A/N: I like the 2008 remake, and I like the 2008 prince, too. I like to imagine that there is more to him than what he says, and that what he says is influenced by the fact that we only ever see him with Elika. I also like to imagine that video game people work in a universe not too different from ours, where you can't actually run around for 30 hours without some consequence. Finally, I know you can get the powers somewhat in any order you choose, but I chose Breath of Ormazd last, and I like what it does to the story.
I do not own anything but my copy of the game, and I am not making money from this.
He can't remember exactly when it started. He's always prided himself on being strong, and hey, it takes a lot of agility too to get through some of the traps long-dead kings devised for their tombs. But most tombs are only so large, and he's traveled that distance several times over thus far, and according to Elika there's more than three times as many fertile grounds to get to.
He does his know feet started it first, followed quickly by his shoulder. He was shocked and understandably grateful the first time Elika plucked him from a deadly fall, and thrilled the first time she expanded his jump. But then she revealed that in order to reach even more ridiculously dilapidated building tops and fight yet more corrupted superpowered enemes, they'd be using "power plates" which involved her leaping and yanking him along, and before long his shoulder ached more than anything else. He'd had to surreptitiously re-locate it a few times, before he got the knack of holding it when she grabbed him.
Worse than the pain was the fear. His mind could tell him however much it liked that Elika was there, that her powers were practically limitless, but it can't stop him from screaming when didn't make the jump and the ground, so distant he can only just see it, is rushing towards him. It can't make him not turn his head and close his eyes when there's no time to recover, only time to see the deathblow coming, and it can't stop the desperation with which he throws out an arm when something goes wrong and the corruption gets a hold on him.
He'd thought it couldn't get any worse than when the alchemist had infected him. The pain and fear were involved in that, sure. But more than that it was - wrong. Something wrong was inside of him, and was ripping holes to make room for itself to ooze further in. He had…he had almost been raped once, when he was old enough to have left his uncle and too young still to fight the attacker off. He had never forgotten the traveler who had saved him, and he never would, with the man's scarf wrapped always around his head and neck. But he had never forgotten the helpless feeling, either, and now it seemed as though, more than a decade later, his nightmare was finally coming to completion.
But it did get worse. Not a specific occurrence, but over time, through mad push off of broken walls and leap and swing and fight, and he counted he'd now run through the equivalent of at least twenty temples, without an altar girl in sight. Not an attainable one, in any case. And the point, anyway, was that he was tired. And then – then came the Breath of Ormazd. Each time they'd reach a Breath plate he'd wince, step on it, and feel the best he had ever felt – for the time it took to reach the end of whatever ledge he happened to be running on. The momentary relief, the fear of the return and the inability to slow down and delay it…he hated Ormazd just for those damn plates. With each crushing return of exhaustion he thought he'd finally reached the end. Forget pain and fear and corruption, it was the exhaustion that would do him in, he was sure of it.
But even as exhaustion, pain, fear, and corruption were building up inside of him, something else was building too. So it was that each time he finished a run or an impossible flying leap he made a point of smiling at her and making a joke about the corruption that was racing both of them for control of the land. When he wanted to rip out his stomach to get at some of the wrongness inside, he showed her only the pain, the simplest part. And when there was pain, when his feet and his claw hand and his shoulder ached worse than anything he had even imagined, he carefully disguised a roll to loosen it by wiping his forehead.
"Shall we get some more lightseeds?" he asked.
They will heal the land and he will sleep for days and then leave and she will never, never know what it had cost him. That's what he decides, as they enter the temple for the last time.