In time, he learns not to be swayed by the pain. Rather, each ache and sting serves as a marker, a signpost, confirming that he must be on the right path.

His arrival on this world — plummeting through a scorched sky — should have ended with merciful blankness. What luck instead hurled his blazing body from the pyre to quench in a fetid swamp?

Peculiar luck.

Since then, he has grown intimate with all kinds of suffering, from crass pangs to subtle stings. In cataloging them, he grows learned in the many ways there are to hurt.

Those earliest agonies, right after the crash, had screeched coarsely from wounds and scalding burns — a gale of such fierce torment that he barely noticed when a motley crew of local savages rowed out to him in a makeshift boat, like sinners dragging a fallen angel out of the boggy fen. Saving him from drowning, only to face more damnations.

Beings who insisted that he fight for his broken life, when it would have been so much easier just to let go.

Later, as his more blatant injuries healed or scarred, other types of anguish took up the symphony of pain.

Afflictions of the mind.

Holes gape across his life, vast blank zones, lightless and empty, where missing memories must once have spanned megaparsecs and life years. Each gap feels chilled beyond numbness — a raw vacancy more frustrating than an itch that can’t be scratched.

Ever since he began wandering this singular world, he has probed the darkness within. Optimistically, he clutches a few small trophies from the struggle.

Jijo is one of them.

He rolls the word in his mind — the name of this planet where six castaway races band together in feral truce, a mixed culture unlike any other beneath the myriad stars.