filled a hollow cavity. A boy cursed with every curse of mankind, a boy stained by that curse.
It was also the time he begged the old man to teach him sorcery, those lessons were rough and he had never learnt much. At least he had learned how to cook in that time frame.
Having to relive his trauma to generate the Curse Energy was harrowing, but he didn't give up.
After being told how Curse Spirits formed, he developed a habit of forcing down the unused energy into his hollow soul.
Regardless, he hadn't made any progress with his sorcery in the three years of being taught.
And on a cold night, five years after being adopted, where a bright moon shone amongst a cloudless dark sky, he sat next to Kiritsugu.
And in their final talk, Shirou Emiya, a eleven year-old child took on the abandoned ideal of being a hero of justice and then he cried for the first and final time.
Kiritsugu Emiya saved his life and raised him, and even in death he could smile peacefully.
Ten years after surviving a fire and being adopted, eight years after learning sorcery, five years after taking on the ideal of being a hero, Shirou Emiya, at sixteen years old, had been killed.
And his life changed dramatically.
