The night time air snaked its way through the ruins whilst Richtofen sat alone in his makeshift office. He hummed softly to himself as his mind ticked over at a million miles per second. The generator was now repaired which it led to the next conundrum. How was he going to transport it to Gersch?
But the action of the day had taken its toll as sleep hovered over him. It was the same routine each night as the feelings of fatigue immediately invoked dread and despair. Whenever the darkness of the night loomed over the earth; Richtofen would feel his chest constrict and his throat tighten. Something he had become all too familiar with.
More recently, however, he had been plagued with a different kind of feeling. Each night Richtofen would find himself laying awake into the wee hours of the morning. And in a twisted turn of fate, he would find himself begging for sleep to numb him and carry his mind away from these feelings.
At first he could not diagnose the cause. The symptoms themselves had been confounding enough. But slowly, the more he became acquainted with these feelings the more he gleamed about their origins. And it was not long before he untangled the twisted thorns which had grown around the root.
Richtofen's heart welled up with crippling guilt as it felt like it would burst at any moment. The guilt of his past and the many people he had wronged had begun to haunt him like a evil omen. The faces, each face of every man, woman and child who he had harmed would flash before his mind's eye. His face twisted with anguish as he recounted their contorted expressions and guttural cries of agony before he stole their life.
Something was changing within Richtofen. He no longer derived the same pleasure from the suffering he inflicted - which was no easy feat as he went to great lengths to try. The demons that dwelled within him had opened the flood gates when they left. More specifically, that which had restrained his conscience all these years. This was his punishment.
Richtofen trembled on the makeshift bed of chairs. He began to sweat profusely within the thick cocoon of the cosmonaut suit. With each bead of perspiration that fell down his face; his discomfort quickly turned to feverishness.
The ensuing delirium slowly began to warp and distort his sense of reality. The walls of his office began to fall away as the room swam in a seedy haze of faded vision. Richtofen's body flushed with a wave of shivers as it switched to and fro between clamy sweats and unrelenting heat. Every hair on his body began to prick up as his skin tightened under the sea of goosebumps.
And then, his vision suddenly refocused. The walls of the office reappeared intact as the room reassembled itself back to normality. Richtofen looked around as he felt a wave of relief come over him. The shivers had ceased causing his tense muscles to immediately relax. Even the stream of sweat trailing down his brow had stopped.
But in the middle of any storm, there is always a fleeting moment of calm. Richtofen's respite was short-lived as he began to feel a weight pressing against his body. When he looked down, he saw beneath him an abyss which had opened up to reveal many pairs of decaying hands reaching up towards him. He then realised the floor itself had turned to glass; which was all that prevented him from tumbling down to meet this terrible fate. Richtofen gasped he watched a fine web of cracks begin to radiate out from beneath each chair leg.
The discoloured hands and broken fingernails of the deceased scraped and tapped against the cracking glass as they rose up from the murky depths. The abyss seemed to tunnel deep into the earth as if it led straight to Hades itself. Through the darkness he could make out a distant fiery glow. His bones chattered together as he wondered what awaited him.
Frozen in terror, Richtofen grimaced as he waited for the moment that the floor would shatter beneath him. But it never came. Instead, he was forced to gaze down in limbo as he watched the deep veins of splintering glass branch out into smaller capillaries. And then he heard it.
Their moans. It was their deep anguished moans and cries of agony which tore through every fiber of Richtofen's being. Just hearing their pleas for mercy reminded him of his crimes. The piercing cries of babies and children sat atop the monstrous cacophony of deep masculine moans and shrill feminine screams.
But the worst part was that Richtofen felt no desire to try to escape. There was no push-back as his tormented mind teetered over the edge of defeat. Part of him believed that he should accept his fate - being dragged down to face the Devil himself. In his weakened mental state; he simply wished his torment was over.
The glass floor started to ripple like water as the decaying hands began to pass through it. Richtofen watched himself become entombed within the grasp of the damned. Their gnarled fingers twisted and twined around his body as his eyes anxiously traced the violet veins on their sickly ashen skin. Then, the sea of limbs began to constrict around Richtofen's body.
The force of it took the wind out of him. His lungs deflated and his diaphragm crumpled under the pressure. He could feel his bones struggling to withstand the force as they trembled under the weight. But before the last breath of air was squeezed out of him; he was afforded a rare moment of mental clarity. Bringing him to his senses.
"Vhat zhe hell am I doing not even putting up a fight?" Richtofen mentally chastised himself.
