It starts with a man, an adventurous man to be exact. He was relatively normal. In his travels to various places around the world, he came across many items. His top-hate-time-piece for instance. He also carried around a spell caster cannon, which was helpful in lighting fires at night.
All sorts of creatures were attracted to him. Always had been. He was just that kind of person. Animals were naturally attracted to his presence. A singing cardinal, a fuseling, a sparrow he named Pudgie. Once, he even attracted a sprite while swimming. And lest we forget the griffin that pestered him for attention. They were his pets, his friends, his companions. They traveled where he traveled and kept him company.
Phase 2 - The Unholy
In his travels one day, he came across a mighty ogre that was under the influence of a strange poison naturally excreted from some berries it had ingested. In its rage, it attacked the traveler, scaring away his companions. His pistol was destroyed, his body battered and bruised, and his right arm torn from his body before the poison overtook the ogre and killed it. As he lay on the ground, dying of blood loss, a Centaur out hunting for food found him, and left him outside a nearby building of techno-mages. They did all they could, and replaced his arm with a mechanized gun they had conjured up. It possessed great power, yet slowly sucked the soul from the one who wore it.
Not deterred from his adventures, he searched high and low, fearing nothing with his magical gun and brand new arm. He killed many a beast using his new and powerful weapon. It slowly began to change his appearance
A mysterious traveler one day met up with our protagonist, and informed him of a mysterious cross as large as a man, yet light enough to carry on your back as if it were the shirt on your back. High and low our hero searched, finally finding it one day deep in an underground lair once said to belong to a cult of Satanists. He pulled the dusty cross from the wall, and slung it over his shoulder. It was indeed light as he was told. A red circle surrounded his feet, only visible to him.
Phase 3 - The Soulless
It was an item of the devil, created to steal the souls of the damned, the innocent, anyone who so much as touched it. Upon discovering that he had no soul to take, the devil sent minions to take what he could. He took the color of his skin, his eyes, his hair, his clothes. Our hero dawned a cloak to hide his hideous figure from the people of the world. He spent the next several years attempting to escape the grip of the devil. His efforts were in vain. When he tried to sleep, he was haunted by images of skeletal beings with glowing red eyes coming up from the ground to steal him away from the world. He hardly slept, never ate, never truly rested. Without a soul, there was no reason to fear physical death.
Phase 4 - Taken
A powerful demon was sent to retrieve our hero for the devil's amusement, but with the power of the arm he had been given, he fought off the demon and kill it without mercy. He did not go without loss in the battle, for the demon had cleaved skin from our heroes body with his scythe before having it taken from him. Our hero took the scythe the wielded and used it to defend himself from anything that attempted to attack him. Little did he know that the devil grew tired of playing games, and sent an enemy to him that he could not fight off with any physical means. A black fog engulfed his legs, slowly eating away at his skin. No matter how he tried, it would not go away, not stop. The pain was far too overwhelming for him, yet he could not die from the pain or loss of blood for he no longer had any soul to speak of.
Phase 5 - The Nothing
The fog ate away his skin and organs, leaving nothing but a muscled skeleton with a pulsing machine arm, ready to fire at anything in front of it. The fog are his cloak, leaving nothing but a hood before it started to finish him off. It first took his left leg before swallowing whole the arm he'd gotten replaced. The arm held his soul, and thus the devil was satisfied. Our hero was left as not even a shell of his former self, dying. He was merely a skeleton with muscle in a pool of bloody grass in the middle of nowhere. His leg was gone. His arm was gone yet again.
Just as he was giving up his life, there was a small, flickering light on the horizon.
To be continued with Redemption
