Chapter 7 - Episode 7: Revealing the silvered glow of hidden truths

The scream that split his consciousness didn't come from his mouth, nor from any place that made sense— it was birthed deep within a mind cracking under pressure no human soul was ever meant to bear, a scream so silent it seemed to resonate in reverse, unraveling him from the inside out until thought itself became a mangled echo.

There was no pain at first— rupture, an annihilation so pure it felt surgical, precise, as if some cruel hand had reached into the marrow of his being and plucked loose every tether that once held him to himself.

He didn't fade. He shattered.

Sight collapsed into a burning smear of nonsense. Touch became the brittle crunch of nerves imploding under their own memory. Breath became impossible, irrelevant.

What remained wasn't a man— it was a concept torn from context, a puppet mid-dance with its strings severed, twitching in the dark with no stage left to fall upon.

And yet, something foul lingered in the ruin— something stubborn. A taste.

Not taste as the body knew it, but the afterbirth of memory clinging to the dying tongue like rot on a corpse's teeth.

It wasn't flavor. It was guilt, molten and metallic, festering like iron soaked in months-old blood left to boil in the sun.

His tongue curled, convulsing in its cradle of shattered teeth, desperate to vomit it out, to scrape the blasphemy from his palate with shattered bone or fingernail or anything at all— but his jaw had ceased to obey, hanging slack like a butchered animal's, drool and gore mixing into a thick syrup that slithered from his mouth and pooled beneath his chin like a second tongue, one made of nothing but waste and ruin.

Then came the flicker.

Not relief. Not even cruelty dressed as mercy.

This was something prehistoric— violence, raw and predatory, awakening like a god long starved. His eyes snapped open, not with recognition, but with violation— as if rusted hooks had been driven beneath his eyelids and yanked upward with a butcher's glee.

Sight didn't return. It invaded. It poured into his skull like acid, igniting every nerve with blinding information his brain could no longer parse.

What he saw was not a world— it was mockery. A plane without shape, shimmering like filth floating atop stagnant water, a place that reflected nothing and gave nothing back. It didn't hold him. It impaled him, cradled him in razors that kissed with hunger.

He convulsed— not like a man in pain, but like a puppet possessed. The spasms were not his own. They were commands he couldn't disobey.

His limbs jerked and flailed against the void, fingers clawing at air that wasn't there, skin sloughing from his palms as he tore himself open for traction that would never come. The pain that answered was old— older than flesh, older than memory.

Each twitch reignited scars forgotten by time, scars carved not by blades but by moments— each one a monument to every time he had failed, betrayed, lied, or turned away.

He opened his mouth to scream, and something broke.

His throat split, tendons snapped like overstretched rope, and a ragged, bloody howl burst from his lungs, choked with foam and fragments of his own ruined voice. Blood frothed like wine at his lips, thick and bubbling, spattering the void below in a trail so visceral it might have been scripture, if God had ever bothered to weep.

His body began to heal. Not mercifully, not cleanly, but mockingly. As though some cosmic puppeteer, perhaps even God himself, were indulging in a twisted experiment in suffering, dragging the thread of life backward not to restore, but to prolong the agony.

The process wasn't rapid. It wasn't even efficient. It was excruciatingly slow, a meticulous act of torment designed to remind the soul that pain precedes wholeness— and often, pain returns again right after.

First, the limbs. What had once been severed— torn from sockets with such force that the jagged ends of bone jutted out like white stakes— began to twitch. The raw stumps pulsed as black blood oozed in slow rivers, thick and syrupy, slithering in reverse along the gnarled floor.

Across the void-like ground, where flesh and sinew lay discarded like slaughterhouse waste, veins wriggled like worms, reattaching with wet slaps to exposed muscles and half-rotted cartilage.

Vein found vein. Nerve kissed nerve.

And when they touched, they sparked violently, like wires thrown into water. Twitching returned to the dead limbs.

Fingers curled. Toes flexed. One finger at a time— snapping loudly back into joints like broken branches forcefully straightened.

Then came the bones, still fractured and splintered. They didn't simply slide into place— they grew outward from their shattered cores, spiraling unnaturally, knitting back into structure while the marrow steamed like molten tar.

One femur cracked in three directions before folding inward and correcting itself with a nauseating crr-khh-ack, sending shockwaves of motion up the reattaching leg like a parasite burrowing into a host.

The skin wasn't healing. It was forming— like meat pulled over wire. From the deepest layers, muscle fiber rippled and thickened, stretching like red ropes across the frame of his rebuilding body.

And then came the skin, but not like a bandage— no, it crept in strips, dragged by invisible forces, wet and glistening like peeled fruit, each patch slapping onto muscle like fresh meat on stone.

Hair follicles sprouted instantly, only to fall out again from the stress of cellular mutation.

His torso— once flayed open, ribs shattered and lungs collapsed— now heaved upward violently as each rib realigned itself.

They snapped back into his sternum one by one, and each time he convulsed, his spine arched so severely that he bent backward almost in half, the sound of each vertebra clicking into place echoing like a xylophone of bones.

Then came the blood.

It didn't just flow back in— it rushed. A flood of crimson returned, squirting from the air, from pores, from torn veins, reabsorbing what had leaked.

Blood sprayed like jets from open cuts before vanishing into the skin as if inhaled by force, leaving trails of crimson staining the new flesh.

But the healing didn't remove the damage— it layered new life over the wreckage, leaving remnants of trauma etched beneath the surface like scars trapped in time.

His throat, once crushed and caved in, inflated slowly— cartilage reformed like shattered glass melting together.

His vocal cords twitched— half-exposed, vibrating on their own— until the muscles re-knitted and sealed the throat shut with a sickening wet gulp.

The jaw cracked back into place, hinges forming with a high-pitched squeal like metal grinding bone. His tongue reformed in two halves, flopping about uselessly before slapping together in a grotesque kiss of tissue and sinew.

Worst of all was the face.

It had been shredded— eyelids torn, teeth knocked out, cheeks sliced to the gums— but now it was rebuilt. Slowly. Cruelly.

Teeth erupted from raw gumline like white stones shoved through a meat grinder. One tooth grew sideways, broke through the lip, and had to twist itself back in as the flesh peeled over it like molten wax.

The eyes returned last, dark voids slowly filling with jelly, then color, then the pupil.

And through it all, he screamed. Not for mercy, but in pure refusal.

Every nerve reawakened with each restoration— there was no numbness here, no unconscious reprieve.

Every reattachment, every cell reborn, was a rebirth through torture.

He thrashed, spasmed, and tore his nails into the newly formed skin. Tried to rip himself apart again. But the healing would not stop.

He wasn't being restored. He was being reset— made whole just enough to be broken again.

Because this was no miracle. This was punishment. And it was only just beginning.

And still he screamed, long after his voice had gone, long after his mind had frayed at the edges. He screamed because it was all that was left.

And the void— responded.

It didn't split like the sky. It tore like skin. A wound opened in the fabric of unreality, not to reveal light, but to vomit blood.

Endless, boiling blood, hissing with heat and hatred as it slammed into the false ground. Within it swirled gore— veins, viscera, liquefied cartilage, teeth half-melted and still grinning as they drifted past like confetti from some perverse celebration.

It was a torrent of everything the world had ever buried and prayed to forget, now rising again with vindictive hunger.

The blood touched him.

It began with a lick— nothing more than a brushing heat across his ankle— and yet it detonated through his nervous system like napalm.

He shrieked, or tried to, as memory was rebranded across his bones: the memory of fire, of betrayal, of being burned alive in every way that mattered.

His limbs lashed out in a frenzy not born of fear but of instinct— like a body that had lost all comprehension of itself, thrashing just to feel real. His throat tore anew, voice shredding to raw, gory ribbons, and still the blood climbed, crawling up his body like a lover made of razors.

