A spoked wheel spun spun serenly in the darkness of the void, illuminated with the embers of an azure flame that revealed the back of a certain someone. A certain someone who had, a year ago, embraced the power within himself and selfessly raged against a world that wished to subjugate the ones close to him with a burning fury. A year ago, he had fought with his all, and won, against the Toli, effectively re-uniting the two peoples into one entity again, but not before Yamiko had cursed him into Nirn, the supposed world of the dead, and sealed him for all time to remain on a barren rock in an endless, empty void with nothing but a distant red star to illuminate "his" world.
He drew in a long breath and exhaled slowly, watching the moisture in his breath crystallize and float into space. It was cold, cold beyond belief. He surely would have died were it not for the flame that resided within him, although, that had been mostly exhausted in the fight, and the year spent in this void. "It's been a while now, hasn't it?" He murmured quietly to himself as he twiddled his thumbs and twisted the braided rope that Avia had won for him in a knife throwing game at a carnival. He smiled sadly and slid back, stretching his legs for the first time in what seemed like an eternity. There was something strange about the world he'd been banished to. Time slowed to a crawl, hunger and exhaustion were a thing of the past, and absolutely nothing had changed. "I wonder if she'll ever find it in her to forgive me." He slowly turned his head to the right, away from where the sun regularly came into view, every 8 hours or so.
The aforementioned red star winked into view and cast a orange light on the surface of the rock, slowly revealing the frame of a door, or a gate, he couldn't decide which, and he didn't care. That wasn't there before. He stared with a look of disbelief on his face as he quickly stood up, stirring up frozen dust with his scorched Chuck Taylor's as he scrambled to do so, and ran towards the gate with an exceedingly slow stride. There wasn't much gravity on this rock and he had to be careful not to fling himself off of it, he wasn't a person who liked leaving the ground, at all. Gravity is something I miss, amazingly. He grumbled to himself after reaching the gateway, as he had decided to aptly name it. He brushed his hand along the side of the frame as he gazed into the grooved lettering that adorned the smooth black frame, and gasped as one of his fingers sank into the groove of a round letter similar to an O with a dot in the middle. It was hot, searingly hot. He drew his hand back quickly and inhaled sharply in pain, then stared in awe as the letters glowed an omnious shade of red. Did I turn it on or something? He stared at the gate in wonder as a red orb formed in the middle of the gate, which, now that he thought about it, was just big enough to accomodate a person his size. No. The more important question is to where it leads. And... Will I ever see her again? He grasped the braided rope firmly between his index and thumb as he reached for the red orb, which promptly swallowed him with a flash of light before disppearing from the rock, along with the frame.
Gasp...Gasp...Gasp...He slammed down onto a patch of thick brush, instantly incinerating it with the heat from the rift that had opened to spit him out, and snapped shut with a deafening bang! that flattened the grass around for hundreds of yards with a shockwave. Sweat was drenching from his face as he gulped down air like there was nothing sweeter in his life, perhaps except maybe, seeing her again. Where was he anyways? The spasms had come to a stop mostly as he sat upright, albeit shivering violently as he did so. He clamped down his teeth with a miserable gaze on his face as he surveyed his surroundings and opened his eyes slightly wider in surprise as he saw the familiar branching outline of a Kodama, or several of them dancing about in the near distance, unfazed by the commotion his entrance into the woods had caused.