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Honorable mention.
The Awakening
by CRI
You spend years reassembling your life after The Awakening, trying to make sense of the Plague, but it doesn't matter. The endless quests for denizens of your town/other towns grow repetitive and they lose their sense of excitement that you fell in love with. It happens. So I'm trying to remember; the before, the after, and everything in between.
I think the best place to start would be with the transformation, The Awakening.
My mind opened, a streak of explosive orange cuts down the middle of my gray matter, searing with the same intensity of the day they branded me in the center of the cathedral for twisting the Light. On either side of my skull tens of thousands of pins insert themselves and twist, images of horses being tied to my arms and quartered, my elven flesh tied to a stake and burnt, fill my veins. I turn my head and the feelings echo themselves, felt in every cell of my body. Then I wished I was dead. The feeling numbs you till you can block it from your skull.
I felt nothing, for eternity. No noise. No sound. No muffled screams of other people inside my mind crying out.
The numbness woke up a thought, one that had been dormant, sleeping in the back somewhere collecting dust and pretending that it was appropriate to wait for this epiphany. Every feeling of pain I felt, was the pain of being held against my will. The hypnotic trance that druids and shamans enter when consorting with the Emerald Dream except this was the nightmare that tore it apart. All contained within the confines of my bones, my marrow, my blood. It was like walking into the Prison's torture rooms where Stormwind's elite Inquisitor's strapped members of the Defias to the gurney as the Inquisitor cuts open the bowels and pours salt into the small incisions until they provide the sought information about Van Cleef. It felt like I was the prisoner. Strapped in and waiting for the cool steel to invite fresh burning.
I couldn't open my eyes.
I was thinking about my childhood (it was the only thing I could do after I realized I had no control) when I felt the claws of the Lich King recede. The wake was cool, the way scar tissue feels two weeks after it first appears. The sensation disappeared the second I felt it. It was too brief to write an adequate description of it. I opened my lids, but saw nothing. Held my hands before my face and saw nothing. I rolled over and fell onto a cold slab of slate, I think. I crawled around for what felt like hours before I found stairs and made my way out of the ground. A deep voice began to speak to me, but I could not hear his words. I felt grass but saw nothing and I seethed.
End
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