Faces surfaced. Not strangers.

Everyone he had ever known. Children he had laughed with— faces now hollowed, cheeks sunken into skeletal pits, eyes wide and accusing. His mother, her sockets cavernous and void-black.

His brother, mouth twisted into a snarl that spoke of betrayal and blame. Friends. Teachers. Everyone. They smiled with meatless lips and peeled skin, their teeth bared in grins that looked more like wounds.

They didn't blink. They didn't breathe. They just watched.

Their mouths opened wider— too wide— splitting skin, tearing muscle, until their skulls caved in like fruit left too long in the sun. And from those decaying, collapsing maws, a voice slithered out.

Of his own.

Why are you being selfish, saving your own…

Why don't you put us as your first priority…

Why are you the one whose feet are standing…

The words wormed into his ears, lodged in the folds of his mind like maggots in a wound, burrowing deeper, feeding on memory.

He tried to block them out, but they weren't coming at him. They were coming from him. They were him.

The blood rose to his chest, to his mouth, and then swallowed him whole.

Only it wasn't a it anymore. It was flesh.

He drowned in it— a sea of living, pulsing meat, hot and slick and reeking of birth and death.

The world became muscle. Veins thick as serpents wrapped around his limbs, pulling him deeper into the cavity of this place— a womb of pain, a grave that breathed.

The taste of blood was constant now, thick in his lungs, his sinuses, his thoughts. It was all he knew.

And then came the voice— not around him, but inside him. A root that thought in language.

Do you remember what it felt like... to be human…?

He clawed at his own face, nails raking furrows down his cheeks, peeling away flesh in strips, desperate to find something beneath it all.

But there was no bone. No muscle. Only white, pulsing strands— tendrils that twitched like worms feeding on the meat of a dead god.

His body was a lie. His skin, a disguise. And now it was gone. He wasn't human. He was the echo of agony, given shape.

We've not… and you're not human anymore, like us, the voice purred.

You are a wound that never closes. You are pain, incarnate. And you will be in pain... and forever be it.

He tried to scream, but his jaw wrenched sideways, unhinged, tendons snapping, leaving him with nothing but a slack, gaping maw leaking spit and blood and broken sounds.

His breath became a gurgle. A plea. A death rattle that wouldn't end.

The faces returned— not physically, but solely within his gaze, conjured like hallucinations forced behind the lens of his mind.

They crept in from the corners of his vision, hovering, disembodied and decaying, suspended in the thick, viscous air like corpses floating in embalming fluid, trapped forever between death and memory.

Their skin sagged and slipped, some without jaws, some eyeless, their sockets yawning like open graves, black and bottomless.

They didn't blink. They didn't breathe. They didn't live. Yet they watched.

Inches from his face, they drifted, weightless and wrong, like parasites bloated with rot.

They leaned closer, drawn by gravity, his sanity couldn't explain. Their mouths hung wide— too wide, always open, jawless cavities that drooled strings of memory-thick fluid, the color of bile and old sin.

No teeth. Just dark gullets, tongues like rotted eels writhing at the base of their throats, twitching as though tasting the atmosphere of guilt around him.

Then they whispered. Not with voices. With soundless sound— a wet, slithering crawl of thought through bone. Each memory they pulled from him wasn't remembered.

It was forced through him, like a dirty rag shoved down a child's throat.

They showed him. The day he lied.

Not just the moment, every second.

They unspooled it like gutting an animal, stretching it out frame by frame until he felt the muscles of that day working again in his own face, until he felt the cowardice thick in his blood.

His child-self standing there, small and shaking, as he watched another child— his friend— accused of what he had done.

He remembered not just the action, but the comfort of escape. The disgusting relief of getting away with it. The first real betrayal, and how he felt taller for it.

The faces began to change.

Their flesh peeled back as if to scream, but instead they split down the middle, revealing sinew, memories embedded in their muscle like tattoos made of living guilt.

One face stretched its cheeks back, revealing himself, younger, eyes wide, a smear of jam across his lips as his friend sobbed beneath the teacher's fury.

Another face swelled like a blister, then popped, and inside the hollow wound, he saw the classroom again, heard the shrill accusations, felt his heart beat not with guilt, but relief. That unbearable, shameful relief.

They hissed the scene into him again and again.

Every breath is a betrayal. Every blink is a sentence.

The whispering grew louder— not words, but the memory itself writhing, slithering into his ears, down his throat, into his lungs like fluid. He gagged. Choked.

The lie he told now existed inside him as substance, not just thought. It filled his stomach like spoiled milk, his veins like glue.

Then, more faces appeared. And more.

The time he laughed when someone cried. The time he watched someone fall and turned away. The time he made fun of the boy who stuttered. The time he hit the dog and said it was just a joke.

They poured in now— hundreds of them, a procession of guilt that wrapped around him like a noose woven from everything he thought he'd buried.

And the worst part— they weren't angry. They were pleased.

Their eyeless gazes smiled. Their mouths twitched wider, not to accuse, but to reveal.

He was the exhibit in a museum of guilt, on display for eternity, surrounded by the chorus of all the small, private, cowardly moments that made him who he was. The faces didn't judge him.

They celebrated what he had become.

A liar. A coward. A child who found comfort in another's pain. A man built on that same cracked foundation.

And still, they leaned closer. Too close.

Until he could see the maggots of memory crawling through their tongues, until he could smell the rotted heat of his own shame reflected in their breathless mouths, until one of them, without sound or breath, leaned so close its lipless mouth brushed his ear— and showed him what came next.

The time he laughed at pain. The betrayal he pretended not to see.

Every sin he buried. Every cruelty he rationalized.

And the voice of the flesh laughed.

This is what you are meant to be…

This is your one truth…

This is where the screaming never stops… with your scream shall be…

The meat was wrapped tightly. The guilt screamed louder.

In that moment, as Macdoul dissolved into a mass of screeching, writhing pulp— his form unmade, his soul cored like rotten fruit— he understood the full depth of his punishment.

He had never escaped. Never survived.

He had only been reshaped by the hands of suffering into something monstrous. Something sacred to torment.

Here, death was not the end.

Here, dying was a religion.

As he was the most devout believer of all.

Then, a lake of blood erupted around him— no ripple, no warning— just a violent, sickening surge, as if the world had ruptured beneath his spine.

The red tide frothed and boiled, a seething, pulsing ocean of thick gore, its surface bubbling with a thousand shredded mouths gasping their last and first breaths all at once.

The air filled with the metallic stench of slaughter, the iron-rich perfume of long-dead veins split open, still weeping as if time had refused to let them forget.

He sat on a lone, crumbling island— a jagged chunk of stone barely wider than his own torso, hovering like a tooth in a mouth too large to close.

Beneath him, the liquid shrieked. It screamed.

It hissed and gnashed, not with sound, but with sensation— the howls of the drowned rose from its depths, thick and furious, as if every scream had curdled into physical matter, and now boiled back to the surface, reborn as teeth.

Then the hands came.

Not hands of flesh and bone. These were blistered, skinless, malformed claws— twisted by heat, dissolved by rot, writhing like worms starved for skin.

They surged up from beneath the blood, fingers like tangled brambles, hundreds of them, grasping with a desperation so profound it bled into his marrow.

They didn't reach for help. They didn't seek escape. They wanted to bring him down, to drag him into the same churning, burning pit they called home.

Their touch was not cold, but feverish— the heat of rotting meat in the sun, of screams still echoing through bone.

One hand seized his ankle. Another clutched his wrist, then his thigh, then his throat.

The stone beneath him began to sink. Slowly. Like the universe was savoring the process.

