(This story is related to elements but not avatars. This prologue is to gain the interest of the reader and has another deeper purpose connected to the whole story, so don't mind if you don't understand this prolougue)

What is Time? What flows through your mind in the sheer utterance of this word? Is it the peaceful memories you recall or the regretted ones? To us, time is a disease, nothing more and nothing less than a wretched law, a law of nature, a law of fate. It is that which drives our lives leaving none to rest, yet it bears no rest itself. It is the reason we feel this pain, it is the reason people are dying. Yet in its absence there would be no history, no future, no past. People say time is like a river, it flows swiftly & waits for none. It has its beginning and an end, it has its twists and turns & after one cycle ends it starts another. There are many similar rivers which I imagine to be merrier than ours, each flowing at a similar pace but with different twists and turns. Some start late yet end quick, some cross another's path. They are all connected. Time travel is similar to rowing a boat. It is easy to go with the tide but difficult to go against it, our path was to go against it and fortunately for time, we succeeded to fail. Never lay your trust in time, never. Where was it when countless men died? It never once tried to hear the cries of the world. It did not even help nor listen to the countless souls bearing the pain death had created. All it did was erase that horrible memory from the world's history. That is all it has ever done, that is all it can ever do.

Every time I think of that beguiling memory, I fill myself with regret and remorse. I thought and I still think why I had not been there. But I still remember it, I can never forget it when the poisons filled the air, the waters, the earth and the souls of men, women, children, & every creature of the region. Armies marched toward each and every village, every city separating souls from their mortal shells, armies who follow none but time himself. A stormy sky empowered the beast inside the men. Cowls of wolves in the distance rang in every leaf in the forest lands. Rain and wind could heave no barrier on the chaos. Clangs of iron and steel sent flesh and armour to the ground. Disciples of Death, in the form of ravens surrounded the land waiting to scavenge their end of the bargain. A devastating war it was for every limb of nature called for help.

As I have said earlier, time is a disease. It is allowed to spread for it is inevitable. Even then it did not listen to the cries of the world. From the midst of all this, a boy ran for his own life, no one had been there to help him for they had not the strength to help themselves. The boy's soul was shattered, but even clearly, destroyed. The surrounding bloodshed gave every part of him the will to give in, and to give in was what he chose. In our world, those who cannot escape their fate – the tortured are the corrupt for evil isn't born within but fated. He could not help but fill himself with the devouring flames of rage that his pain had fuelled. As he evaded from the war, he was filled with guilt, everyone he cared for had either died or was being tortured to give in to the existence of fate. And time did nothing but flowed carelessly as it had always done. The boy could not bear the pain anymore. He struggled for the rest of his remaining accursed life. He was left to live with nothing, as nothing. He had relived the same fate for a second time but even then, I was not there for him. That boy was my friend.

But all I was concerned with was my own reason for existence; that I was not there when this had happened. I was shattered in the guilt of not being there, not dying with whatever honour I had left within me, not seeing the face of death. Since then, I was nothing, I am nothing, a nobody. Just a shell of flesh & bone in the way of time.