Pxan had become a little boy again. The voice continued to echo through his skull. It was becoming more and more intense.

> it paused and added > he felt an intense heat. Then cold. Then heat again. He heard machinery moving, he felt watched by a thousand eyes. He felt but couldn’t know if that was true or not. His eyes were lying to him, his sense failing him. He lost his sense of orientation.

All of a sudden he saw a bright light upon the horizon, the sun appeared bigger and bigger.

He remembered that sun.

The screams, the pain, the voices, the inquisitors, the occultists. All came back.

He fought with everything to get away, to hide behind a tree, to flee, to fight, to bite. But it was all useless. The arms of a plated warrior grabbed and chained him. Now he felt worse than powerless, now he felt like an inmate object, merely a vessel for something else.

In those few last moments before the axe cutted his head he wandered back to his childhood, to his long-gone childhood, to his mother and father. To his dog, to his notebooks, to his adopters, to the dragon, to his job. And most of all to his unfulfilled mission.

The occultist all lined them up, he was the third in the row. It was the little girl turn. The initial initiated, words song, magick filled the air and the little girl was lifted in the air, then fell to the ground. Dead.

> the boy next to him said “Does such a thing as a soul even exists? What consciousness even is? What will happen to me?!?" he discovered the answer to those questions a few minutes latter.

It was the turn of the breadmaker, a gentle man who had been many times kinds to him. The ritual started, word sang, he was lifted up and then trowed down. Dead.

> his mother said <> she looked at him and smiled. She mother went next. Words, up, down, dead. Another lifeless corpse to the pile, nearly understinguable from the other, another soul, another number, another body to be devoured and consume by the earth and elements.