He kicked and flailed, but his body was already failing, already half-swallowed by trauma and horror. Muscles torn. Joints twisted wrong.

His bones ached with the weight of guilt, and the blood below smelled of everything he had ever tried to forget.

Then, they began to climb him.

Not just pull. They crawled up his legs, over his ribs, across his spine, leaving long trails of skinless prints where their fingers touched.

His flesh reacted like paper to flame— blistering, bubbling, peeling back. Screams clawed their way out of his throat but dissolved into gurgles.

The blood rose faster now, slapping against his chest, his jaw, entering his mouth, and forcing itself down his throat. It wasn't just liquid— it was alive, writhing and struggling as if it were devouring him from the inside out.

Inside that lake, faces formed in the froth— ghastly, malformed echoes of those he had wronged, or abandoned, or forgotten.

They opened their mouths in tandem, and out of their mouths came not voices, but his own, once again, except distorted and layered a thousand times over— each speaking a different cruelty, every vile truth he'd buried, every whimper he'd ignored, every selfish impulse he'd acted on.

The blood whispered as it climbed into his ears: This is your reward, for being generous… too generous…

It reached his eyes. You are being known…

It filled his skull. And what is known cannot be unlived.

His body sank beneath the surface, swallowed like an offering.

In the final moment before the red closed over him completely, he looked up and saw the sky— if it could still be called that. A sky made of twitching flesh, stitched with nerve endings and pulsing capillaries, stretched taut over something massive and watching.

A god, perhaps. Or something far worse.

And then— he sank. Deeper.

Where the blood was thicker, where the hands had teeth, where the memories had bones, and they knew his name.

Every nerve in his flesh howled— not with the heat of blood, but with a glacial agony so profound it felt engineered by some sadistic architect of suffering. It wasn't just cold; it was a godless frost, an anti-heat that stripped flesh from muscle and muscle from bone, as though invisible razors soaked in liquid nitrogen were dragged methodically beneath his skin.

His pores split open like overripe fruit, leaking black ichor instead of sweat, and his bones screamed within him, marrow crystallizing into shards that pierced outward with every twitch, every breath— if it could even be called breathing.

For what he inhaled was not air, but the fetid stench of forgotten dreams turned septic— an atmosphere rank with the curdled bile of human regret and the chemical tang of grief left too long in the sun.

It clawed down his throat and into his lungs, burning him from within, painting his insides with the rot of a thousand last gasps. There was no oxygen here.

Only the stench of endings. And every breath he took was a desecration.

In desperation, he slammed his fists against his ears. Once. Twice.

Until cartilage cracked, until bone split with a nauseating crunch and a hot, syrupy curtain of blood spilled down the sides of his neck. But still, it wasn't enough.

The sounds kept coming— not from the world around him, but from inside him, rising from the lake within where he had drowned, where the weight of uncountable deaths still anchored him beneath.

It was not sound. It was an infestation.

A ghastly choir, spectral and diseased, rising from some psychic pit miles beneath his own sanity. The voices didn't shout. They seeped. They squirmed.

They coiled through his mind like maggots tunneling through softened brain tissue, their song a soundless pressure, a crawling infestation of memories weaponized— not his own alone, but the collective agony of the countless, funneled into him like sewage through a ruptured pipe.

That's the Murderer. The word slid beneath his skin like glass.

A show fool of this century. That one sank into his teeth, grinding against his molars with each clench of his jaw.

You pleased, for our death, it's entertained, is it not?

It tore through his ribcage and wrapped around his heart like barbed wire.

They hissed in chorus, not like living voices, but like the dying thoughts of a thousand extinguished minds screaming for acknowledgment. And with every word, his flesh responded— blistering, breaking, peeling back in raw, weeping sheets.

Fingers sprouted from his torso— not his— clutching outward from inside his ribs, desperate and angry, trying to escape or return, he couldn't tell.

One hand clawed its way up his throat and out of his mouth before curling and sinking back in, dragging a chunk of his tongue with it.

He tried to scream, but his jaw was no longer his own. It swung wide, too wide, breaking with a hollow pop.

His teeth fell like hail. The scream came anyway— a soundless howl that burst blood vessels in his eyes and forced viscera to weep from his pores.

You were tasked to save us. Either you come dead or alive…

The voice wasn't angry anymore. It was broken. It was grieving. And that was worse.

The lake of blood pulsed beneath him, aware, alive, responsive to his torment. It didn't drown him. It fed from him.

With every sob, every ragged exhalation, it drank deeper, grew redder, thicker. Faces bobbed just below the surface— some he recognized. Some he didn't. All of them are accusing.

He clutched at his skull as the last illusion of self unraveled. There was no body anymore. Just wound. Just open nerve and memory. He wasn't drowning. He was becoming the lake.

And the lake was very, very hungry for fear.

The lake water churned and burst with putrid life, a geyser of gore erupting skyward as the surface split open, vomiting forth the dead like a festering wound torn across the face of the world.

Then came the faces— mutilated, rotted, eyeless and bloated with blasphemous rage— thrust upward from beneath like corpses rejected even by the grave.

They hovered and bobbed, their skin sloughing off in patches, their jaws unhinging with sickening creaks before spewing streams of black flies, broken teeth, and ribbons of necrotic flesh that hung in the air like the entrails of a butchered sky.

Children emerged first— skulls crushed into concave messes, one eye hanging by threads, clutching splintered toys slick with viscera and screams.

Behind them came the mothers, rocking the decapitated remnants of their own heads in skeletal arms, maggots spilling from their sockets in milky ropes.

Then the fathers: crawling on shattered pelvises, dragging themselves on blood-polished ribs, their hearts missing, replaced by gaping cavities gnawed hollow by unseen beasts.

They came not to feed. They came to punish.

They descended upon him as a single hive of anguish, a swarm of revenants whose only sustenance was pain.

They clutched at him, yanked his limbs apart with a strength born of hatred, their teeth sinking into his thighs like rusted saws, their nails scraping through skin and meat to expose trembling tendons.

They tore him open with obsessive care, like artists sculpting agony— peeling strips of skin with such methodical cruelty that each tear echoed with an orchestra of his own nerve endings screaming in betrayal.

The more he struggled, the more they adored him. His panic was perfume. His fear was music.

And with each desperate movement, they gripped tighter, yanking bones from joints with wet pops and stringy sinew, unraveling him in bursts of arterial spray and shredded muscle.

They didn't pull him under— they dismantled him where he lay, turning his own body into a theatre of dismemberment.

One child, smaller than the rest, floated through the carnage.

No older than six, his desiccated skin was stretched tight like old parchment, mouth frozen in a gaping rictus from which dangled a bloated tongue coiled into a perfect noose.

His eye sockets were cavernous, empty holes weeping coagulated blood.

His fractured hand reached forward, three fingers bent backward, barely clinging to the wrist by strings of tendon.

He touched the man's chest— not with force, but a sickening gentleness.

A child's imitation of comfort. But the contact detonated something far worse than pain. It wasn't just his body that screamed— it was his essence.

Something inside him ruptured, and a wave of torment surged outward from his core, a psychic implosion of everything that once made him human.

Barbed chains of memory shot through his soul, ripping through thought and history, dragging out names and faces like meat from a grinder.

The memories didn't fade. They decayed.

His mother's lullabies turned to garbled vomit.

His child's laughter twisted into wails.

The smiles of friends blackened, melted, and oozed through the holes in his mind like pus from infected wounds.

Everything was defiled. Every moment he had clung to became excrement in the mouths of the dead. They chewed on his life and spat it back in his face.

He could no longer scream. His throat had been ruined long ago, torn into red ribbons that dangled down his chest.

