Imagine waking up as a spirit bound to the place of your traumatic death. Remembering everything, knowing that you failed your people - your friends, and doomed them all.
Having to watch your own body rot away. Slowly. In real time. To smell it's decay.
Imagine realising that you're entirely alone except for the souless beast that ended your life - and even that can no longer see you.
Watching as the beast you were supposed to pilot now harms your friends and family while you are helpless to stop it. Begging into the void, praying for it to stop.
Imagine a month passing. Two months. A year.
You speak to nobody. There is nobody left. But you...you're still here somehow.
The silence is deafening. You're bored. You know every crevice of this place now. You've paced up and down every hallway. You've counted every crack and crease in the stone.
You are forgetting what your family's faces looked like. What their voices sounded like.
You talk to yourself now. Purely to try to stay sane. It's hard to even find things to talk about.
You voice your every action. You sing - trying to remember the words to old songs that keep slipping away. Sometimes you shout just to hear something.
You do not need to sleep as a spirit. The nights are somehow longer than the days. You still feel afraid of the dark, even though nothing can hurt you anymore.
Your body is no longer recognisable. Bloodstains on stone surrounding a withering pile of bones barely held together with rotting, dried flesh. It still makes you feel sick to look at - even though you no longer have a stomach.
You are losing your mind. You can't remember things. How long has it been?
Nobody comes to visit. You haven't seen one of your own kind in so long now.
You haven't seen anything alive in so long.
Sometimes, a stray weed starts to bloom from a crack in the walls - some moss starts to form, or a butterfly finds its way inside.
The blight soon finds them and puts an end to their existence. But for a few minutes, you get to see that life still exists beyond these walls, and some days that is enough.
You find yourself screaming. Throwing your spirit body through walls. Laughing hysterically. Singing. Crying. Sometimes just laying on the ground and staring into space for days.
You'd do anything to move on from here. This is your prison for all eternity because you never fulfilled your purpose. This is your punishment for failing.
You'd give anything in the world, in the universe, to just hear someone's voice again. Just once. Just to remember what it sounds like. Just to not feel alone.
Ten years. Twenty. Thirty.
How long has it been? You often wonder what home is like now? Does anyone still remember you? Is anyone still alive out there?
You wonder if the others are trapped like you are. You wish you could see them again.
You cannot remember exactly who you are anymore. What you used to be like. What you once looked like beyond that pile of dusty bones.
Sometimes, you can see through the eyes of the your beast.
See the surroundings. The malice poisoning the waters and climbing the cliffs. The world you once knew, a husk of what it once was. Wartorn and broken.
Tattered warrior flags tangled from trees blow in the winds. Once cozy homes are nothing but ruins now. Monsters roam the land where towns once stood.
How long has it been? You don't know anymore. You've long since lost count. Perhaps a thousand years - that's what it feels like.
Sometimes, one of your people braves to venture out too close to your beast. You get to see a glimpse of a real person - at least for a few seconds before the beast fires a weapon to send them fleeing.
You crave those moments. You wish you could reach out through these walls and touch them. To know once again what another person feels like. The warmth of a hand, the comfort of a voice.
You have been alone for so long that you cannot remember what it feels like to love. Only that you have never needed anything more than simply a whisper of it on the breeze.
You wonder if somebody loved you once.
Life aboard the Divine Beast is all you know now. This space has become your entire world for so long that the outside world feels almost frightening.
You can barely remember how to talk to other people. The guilt of your failing has long since blurred into nothing.
You feel nothing anymore. Time isn't real and you are merely a concept. A presence. Here to suffer and nothing more.
Until one day, a pair of boots steps onto the hull of your beast, and you are met with a familiar face for the first time in a hundred years.
