(Scars do not appear to be cause of death –shock ... - Bad Request

I noticed her then: On the other end of the rooftop to see me away. She
gazed at me with crystal-blue eyes, her silver-white hair whipped by an
unseen wind. Her sky blue gown rippled like the waves of an ocean. Her eyes
locked with mine, and she bowed her head. Bit by bit her being dissolved
into motes of stardust. There was nothing to bind her here now.
I murmured softly, even as my voice resonated,
even as the roar of crumbling mortar drowned out my words.
And the ground broke away from me, the roar of abyssal flames searing my
flesh. I threw my head back, howling in pain, weeping with relief. The flames
seared past the flesh and down to my soul, and I laughed. I laughed that
finally, death was mine.
Its fangs snagged my spirit, its scythe pierced my breast. It dragged me
down, past the hundred plains of the Abyss. Down, through the layers of
hell. Down, into the cold that froze the hearts of fiends, into the flames that
would sear souls to ash. I sped onward to my fate for an eternity, and my
regrets broke down behind me, until nothing was left.
I was dead.
~~~~~
In the deepest levels of the Lower Planes, in a realm where the soil was the
dried and crumbled blood of infinite sinners, where the dust that blew in the
wind was their powdered bones, a single star flickered in the sky.
It was a pale and pathetic thing, shrouded by the dust that rose in battle, the
toxic miasma that belched from the fire-mountains on the far horizon. Yet if
one looked up and searched hard enough, it could always be seen.
Few in this land lived long enough to attach a name to this realm. Fewer still
lived long enough to contemplate anything but survival. But those few, those
rare and precious and condemned souls that could become scholars of a sort,
were split in two on what that star was.
Some believed that the star was a pale beacon of hope: that salvation was
available to all, even on the most wretched and vile of Planes.
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