What escaped his mouth now were gurgles, frothing jets of steaming blood that sprayed from his lips with every convulsion. His mouth stretched grotesquely, tearing at the corners until his jaw hung unhinged, strips of flayed cheek swinging like meat curtains from his splintered teeth.

Still, the pain deepened.

His body was a furnace of agony with no release, no climax, no end. And the blood, thick as tar, rancid with the stink of grave dirt and liquefied rot, rose past his neck and shoulders, not to drown, but to pierce.

The blood had grown intelligent. Malevolent. It didn't engulf him. It stabbed him.

Jagged bone erupted from the lake's depths— spikes made from shattered femurs, fangs of rib and claw— impaling him from below, one through the pelvis, another bursting out of his stomach with a sound like wet paper tearing.

He twitched as a third punched through his collarbone and out of his shoulder, spraying flecks of marrow and lymph into the air. His body jerked and spasmed, nailed in place, blood gushing down the stakes like holy offerings.

And then came movement in the crimson fog. Shadows, immense and collapsing under their own mass, dragged themselves toward him. Not human. Not even beasts.

These were forgotten titans, creatures that should never have been named— gargantuan horrors carved from plague and liquefied time, their bones strung with tumors, their bellies bursting with organs too numerous, too strange.

Each step they took convulsed the blood-lake, birthing waves of screaming faces and ruptured wombs. Their limbs moved in ways the mind couldn't follow, each gesture birthing more pain, more presence, as if the air itself rejected their being.

They were coming not to kill but to finish what the dead had begun.

One descended, and with it, the sky itself seemed to shrink— darkness coalescing not from above but from within the blood, as though light had simply abandoned this world in dread.

The beast towered above the carnage, so vast its silhouette fractured the air, its body an abomination of cracked bone plates stitched together by rusted barbed wire that still wept rust and rot. Where a mouth should have leered, there yawned a cavernous hollow, and from it spewed no words, no roar— only cascades of broken fingers and eyeless insects that buzzed like locusts but screamed in the voices of newborns, high-pitched and wet, their shrieks bubbling like milk curdling on a stove.

It reached for him.

He twisted, thrashed, screamed silently through torn vocal cords— but the river had already claimed him. He belonged to it now, an unwilling heir to suffering, and when the creature's claw descended— an obscene lattice of fused blades where fingers should be, each digit a rusted knife bound to yellowed knuckles— it didn't lift him. It wrenched.

With a force that made the world lurch, it gripped his torso and tore, not with skill but with the unrestrained violence of starvation.

His ribcage snapped open like a broken gate, each rib cracking outward with a sound like a tree trunk splitting under a storm. His spine, once the pillar of his being, splintered down the center, vertebrae popping like beads torn from a necklace.

Coils of his intestine spilled forth, steaming and slick, flung carelessly into the tide where smaller mouths— jaws made of molars and nails— rose from the red to devour the viscera in slavering gulps.

No mercy came. No veil of unconsciousness to pull him away. He was awake for everything.

He felt it all— his spleen splitting like a bruised fruit, the rupture of his liver in a hot gout of fluid, the grinding crack of cartilage as the claw burrowed deeper. 

It wasn't killing him— it was searching through him, rifling through organs like a butcher rooting around in spoiled meat.

Then it found what it sought: his heart. Somehow, impossibly, still beating. Still struggling with hope.

The creature paused, almost contemplative, before crushing it slowly between two hooked claws, the muscle bursting into pulp with a sound like wet rags shoved through a drain.

Still, death did not arrive.

His mind remained a prisoner, lashed to what remained of his body. Suspended.

Flayed open to every shard of pain, every shift of ruined tissue, every twitch of butchered nerves. His awareness didn't fade— it sharpened, honed into a raw, electric scream trapped in a cage of agony.

He couldn't faint. He couldn't escape. He could only endure and feel the pain.

Then, when the creature had finished with its dissection, it leaned down and vomited into the gaping ruin of its chest— thick, tar-black sludge that hissed and steamed, moving with a will of its own.

It wasn't fluid. It was a memory— but not his.

The screams of the thousands it had mutilated before, their despair, their deaths, their betrayals— it forced all of it into him.

He became them. He lived each death. Each agony with each final, useless prayer.

They flooded him, filled him, drowned his identity beneath a tide of borrowed suffering until he was not one man, but every victim this creature had ever claimed.

And then, his body healed.

Muscle knitted. Bones reset. Skin reformed. The cavity of his chest closed as though nothing had happened, as though no pain had ever been inflicted.

Not even scars remained. Only the pain. Only the memory of being torn apart and left to rot, now fused into every cell, etched into every atom. His body was whole, but his mind irrevocably shattered.

He writhed, fetal and slick with gore, and as his nerves still burned with the phantom screams of thousands, the beast collapsed— not in death, but in transformation.

Its colossal frame liquefied, sinking into itself, bones snapping wetly as they folded inward. In seconds, it had become a glistening mound of throbbing, blood-clotted slime— shuddering and pulsating with residual malice, as though even in this form it was watching, waiting, breeding.

The blood churned. Something else was coming.

The villagers emerged from the fog like marionettes of decay, their limbs twitching in unnatural sync, silhouettes of the once-human warped by something ancient and merciless.

Their eyes glowed with a hollow mirth— joyless, ravenous— and their mouths stretched too far, lined with rows of teeth that no child should have drawn, let alone borne.

They clapped, their hands slapping out jagged rhythms, mismatched and chaotic, and they danced in lunatic spirals, shrieking with delight. Children danced too, if they could still be called that— creatures with half-crushed skulls and twisted spines, cradling stones and rusted blades, some missing fingers, others with hands like shattered clay, wrapped tight in bloody gauze.

He didn't fall. He was pushed. But there's no one in his sight near him.

The ground rose to meet him, and before he could rise, a rope— rough and fibrous, all too familiar— coiled itself around his throat, just like the one that had hanged the man in the square.

His fingers clawed at it, nails scraping desperately for slack, but each tug only rewarded him with loss— his fingernails popping off one by one, blood fountaining from beneath, only to regrow, pristine and new, like a system executing a loop it would never break.

Pain without progress. A scripted suffering.

He was dragged, heels scraping fire into the earth, until he was hoisted, not to hang, but to stand. The cross wasn't clean wood— it was a sculpture of cruelty, lined with nails driven outward, each iron spike whispering hunger for blood.

He was pressed against it, crucified upright, and a pale man stepped forward, his face featureless but for the thin slits of burnt flesh where eyes might have been.

He took Macdoul's left hand in his own and poured molten iron across it— no ceremony, no hesitation— just the slow hiss of flesh cooking on bone. Macdoul didn't scream. He couldn't.

To his right, a little girl— her scalp torn open like a peeled fruit— lifted a nail to his other palm and, using her skull like a hammer, drove it in with thudding, wet determination.

Blood burst outward like ink through paper, but she only giggled and hummed, even as her head split more with each strike.

His feet, stripped to ropes of veins, were wrapped in a grotesque tightness that grew tighter with every twitch, every struggle, a noose for limbs. Only then did he understand: this was never meant to bind. It was meant to punish.

The villagers formed a circle. The cross was their center.

And then came the stones— enormous, cruel, carved by no tool but hatred.

They struck him like boulders launched by catapults, breaking bones, tearing skin, and rupturing flesh. His jaw shattered sideways. His ribs imploded.

An hour passed— or what felt like one— while agony etched new languages into his brain. He lost count of the bruises. There was nothing left to count.

Then came the farm tools.

Spiked implements rusted and bent from long-forgotten harvests were thrust into his sides, his stomach, his face. One found his eyes— a hayfork driven in with grotesque accuracy— and when it was yanked free, his eyes came too, dangling from their cords like macabre ornaments.

