One Day at a Time

It was a dark and stormy night when they hanged me. Treason they said as they called for my death, their smiles firmly in place as they walked me to the hanging tree. They just wanted to see someone hang, just wanted someone to blame. It didn't work though. I can't tell you how long I was there, minutes, hours, days? Eventually, watching me stare at them must have gotten real old because they tried many different ways of killing me. Burning, Drowning, Stabbing, none of it worked. I was determined to stay alive, for the family I had only just started. My little girl, her mother. Eventually, they stopped trying, and I was at peace, until the king came to see me. He'd heard of an invincible man who refused to die, and came to see if I would help him gain the same Power. The king was a fair man, and he was also my friend, so I told him my secret.

I had unlocked a power, a power in my very soul, it protected my, healed me, allowed me to stay standing even when many would have fallen. I Pulled this power out from him, and he rewarded me. I was want for naught, my family, me, and a house in the forest close to the nature and the Grimm that I had always loved. Being a Bear Faunus, Nature was a supreme entity for me. But that was merely the beginning, and as surely as I had unlocked the kings soul, so too did he do so to his wife and three children. But there was a problem. Because there is always a problem.

The king, armed with his soul, fought the Grimm, my friends, back further into the forest, making more room for expansion, until eventually, we came upon it.

Dust.

The means of our doom.

Humans and Grimm, in these times existed peacefully. No one bothered the Grimm, and they didn't bother anyone either. Until Dust was taken from the ground.

The Grimm went crazy, and theirs was a rage that could only be met with combat and quenched by blood. I watched as creatures I'd grown up with, that ran with me in my younger days lose their minds and blindly attack anyone who even came into contact with Dust. Normally, the Grimm, with their overwhelming strength and numbers would have been able to destroy us all, but the wife of the king, a witch, refined the Dust into a more pure form, a form anyone could use.

For battle.

And battle they did. The twin sons of the king, greatest blacksmiths in the kingdom, developed weaponry that could harness the Mineral, and the kings daughter, a mechanist more accomplished than any other, developed tools for war that ran off the new power source. And thus the king and his kin went to war. It was a very short war, as with the power of their soul, and even more, the power awakened from their souls, they slaughtered my old friends and boasted about it.

One day, as the day died down and I put my Little Elizabeth, no more than five, to bed, the king and another showed at my door. The king wanted me to unlock the soul of this woman, but wouldn't tell me why. She was young and pretty, but also sad looking. I said if this was to advance his war, I would have no part of it. The king assured me it was not so, so I did as he asked, for what was he guilty of but looking for a better life for his subjects and family? Oh yeah, murdering my friends. It was with this rage that I unlocked the woman's soul, and it was within twenty-three seconds that she had stabbed me and brutally maimed the king. While the king recovered, his family plotted, and before he could wake, a sentence was passed on both me and the woman. We were to die. But that's the thing about the soul, fully awakened, it is nearly impossible to kill someone by normal means. So the queen decided, if we could not die, we would not be alive.

With a machine her daughter had invented, the queen slowly bound me in an unbreakable Ice, staring at my feet, the woman next to me was to be banished deep into Grimm lands, and was to never be seen again. As the Ice slowly creeped up my body, and they carried the woman away, out the the door, the king burst into the room! Injured and bleeding from wounds not yet healed, he demanded, what was going on, why I, his best of Friends was slowly being imprisoned. The queen spoke of how I was detrimental to expansion, of how I would eventually be her families ruin, for the queen knew nothing of my role in her power, how could she, her husband had never once told her. When he did, at that moment, her face when slack, and her eyes wide. She's made a mistake, and nothing could change that. The King, My Friend Richard, tried to free me, and in failing, promised to take care of my little girl and Her mother, Gwenivere. The queen, in remorse, asked, nearly begged for my forgiveness. And with the last seconds I had, I spoke the only words I've ever spoken to the woman.

"No."

And then, all was cold and dark.

-2,164 Years Later-

And then, it wasn't. And for the first time in a long time, the Monochromatic Eyes of Randal The Undying were wide open.