Fade...
Water... Dark... Silence...
Rain gradually drifted back to some form of consciousness, it felt like it took hours.
His vision remained hazy and dark around the edges. He attempted to look around. He couldn't see much. Far above light pierced a rippling watery surface, but it didn't truly light the place. It was dark down here, far below.
He belatedly realised that he was in fact underwater; it took only a little while longer for his fuzzed mind to realise that he wasn't breathing. Strangely he found he didn't panic, he felt not calm, but near mindless, as though he was still half asleep.
His vision drifted down and he realised he was floating above a human corpse resting on the lakebed. A corpse that had been brutalised and dismembered. His eyes wandered over it without understanding.
"You..."
Rain heard a voice. He slowly blinked, or at least he tried to, no eyelids dropped down to cover his sight. This puzzled him, but not for long, it was hard to really be concerned about anything in his current state. Everything was just so unimportant.
"I want..."
Rain's view eventually drifted from the curious corpse and across the sandy lakebed. Not for long did his eyes drift because something caught his eye. The corpse had caused a recent disturbance in the sand and something had been unearthed. A skull.
Sluggish images of a wolf drifted across Rain's consciousness, that was what it reminded him of, a wolf's skull but different somehow, whatever.
"Kill..."
Was it the skull that was trying to speak to him? How odd.
"-ousand years..."
Hmm well it didn't seem important, much like everything else. Rain was content to simply exist in this warm mindless fuzziness.
"My people... gone..."
Rain pondered if it would ever shut up or if he was doomed to hear meaningless rambling for eternity.
"I... the last prince."
Rain felt the mild spark of interest the skull had created start to lose its tenuous grip and he went back to examining the corpse. It did feel strangely familiar but he couldn't place why.
"You..."
The sand was awfully reddish around the corpse, it couldn't have been a pleasant death.
"Avenge...?"
Rain's musing was interrupted by what felt like a question inside his mind, one that he actually had to respond to. Not that he cared about the content but he would quite like the feeling to go away so he could go back to his dreamful musing. He answered in the negative and the question disappeared. The skull stopped talking.
Time passed and Rain could feel himself gradually slipping away as though he was moving to a more dream like state, somewhere else.
"Inherit...?"
The skull's voice returned. It seemed to be struggling to get through to him. He didn't really have an answer as to why that was. More to the point the annoying question had returned and was penetrating his mind, demanding an answer. If he could have sighed he thought he would have. He decided that if one way hadn't worked then maybe the other way would. He answered in the positive and the question disappeared.