Still, he did not scream. His tongue had long since turned to ash in his mouth. His jaw, a memory.

The cross buckled under the abuse and finally fell, crashing backward, but the villagers didn't stop. If anything, they grew more frenzied. More ecstatic.

Their lips were wet with saliva, their eyes gleaming with euphoric cruelty.

A hammer— vast, comically large, too heavy for any one person— was lifted by six of them and brought down onto Macdoul's head.

His skull caved in like wet clay, brains spurting onto the ground like soup from a broken bowl. But no death. No end.

The head grew back, piece by piece, as if even annihilation itself had been revoked.

He tried to sob. But there was no face left to cry.

He tried to beg. But the air ignored him.

He tried to die. But death, cruelly, passed him by, uninterested in absolution.

Then— silence. Everything froze.

Villagers held mid-motion, faces locked in perverse glee, blood glistening on teeth and hands. Time itself paused in mockery. His arms, supposed to be nailed— hung loosely now, limbs reformed but no longer bound.

He collapsed forward, crumpling like a marionette cut from its strings, and saw the pool of blood at his feet— his blood, thick and steaming.

He crawled.

Every movement was a war against agony, every inch earned with teeth clenched so hard his gums bled. He clawed toward that pool, toward something unknown.

Why? Why always them? What did I do? It was the king's order… I only followed…

No reflection came. Then it did.

Not a beast. Not a ghost. Something worse. Himself.

His own reflection rose in the bloody surface, twisted, warped, smiling. Its face was not scarred but shaped by every soul he had failed, molded from guilt and cowardice, its smile soaked in loathing and contempt.

It leaned forward, hovering just inches above the gore, eyes burning not with fire, but with truth. In his own voice, ruined and raw, it whispered: You deserved this.

The laughter of the villagers inverted— became screams, spiraling into a hellish chorus.

The river surged. Darkness collapsed. Not like night, but like the end of thought itself. A black hole of memory shredding through his sanity, not with blades but recollection honed to razors, cutting away hope, sense, identity.

It stripped him. Unmade him. Thought by thought. Name by name.

Yet— deep in the ruin of his soul— something remained.

Small. Insultingly small but alive.

A flicker. A spark. A defiant ember of self.

A heartbeat. A breath. A whisper saying no.

And then— clarity.

The storm receded. The screams faded into echoes. The heat in his skull cooled like coals in ash as Macdoul stood barefoot on scorched, cracked earth beneath a sky so red it looked ready to die.

Fields of ash stretched in every direction, shadows shifting like things trying to remember their shape. He had survived.

Suddenly, as if waking from a nightmare only to realize he had never left it, he looked down— and what stared back at him were not the bloodied, calloused hands of the soldier he had become, but the small, fragile fingers of a child, scabbed at the knuckles, shaking slightly, as if trembling beneath the weight of a truth too vast to bear.

His legs were thin, ghostly things covered in bruises like faded fingerprints of past punishments, wrapped in torn breeches clinging like paper to his knees, while his feet were crammed into sandals far too small, the straps biting into skin speckled with dried blood, dirt, and memories he had long tried to forget but which now pulsed underfoot with a terrible, rhythmic beat, as if the ground itself possessed a heartbeat— sickly, slow, and old— reminding him that he had come back not through will, but through curse.

He stood there, this boy, himself but not himself, in a place that throbbed with old grief and never-ending dusk, and far off— buried in the mist like bones beneath soil— came the sound of laughter, warped now into something brittle and broken, shaped like sobbing yet deeper than sorrow, as though the land itself wept not for the dead, but for what the living had become.

And within his chest, that faint ember still stirred— not a comfort, not a salvation, but something colder and crueler, the cruel justice that rises not from goodness but from unbearable suffering: vengeance.

Then, without wind or warning, without thunder or dramatic shudder, they appeared— silent as ghosts, but heavier, more accusing, more present— slipping through the haze not like intruders but like secrets finally stepping into the open, like memories that had never left but had waited patiently in the dark for him to break enough to see them clearly.

They stood there, just beyond the veil of ash, not as corpses, not as horrors, but as they had once been— before the world had drowned in fire and blood— his friends, his playmates, his companions from that fleeting time when innocence was still a language he could speak.

And yet even in their soft, sunlit shapes, something was terribly wrong.

They approached barefoot, their steps silent, drifting forward across the dust-choked earth, their limbs moving with a grace too measured, too deliberate— like puppets drawn by invisible threads— and their faces were lit not with joy, not even with sorrow, but with something far worse: the stillness of betrayal.

Their cheeks still bore the ghost-smudges of plum juice and cherry pulp, their skin still flushed with the memory of long summer afternoons, and their hair still tangled from the wind that once carried their laughter— but none of them smiled. None dared.

Their mouths, slack or sealed with crusted gashes and stitched wounds, were no longer capable of joy, and their eyes, once bright and foolish and full of mischief, had clouded to a gray so lifeless it hurt to meet, filmed over with the film of death and yet locked so fiercely onto him that he felt their gaze like brands pressed to his soul.

And now— truly— he saw them. Not the blurs that had haunted his sleep. Not the half-remembered phantoms from a burning village. But faces. Names. Moments.

Frozen forever in that last breath before the end.

Little Luna came first, her yellow ribbons clinging stubbornly to the greasy, filth-matted strands of hair that had not been washed since the day her skull was crushed.

One side of her face was gone, caved inward like an apple rotting from the core, the dried blood cracked like old paint, and within the concave ruin of her head, fat maggots squirmed and nested in slow, obscene waves.

She tilted her head— not in curiosity, not in affection, but in something quieter, sadder, more damning— and as she did, one of her eyes, loosened from its socket, slid out and swung gently against her cheek like a pendulum sculpted from grief and decay.

Then came Tommy, dragging behind him what was left of a leg shattered beyond use, the shattered bones grinding with every step beneath shredded skin and purple rot.

His mouth had been sewn shut by thorned vines that snaked from his throat and twisted between his lips like barbed tongues, their thorns jutting from the corners of his mouth like cursed needles.

He tried to speak— he tried— but the only sound that came was the sick hiss of blood from his nostrils, a bubbling, pathetic sound that carried more heartbreak than rage.

And Ewan— he was the last. His entire lower jaw had been ripped clean from his face, leaving a gaping pit of ruin beneath the shattered remnants of his cheekbones, his tongue lolling out grotesquely, not in mockery but as if trying to form words it no longer remembered.

He made a sound— wet, choking, gargled— and the air curdled around it, thickening with bile and horror as if reality itself rejected what he had become.

They did not walk like children. They did not return like spirits.

They came like broken marionettes, their limbs yanked by unseen hands, their joints bending in ways that no living thing could endure, their necks twitching, heads lolling, bodies jerking forward with the sick rhythm of corpses reenacting the memory of life.

Every step they took seemed to pull something loose in him, unspooling sinews of guilt and fear, shredding the fragile web of denial he had wrapped around himself for years.

And in that moment, with the dust rising around their feet, and the sky bleeding overhead like an open wound, he understood— truly, completely, fatally— that this was no haunting. This was judgment.

And he, the boy with blood on his sandals and a heartbeat filled with ash, was not its victim. He was its cause.

MacDoul stumbled backward as if the very air had become poison.

His legs, once hardened by war and duty, now trembled beneath him like twigs beneath a storm, and breath caught in his throat— not like a gasp, but like a hand, a fist, squeezing tight until even silence became unbearable.

The ground beneath his bare feet, once so familiar, now cracked open in sheets, flaking like old skin, splintering apart in jagged veins that bled a thick, rust-colored dust, as if the world itself were wounded.

