Five Times Charles Died (+ One Time He Did Not)

The first time it happened, he was barely even a year old. Despite wild wolves miraculously having claimed him as their own, they could not prevent illness from taking the child from them for a brief moment on a particularly cold winter night. Though it is hard to know if they mourned in these spare moments where the infant lay among his canine siblings, motionless and growing cold, the joy felt in their hearts when he gasped for air once again, began crying once more, was clear from the wag of their tails.

The fourteenth time was a few years later, at the bank of the small lake the boy and his pack often drank from and played in the shallows of. However, accidents happen, even in the shallows. Floating face-down for a few minutes after a dive, he eventually turned around and paddled back to shore, once again unharmed, ready to go back to play with his packmates with reckless abandon.

The thirty-eighth time was when the boy was beginning to grow more capable and self sufficient, enough so to try and climb up into wild apple trees in the forest he had spent his entire life so far. As he sat on a branch of the tree, three crunches would sound out in succession. First, that of his teeth sinking into the underripe apple. Second, that of the branch he sat on splitting under his weight. Third, that of his body hitting the ground, head first, crushing it. It didn't take long for him to wake up again, though his neck kept hurting for the rest of the day. He only washed the blood off of his hair a few nights later.

The sixty-first time was by the time he could be considered a young man, and a few months after he had discovered the word "Charles" and claimed it for himself. Returning to the abandoned building full of desks with names carved on them, rotting paper and drafty halls he had slept in most nights after he discovered it, he was ambushed by a small and ferocious undead beast. Though he was a fast runner, capable of outpacing almost all other threats, the undead was just as fast. It took until dawn for him to properly wake up from his half-alive stupor, and for his killer to be reduced to ash from sun exposure. He abandoned that building as well, opting to live out in the wild under the protection of the sun.

The seventy-second time was one of the more painful times. Sitting on the edge of a small pool of liquid fire in the dead of winter, attempting to stay warm, his exhaustion betrayed him, his balance faltering for just long enough for him to fall in. The screams rung out, stopped, and then restarted, as several minutes later he managed to crawl out of the pit, only covered in the ash of his burnt clothes. He would struggle greatly for the rest of this winter.

What was meant to be the hundreth time was in the following spring. A rusted handaxe in his raised left hand, his right laying on a stained treestump. It didn't take long for him to bring it down, the sound of his own bones breaking overpowering his anguished scream. Though he felt dizzy, queasy, sick to his stomach, he knew he would feel better soon enough. As he clutched what remained of his right arm tightly in his left, for what must have been hours, as the discarded forearm simply lay there on the stump, rot beginning to set in slowly. Despite his arm not having had returned to how it was, he did not feel scared, or upset, or even angry. Instead, he felt content, for he had trusted in the force that guides him, and in due time, it would reward him for his sacrifice.