One night, the cycle stopped. He found a rare wallpaper—number 485 in the collection—that he hadn't noticed before. It wasn’t a battle scene. It was a wide-angle shot of the sitting around a campfire, their faces illuminated by a soft, amber glow. In full HD, he could see the hope in Casca’s eyes and the subtle, dangerous ambition in Griffith’s smile.
The cold glow of the monitor was the only light in Elias’s cramped apartment, reflecting off the digital ink of the wallpaper he had meticulously chosen from a gallery of hundreds. At 1920x1080 , every detail of the "Black Swordsman" was painfully sharp: the jagged notches in the Dragonslayer, the frantic desperation in his lone eye, and the oppressive, swirling shadows of the Eclipse in the background.
To most, it was just a high-definition image. To Elias, it was a mirror.
As he stared at the screen, Elias realized he had been using these images as a shield, hiding behind the grit of a fictional warrior to avoid his own struggles. He looked at the campfire, then at his own dark room. With a steady hand, he didn't change the wallpaper. Instead, he reached for the power button.