It stung where it touched him. It seared where it settled.

And somewhere inside, deeper than flesh, deeper than soul, his bones seemed to shrink, curling inward like frightened animals, while his fingers— callused, scarred, made for killing— folded into fists too soft, too small, the fists of a boy not ready to face what he had run from.

Stripped of armor, name, honor— left naked before memory's wrath, and they were coming.

And then the voices came— not with breath, not through sound, but like venom injected straight into his brain, bypassing the world and stabbing straight into thought.

They didn't echo. They etched.

You watched us die. Your eyes are the painful truth… came the first, in a voice cracked by tears, not yelled but wept into the hollows of his skull.

You turned away. Leaving nothing behind… came another, louder now, with a tremor of heat behind the words, not angry yet, but rising.

You ran while we screamed. With all your comrades… said a third, and the face that followed wasn't angry—it was worse. It was sad.

You have no desire to help us, from the very beginning… hissed the last, eyes blazing, the words spat with contempt so sharp they made his teeth ache.

But they didn't scream. Their rage was quieter and deadlier. They whispered in a low and close voice.

Curling into that sacred cavity behind his eyes where thoughts used to live, threading themselves through the delicate tissue of his memories like sewing needles dragging hooks, pulling behind them the long-forgotten reels of slaughter, guilt, and abandonment.

They didn't ask. They unearthed. They feasted.

He clutched his eyes with trembling fingers slick not only with sweat, but with something far thicker— something that clung and pulsed and wouldn't wash away. Blood, perhaps, or memory— indistinguishable in a place like this.

He pressed hard, digging his palms into the sockets as though he could gouge the sounds out from behind his skull, crush the whispers like beetles beneath stone. But it didn't matter.

His hands had changed— too small now, too soft, the hands of a boy who had no place in war, no strength to carry guilt.

His scream, when it came, was not a roar of defiance or agony— it was a high, reedy whimper, thin as breath, frail as thread, and it cracked as it rose from his throat, crumbled into sobs that spilled from his lips like shards of broken porcelain.

That sound— the sound of a soul unraveling— drew them in. Closer and hungrier.

Their breath, cold and dry as grave-dust, brushed his cheeks like the hands of the dead, fingers of judgment curling through the air to touch what remained of him.

Their mouths opened— not with noise, not with words, but with verdicts.

No screams. No blades. No torches. Nothing loud nor merciful. Only stones, small ones.

Insulting in their size. It was not meant to kill, but to hurt. Meant to bruise, to break slowly. To carve remembrance into the skin with patient cruelty.

They didn't want justice. They wanted pain with purpose. They wanted his memory to bleed.

The first stone slapped his cheek and left behind a welt that swelled red and purple, blooming with shame like some cursed blossom opening to a sun made of scorn.

The second struck his collarbone, and he felt something give— a small, sharp snap, deep and personal, as though part of himself had cracked open under the weight of consequence.

The third hit his thigh, and it wasn't pain that made his legs buckle— it was memory.

The collapse wasn't physical. It was historical. He was folding under the weight of a past he could no longer carry.

Again… why? he croaked in his mind, breath catching in a throat rubbed raw.

What… with the stone… it hurts…

He dropped to his knees like a marionette cut loose, and the dust that rose around him wasn't clean— it was thick with rot and filth, mingling with the blood that now poured freely from his face, his limbs, his soul.

Where it met the earth, it turned to black mud— putrid, dense, and warm with a stench that rose like guilt fermenting in the sun.

He clawed at it with desperate hands, not seeking escape, but hoping that perhaps if he dug deep enough, he could bury himself before they could bury him again.

But there was no bottom. Only dirt and blood. Only their soft laughter.

And that laughter didn't ring like joy, didn't carry the careless cadence of mockery. It was brittle, papery, like old parchment tearing beneath a cold wind.

It crackled through the air like the voice of something dry and done with mercy.

It was the sound of judges reciting a sentence already carved into stone, read aloud not to inform, but to finalize.

They didn't laugh because they were amused. They laughed because the ending had been written long before he'd ever drawn breath.

They laughed because he still had the nerve to wonder if forgiveness was an option. Their laughter didn't sound. It was the law. Immutable. Eternal.

"Why… just why is this going on—?"

He whispered, but even that last question came fractured, not from confusion, but from fatigue, the hollow kind that settles when the soul accepts its cage.

"Some kind of loop…?"

His voice faded. Not because there was no one to hear him. But because it no longer mattered.

There was no reply waiting in the dirt. No resolution tucked between the stones. No redemption in the echo.

Only silence and stones. Only dust and punishment and the terrible, unyielding memory of what he had done— and who he had abandoned to die screaming while he ran with the coward's hope of never looking back.

But now, they had made him look. And they would make him look again.

And then— the world convulsed. Not with a tremor, not with a quake, but with something older and more intimate, like a seizure inside the fabric of his being.

Reality hiccuped, twisted, and clenched around his bones like a fist.

He screamed again, but the sound fractured midway, catching in his throat as it collapsed inward, folding into choking, then gurgling, then silence, drowned in blood.

His body— it changed. Not in grace, not in healing, but in horror. It didn't grow, but ruptured.

He expanded like a corpse bloated in the sun. Skin split in jagged lines across his limbs as his arms lengthened unnaturally, tendons snapping like piano wire under pressure, only to fuse back together with a sickening wet crunch.

Bones cracked in staccato bursts, like dry branches breaking in an unseen fire.

His ribs clawed outward through the ragged remains of his shirt, piercing flesh with grotesque insistence, and his spine arched back so far it nearly folded him in half— before it snapped forward again, recoiling with the whip-like violence of something reanimated.

Muscles ballooned, ruptured, and restitched themselves in frenzied spasms, slapping and pulsing as if stitched by some drunk, unseen butcher.

This wasn't aging. This was punishment through time. He wasn't becoming a man. He was being shoved into one.

By the time it stopped— if it could even be called a stop— he collapsed forward onto blistered palms, panting like an animal freshly skinned.

He had grown again. But not whole. Not healed and not like a human.

His skin hung in some places like draped fabric, in others it was stretched too tight, like it might tear if he moved too fast. One eye sagged lower than the other. Blood leaked from the corners of his mouth, trickling from his ears as though the screams he couldn't release had forced another exit.

His body was a patchwork of trauma— bruises swelling like tumors, wounds pulsing, his very form a monument to shame. A man's body sewn violently from a child's guilt, and nothing about him fit right anymore.

The villagers were there. Of course they were. Always and forever.

Standing in a circle now, just like they had once when they crossed him beneath a full blood moon, ropes cutting his wrists, torches raised like angry stars. Except this time, his hands were free. No bindings.

Their faces were smeared in ash, their eyes gleaming like oil in firelight. Their torches hissed and licked at the dark, flames curling upward like tongues desperate to taste judgment.

Their mouths opened— not in argument, not in debate— but in unified, furious certainty. Their screams were no longer pleas. They were verdicts.

Give us what we deserve…

You have no right to live longer…

You are a living sin, give up your life…

Each word struck like a whip— hot, barbed, and soaked in memory. They weren't yelling. They were flaying him. Their voices did not carry sound; they carried weight, pressing down on his lungs until breath became a theft.

The air grew thick, heavy as drowning oil, and for a moment, even the torchlight seemed to bend under the sheer mass of hatred that hung around him.

He opened his mouth— maybe to beg, maybe to explain— but nothing emerged except a scream: wet, hollow, and filled with the breath of a thousand names he had never called for help, faces he had never saved, hands he had never held.

His scream didn't echo. It lingered like a rot.

Then she stepped forward. Grown Luna.

