Snippet #2488747

Ivan watched in disbelief as the rot consumed the back of his hand, rending flesh from bone as the tissue shriveled and blackened. At the same time his mind flooded with a dark presence, calm and inviting, luring Ivan to go over that edge, to step into the dark. It all clouded his thoughts, this sort of mental assault combined with the physical pain that grew in his hand made him unable to calmly collect his houghts an think of a solution. He never experienced a conversion like this, normally they would corrupt your mind and then bind the soul to the body causing the body to stop functioning and become a puppet basically being jerked around usin th former mages magic to move the body even after flesh has begun to rot and the body is hardly more than a few pieces of rotting tissue hanging on the skeletal remains. What he experiened now was more or less the reverse of that process

"Even here, even here, the presence of the undead manages to grasp me, to try and consume me. Perhaps it was only a question of time, before I'll end up like all thse others. Turned into leutenants of the undead army on it's quest to consume the entire living world. Against their will forced to murder as their mind grows ver more twisted and evil." He thought as he watched his hand twitch as the black tissue spread over the back of his hand.

He then looked down at the ground where the copse of his former friend lay, almost embracing the fact that he would once again be able to talk to eachother without one of both having to die in the end, knowing that he could still return to the land of the living with a simple ressurection. But every grain of acceptance dissapeared as his eyes caught a glimpse of the blade on the ground. It was through tat blade that he had gotten into this mess, now it would serve as his way out. If he cut his hand off before the rot reached beyond, the influence would stop and he would gain a glimmer of a chace of surviving this without turning undead.

He picked the blade up with his one good hand and heated the blade up to the point where his hand was getting burned by just holding it. "This is going to hurt, a lot, but it's this or being turned into an undead murder machine." He thought as he raised the blade for the swing. He then swung the blade as hard as he could and severed the hand at the wrist joint just before the rot was going to reach beyond. The heat of the blade immediately cauterized the flesh, scorching any severed blood vein shut. Ivan then trew the blade away as the agonizing pain reached his brain.

As his shaken breathing slowly calmed down a bit he sat down a few meters away from the copse and the severed hand, holding the now handless arm with the singed hand. The pain was still bordering the unbearable as he, in his fading consiousness, thought: "If this is my time, so be it. But never will I give in to their murdrous and corrupted way. I'd be much happier in my last consious moments knowing that I won't be turned into a mass murderer."