There is red, pulses of red flaring in front of his eyes, flashing in tandem with his pounding heart. It starts as a fresh stroked line before spidering out in veins of splintering pain. The red bleeds until the world is covered. And everything is hurt, wilting, dying.
He sucks in a sharp chilled tendril of air that soothes the rawness of his throat as it fills his lungs.
There is black and purple and blue and yellow and sometimes even green hugging the once red lines that have sun-dried brown, mahogany. Slowly the wounds thin and threads underneath the cuts bind what is broken back together. It takes the length of a footfall, a bow, a fight, a birth, ages and ages. But everything is repairing, beginning, healing.