The ribbons in her hair fluttered as if moved by wind, though no wind blew. Her body was ruined— limping, half-missing fingers, an eye glazed and dripping pus— but she moved with the certainty of ritual.

In her remaining hand, cradled like a treasure, she held something red, something wet. His heart. Still beating. Still twitching like it hadn't yet realized it had been removed.

She smiled. Not sweetly, nor is it kindly. A broken, shattered thing— lips torn, gums bare, a smile that trembled on the edge of collapse.

But it was no longer hers. It wore his sorrow. And in a voice not hers but his— his voice from a memory buried too deep— it spoke.

You don't get to forget us…

And then, softer, more menacingly.

You don't get to die easily, like us…

She laid the heart down before him like an offering to a god who had long since stopped listening.

Then, with slow, deliberate tenderness, she stepped on it. Not in cruelty, but in finality— like sealing a letter that would never be read.

The sound was soft, not loud— a sickly, intimate pop, like something sacred being defiled. A burst of red warmth soaked into the earth like an oath being swallowed.

His body reacted before his mind could— spine arching, a cry erupting from somewhere older than language. But it wasn't pain that tore through him. Not physical, at least.

It was something deeper. A recognition so profound it shattered him in silence.

This was it. This was the price. This was his penance. And in some broken, repulsive way, this was home.

The villagers did not move. The firelight behind their eyes was alive now— dancing, writhing, whispering promises older than mercy.

It told him what he already knew: he would never leave. Not truly. Not entirely.

And as he sank back down into the dirt— knees scraping stone, hands trembling with every ragged breath— he lifted what remained of his face toward a sky that bled shades of wine and bruises.

The heavens did not look back. There were no stars. Just a blank, suffocating smear of red and black, like the world itself was trying to forget him.

His lips, cracked, split, stained with clot and ash, barely moved. But the whisper escaped anyway.

Not a prayer. Not a scream. Just a breath of truth meant for anything that might still exist in the silence between guilt and death.

"It's so hard to explain the weight I'm carrying inside… It's so heavy… I- I can't hold it anymore."

The words fell like broken glass from a bleeding hand. Fragile.

His voice— shaking, threadbare, soaked in sorrow— shivered through the dust.

"Every part of me aches... my bones, my thoughts, my memories… even the good ones." His breath hitched.

"My heart— my heart feels so heavy that all I want to do is cry, but even my tears feel like knives."

He coughed, spitting blood, then silence.

And for a moment, the wind seemed to pause, as if even the world held its breath. As if it listened.

"I'm tired... so tired. I just want to rest for a little while. I want to breathe, without pain. I want to feel fine, just once, without guilt dragging nails across my ribs."

The words fluttered out like dying moths— bruised, trembling things, barely alive. They drifted into the open air, unsure whether they were a confession or a surrender.

But the world… the world heard them and spat them out.

The crowd roared. Louder than before. No longer just angry.

Something darker had taken root in their throats now— something ancient and past, something gleeful. The fury was animal. The hatred. They howled.

A tide of neighbors turned executioners, bearing not swords, but the remnants of their lives twisted into vengeance.

Rusted scythes, sharpened hoes, blood-spattered shovels— tools meant for harvest now baptized in hatred.

Children screamed for his blood, their faces twisted with innocence lost.

Women cursed through teeth worn by grief. Men who had once carried him on their shoulders raised hammers meant to crush what they could no longer love.

And that was the worst of it.

These weren't strangers. These were the people who should have saved him.

They should have taught him how to fish, how to build, how to hope. They should have kissed his bruises and called them badges of survival. Instead, they fed their hunger with his despair.

Their eyes glittered— not with rage, but betrayal. And behind that, something even more obscene. Delight.

They didn't want justice. They wanted to unmake him.

No amount of screaming would ever satisfy them. No pain could even the scales.

They wanted his soul unraveled— thread by thread— until there was nothing left but a smear of regret in the dirt.

Tears carved tracks down his blood-crusted face. Not weakness. Just weight.

He had burned too much. Lost too many. Let too many smiles die in the dark.

And yet, in the rubble of his heart, beneath the collapsing dome of memory, something moved. A flicker. A twitch. Not hope. Not defiance. But refusal.

His hand rose, shaking, bleeding, half-dead, and smeared the tears and blood across his face, painting himself in grief and survival. His breath rattled through broken ribs, but still he pressed his palms to the earth. Still, he pushed.

The villagers screamed louder. The sky sagged. But he— He stood.

A shadow of a man. A monument of guilt. Still standing.

The villagers wept, but their tears were not salt— black rivulets streaking their faces like tar, like oil bubbling from the pressure of something long-buried now clawing free. They watched him rise, and their glee sharpened.

Hatred foamed at their lips like rot turned rabid. Stones flew— not to kill, no. Killing would have been mercy.

These were for breaking. For grinding his spine into humility. For crushing whatever pride still clung to his bones like brittle moss.

Their curses tasted of old fires, burned dinners, and shattered lullabies. Their voices, once kind, now boiled with the rancid venom that only those who once loved can distill.

It crescendoed— not a crowd, but a single organism, snarling and starved, made of regret and inherited madness. They moved together, a tide of rusted pitchforks, fire-kissed torches, hammers slick with rage, advancing as if to stamp out a plague they themselves had birthed.

But he no longer saw them. Not clearly. Because the sky had shattered like glass.

A hairline fracture at first, an almost invisible shimmer across the bruised heavens— then a rift, tearing wider with a groan like the world exhaling its last truth.

From it poured light— searing, sacred, unclean in its holiness— white and gold like starfire, bleeding down in sheets as though some forgotten god had sliced open its palm and wept.

The mob faltered. Stumbled. Clawed at their eyes as if to unsee the purity.

Their howls twisted into shrieks of pain. But he did not flinch. Because she was there.

Not descending. Not walking. Simply… there.

Like a memory that never truly left. Standing within the rupture of heaven, clothed not in splendor, but in memory. Not divine— no, something far more terrible. Something far more beloved.

A woman he had once known before the world curdled, before the years thickened into shame, before his soul became a grave.

He tried to see her face, to cut through the molten brilliance that framed her like a crown of forgetting, but the light devoured detail. Still, her smile remained. Not seen, but felt. Not etched in features, but in forgiveness.

It wasn't mournful. It held no weight in judgment.

It was warm. Disarmingly, painfully warm. The kind of warmth that ached to behold— because it forgave entirely, quietly, and without condition.

And that was the cruelty of it.

He stumbled forward, slack-jawed, ribs hitching against shattered breath.

His voice rasped out, broken glass coated in pleading, "W-wait… please… don't go—"

Not a command. A child's prayer. A dying man's last sob into the mouth of a storm.

She didn't speak. She only smiled, still, a sunrise frozen in the fracture of time.

And he reached for her. Not in hope. Not in faith. But in desperation— raw, stammering desperation— as if her touch might lift him from the mire or damn him completely.

He no longer cared. He would take damnation if it meant her.

But then he looked down. His hands.

Not dirty. Not bruised. Soaked.

The blood clung like syrup, thick and endless, seeping from his palms as though he were wringing history from his skin.

It slid down his arms in viscous threads, saturated his rags until they hung like burial shrouds, and pooled around his ankles in crimson halos that shimmered with memory. Not memory but guilt.

His hands trembled— not from pain. Not even from fear.

But now he understood.

He hadn't reached for forgiveness. It had reached for him. And he no longer believed he deserved it.

He tried to wipe his hands clean, tried to scrape the filth away with frantic, useless motions, but the harder he scrubbed, the more the blood welled —not from wounds, but from beneath the skin itself, as though his soul had ruptured and now poured out in slow, accusing rivers.

It wasn't just blood anymore. It was memory made visceral. Grief transfigured. Guilt, thickened and red, given shape.