He had always fought for survival. His early life had been one big fight for his right to simply exist. He was the master of his own destiny - the one who lifted himself up out of the squalor of peasantry. The knowledge acquired, the power gained and the influence he held - he had come too far to fail. He had spent so many years working towards his magnum opus!
Part of Richtofen's power came from his sense of invincibility. He could not be taken out so easily. No matter how badly his enemies had wanted him dead - their attempts failed miserably. Richtofen was always ten steps ahead of his adversaries. And as he felt the oxygen depleting in his body; he knew there was still so much to live for. He had his Grand Scheme to carry out!
"I--I-- I-- v--vant to live!" Richtofen gasped as he fought against his imprisonment.
His teeth clenched as he became embued with inhuman strength. The fingers of the limbs began to snap and relent as they succumbed to Richtofen's strength. He could hear the bones of their limbs crack as the wailing turned to cries of pain - which seemed to spur him on.
Richtofen replevined his love of the anguished cries of the damned. He revelled in the power he had over them as their limbs buckled to his will. But just as he became drunk with sadistic pleasure - the tables turned. The limbs seemed to overpower him as they clamped their fingers back around him. The rippling glass floor violently pulsed before shattering as the limbs pulled Richtofen down towards the abyss.
His smirk of delight quickly turned to panic as his body began to disappear below. The terrible wailing returned as Richtofen's body slowly descended beneath the floor. Anxiously, he looked around the room for a way out before his eyes widened at the sight of many pale spectres rising from the floor.
The ghosts of his victims stared back with rage - the souls of every man, woman and child he had ever hurt. Their hatred of him and grudges they held had transcended death itself. Their mutilated visages glared back through bloody tears as their bloodshot eyes narrowed viciously.
The fear he felt gazing back at them began to terrify him. His mind tried desperately to formulate an escape yet no solutions yielded to him. Richtofen's body flushed cold as the true danger of the situation was fully processed. Was he really going to die like this?
"B-b-bitte, nein. Leave me be!" Richtofen whispered breathlessly.
"You never thought of that when you took our lives!" A woman hissed back.
"What did we ever do to you?" Another growled angrily.
"We want nothing more than to see you die in agony. And we will have our wish", a ghostly man sneered triumphantly.
The tears that fell stung his burning cheeks. It had been so long since Richtofen had felt this powerless. It was that very same vulnerability he began his miserable life feeling; the powerlessness which had fuelled his ascent up the ranks of human society. But despite all his achievements; he could not prevent its return.
Even that level of power had not been enough for Richtofen. His insatiable lust of which had compelled him to seek the unseen. His aethereal overlords had promised him everything and more. Yet, here he was - alone and clothed only in his mortality.
Richtofen's whole body had disappeared below as the mist of the murky abyss began to rise up towards his face. All he could do was try to lift up his head in a futile attempt to delay the inevitable.
"N-- NEIN, NOT LIKE ZHIS!" Richtofen cried.
"I MUST GO ON!" He cried out.
As his face began to descend into the darkness below, he saw a light. It was magnificent - he remarked to himself. The stark white light contrasted greatly with the dark bottomless pit beneath him. The pure white light shone its rays as its warmth kissed his feverish flesh.
Then, suddenly, a hand reached out from the light as the rays burned the paltry flesh of his captors. They instinctively relinquished their hold of Richtofen before he seized the opportunity. He frantically fought his demonic prison as he tried to burst out towards the heavenly glow.
The rays of light had miraculously returned his strength to him.
Richtofen fought off the remaining captors as his eyes remained fixed on the heavenly light. The cold icy glare of his eyes had thawed into the warm sky blue of his childhood. The light seemed to cleanse him of the weight of his sins and restore him to the innocence he had lost so long ago. In this state; he could remember what it once felt like to have a clean slate. Where his innocence remained unspoiled by the tragedies of his life.
It was like staring into the eyes of God himself as he pulled himself up through the floor before being uplifted to his feet. He stood there, bathing in the beautiful heavenly light before suddenly falling flat on his face as its brilliance began to overpower him.
As he looked down at the cold stone floor beneath him; he could see large tears dripping from his lashes as they left dark blots on the pale concrete. The overwhelming feeling of peace within his heart became almost too much to bear as the remeberence of this innocence came flooding back. He had lost it so long ago that he had consigned himself to believing he would never know the feeling again.
Richtofen strained to raise his head to look again at the light before it quickly enveloped the room. All the death and decay around him seemed to whither away at the mercy of the cleansing light.
Then, he lost consciousness...
End of chapter fourty-two...