Light's screams echoed throughout a dark void. He couldn't think, he couldn't breathe, he couldn't feel. His own screams never made a sound as they drifted on in the darkness. The deafening silence in his head, the drowning sensation that he couldn't escape... Where was he? It was so dark. He couldn't move, but he could feel himself spinning much too fast. There was no comfort, no rest from the horrific void. Light couldn't tell if he was falling or if it was just an illusion of the darkness. How long had he been screaming there for help? Where was his salvation?

The darkness began to bend and morph around him. At first, only simple lines and colors that he could both see and not see, but grew together to form shapes and patterns. Colors appeared that were faint but painfully blinding. Then came the voices, familiar but anonymous. Light tried to reach for the shapes and the voices but felt as though his limbs were contradicting him. He screamed again in frustration. The voices were calling to him.

The morphing darkness now was all that he could see, as though it were a sharp lens that had wrapped itself around his eyes, and the shapes began to make out recognizable forms which moved and turned to him, watching silently. The voices whispered and cried behind his head, speaking words that he'd already heard before. The morphing figures resonating before him twisted their bodies into actions that Light had already witnessed. He knew what each precise movement would be the second before it happened. How long had he watched this? Why wouldn't the darkness allow him to remember? His body writhed with painful spasms as the darkened figures danced around his peripheral vision.

'Kira.'

Light's body trembled and he felt his soul knot in dread. He tried to turn toward the voice but the darkness moved with him. The figures were clear in his vision, no matter where he looked or moved. They were sickening him but he couldn't tear away from the sight of them.

'You are Kira,' the voice whispered loudly into his ear.

The few whispering voices around him suddenly became a louder myriad. So many different sounds, crying and screaming. They were all so familiar.

"Light... Light!" A sorrowful voice wailed over the others.

It was the first voice that he recognized. It was his mother. Her name flashed in front of his eyes in crimson before the darkness morphed her body in front of him, on her knees screaming and gagging. "My baby boy, my son -" She cried in a shrill voice. "No!"

Other visions began to flash around him: A man with graying hair on his death bed - Light looked down upon him and could remember the feeling of the deceit spewing from his own mouth. The shapes quickly flashed to a woman grieving the loss of her fiancé, misled by her savior to the gallows and slowly becoming evanescent in the falling snow; A boy with platinum hair and cold eyes that reminded Light of another; A black notebook resting idly in the afternoon grass...

'Rester, Giavanni!" The words stung and cracked like a gunshot.

Light watched and turned his head to follow two well-dressed men run across the dank floor of a metal room and seize a madman.

"It's been over a minute," A man spoke, removing his hands from his head with a look of mixed relief and disbelief. "... and we haven't died -"

The vision changed suddenly with the same man yelling in a hoarse voice, "I'll kill him!" The barrel of a gun flashed in Light's eyes as he screamed and tried to dodge the shot which echoed in reverse through his mind. Light was now looking down his own body at a small scrap of blue lined paper in his bleeding hands. "He's got a piece of the notebook!"

"Save me!" Light screamed over the voices. "Somebody, help!" His own voice never reached his ears.

The visions hissed and then reluctantly blurred to the back of his mind as he was unable to keep watching, though he knew they would be back. They were waiting for him to forget again. After everything reset and the torture would begin anew. Never was there a numb moment. Never could he get used to the routine of the same damning memories of how he had led himself to where he was now. He had been so stupid, so careless... It was his fault, all his own. Only in the brief moments like these did he have the capability of understanding that. There were no excuses for him, the ones watching him knew his sins and guile better than he ever would. The void vibrated with his final breath.

"... Mercy..." He cried.

A sharp wind blew past him with such force that it felt as though the gusting air had filled his very being and again, he was spinning. The wind blew into the impenetrable darkness and pushed it back, allowing the faintest of light to reach Light's eyes. The figures behind the darkness retreated back and before Light could begin to realize what was happening, another strong wind and the gushing of feathers enveloped him. With speed that he'd never fathomed before, he ascended.