Then came the whisper. Barely breathe.

A sound unraveling from the hollowed corridors of a throat worn thin by too many unspoken screams. "I've shattered like the sky…"

His chest hitched, spasmed— like something inside had torn loose and now rattled unanchored through the ruins of him. "I'm spilling sorrow… like this nightmare loop… upon—"

But they didn't want to hear. They wanted him to hear.

The villagers, once grotesque, with corpse-pale faces contorted by fury, changed. The hate melted. One face turned. A man. Familiar to him, a human. MacDoul.

The illusion flickered. It wasn't rage anymore— it was remembrance.

He looked again at his trembling hands. Veined in red. Glazed in sorrow.

His fingers shuddered as blood slid from his palms into the red tide pooling below him. And that's when the tears came.

Not a collapse. Not a wail. But the quiet kind— the kind that slips from you in silence, uninvited, when something too deep to name finally breaks.

The kind that carries the taste of everything you were too late to say. Of the hands you didn't hold. The apologies you never gave.

Tears streaked through the dirt and ash caked on his face. Warm and damning. "…this bloodbath river," he whispered, like naming it gave it dominion.

Pain surged behind his eyes. A rhythmic pounding, like the past was trying to claw its way back into his skull with splintered nails.

And then memory didn't drift in— it stormed. Not gentle, not forgiving. Razor-edged and fire-laced.

Laughter. So much laughter. Dead friends under sunlight. Smiles that dissolved into bone and smoke.

Homes ablaze— altars to every failure he couldn't stop. Children screaming his name with voices full of trust and terror as flame devoured their world.

Each image struck like a chain, wrapping tightly around his ribs, dragging him downward. Each face was a shard driven deeper into the meat of his heart.

He clutched his head, blood-slick fingers digging into his scalp as if he could hold the collapsing architecture of himself together just a moment longer. Breath... Endure…

"I… it feels like my thoughts are… crashing into each other," he choked, the words fraying into sobs, "before they could ever… ever find their way back to you…"

He broke on that last word. Not because it was a weakness. But because it was her. Because that name— that memory— was the only thing left holding his soul together.

And then he collapsed.

His knees sank into the crimson tide, sending ripples through the pool of everything he had become.

The water carried pieces of him outward— shame, memory, fragments of a man who once believed himself righteous. "Oh, what am I," he gasped, voice threadbare, "supposed to do… without you…"

It wasn't a cry for salvation. It was a child's voice calling up from beneath a tombstone, praying the echo might reach someone.

And still, she stood.

She, wrapped in that searing, impossible light, too radiant to behold without flinching, yet impossibly tender. Her smile hadn't changed. That unbearable softness remained, like she'd been watching from the edge of every horror, waiting through the centuries of blood and rot. Not judging. Not condemning. Just there but unmoving.

Because it was never her task to reach across the chasm. It had always been his.

The truth struck— not like a hammer, but like a blade gently slid beneath the ribs. Not to wound. To awaken.

He had spent a lifetime waiting for forgiveness to find him. But forgiveness does not chase. It does not plead. It waits. It stands. It invites.

And now, broken and bleeding, hollowed by everything he could no longer undo, he knew what had to be done. He had to stand.

For a moment, he wanted nothing more than to give in to the slow, numbing pull beneath his feet— to allow the blood that pooled like molten sorrow around his knees to rise over his chest, to cradle his jaw, to cover his eyes until the weight of the world no longer existed— until his name, his sins, and his memories dissolved like ink in wine, forgotten by even the silence.

It would have been easy, far too easy, to let himself vanish within that scarlet tide, to surrender to its warmth as one might to the final hush of sleep, and drift downward into a darkness that held no judgment, no forgiveness, and no need to remember.

But as he hovered on the edge of that surrender, as the muscles in his back gave the first shudder of collapse and the tide whispered its welcome, they— those villagers, those watchers, those broken reflections of his own ruin— took an instinctive step back.

A breath caught in their collective throat, a moment of hesitation bloomed among them, for they had not come to witness a man drown in his damnation.

They had come expecting execution, not rebirth. And in that moment, when their hate faltered, he realized something within him still burned.

He lifted his head, slowly, painfully, as if the motion alone threatened to tear apart the seams holding his body together.

She was still there— unchanged, untouched, unwavering.

That same unbearable light still wrapped around her like a second skin, like an echo of something sacred that had refused to die. And that smile— it cleaved through the haze of agony like moonlight against the sea.

It was not a smile of mercy, nor mourning, but one of pure, patient faith, as if she were not waiting for him to become whole, but simply waiting for him to remember how to walk.

And somewhere in the marrow of that ruined body, somewhere beneath the collapsed architecture of his heart, something ancient stirred— something not as gentle as hope, but more stubborn than despair.

Not redemption. Not salvation. Something older. Something heavier. Purpose.

He would walk forward, soaked in blood, shivering beneath the weight of what he'd done, not in pursuit of grace, not to ease the ceaseless ache in his chest, but because someone had to carry the bones.

Because even the most broken things grow roots if they fall deep enough. Because even in fields drowned in ash, there exists the memory of flowers. Because love, even when crushed beneath sorrow, never forgets the shape of its bloom.

And because she was still smiling.

And if she still smiled, then something within him must remain unfinished.

The villagers shouted again— voices raised, arms flung, fury reborn in new shapes, as if they feared the silence more than his sins— but their words no longer struck like lightning.

They broke around him like waves against stone, fragmented and without force, relics of a fire that had long since burned itself to ash.

Their judgment, once sharp enough to pierce marrow, now echoed like the last breath in a mausoleum— hollow, futile, lost to time.

He stood among them— bare, bloodied, soul split open like a fruit left too long in the sun. Every breath drawn was an act of rebellion against collapse.

Every heartbeat was a vow spoken in the language of agony. And still, he stood.

He would continue to stand through the last stone cast with trembling hands, through the final lash meant to silence his defiance, through the grinding of bone and the weeping of scars— until there was nothing left of him but smoke and memory.

Because that was his sentence. That was his inheritance. That was the shape of his guilt.

And he would wear it not like a burden to be wept over, but like a crown of thorns pressed into his brow by his own hands, not out of pride, but out of love. Because buried beneath the layers of ruin, deeper even than regret, he understood: this was the shape of his peace.

This was the monument he would build with his suffering, the shrine carved from the wreckage of himself to honor the dead he could not save.

Then came the sound— a rupture within the skull, an unnatural shriek that did not come from the world around him but from some corner of himself that had long been sealed away.

It was a scraping, metallic and cold, like rusted wire being pulled through soft flesh, a sound too ancient to be language and too recent to be memory.

His hand flew to his eye, the left one, where the pain bloomed like fire behind the socket, where pressure cracked against the inside of his skull like a scream that had grown claws. Blood surged down his cheek in rivulets, painting his face in fresh grief, hot and unrelenting.

He staggered sideways, muscles locking against the spasm, breath catching in his throat like the first gasp before a scream.

But through the burning veil, through the shrieking static, he saw her.

Still standing there. Still whole, radiant, and smiling endlessly as if she's a mannequin.

But that smile, gentle as ever, was beginning to tremble.

Her body flickered at the edges, as if the light around her no longer obeyed her presence. Like she was being unraveled by time itself, like a dream slipping from memory the moment one tries to speak it aloud.

She grew dimmer. Smaller. Fainter. And his heart lurched in response, struck with a panic so pure it bypassed reason altogether.

He stepped forward, unthinking, unbalanced, a puppet driven by grief. His knees threatened to collapse.

His chest buckled under the strain. "Wait—" he rasped, the word tearing from his throat as if it had been buried in thorns. He reached toward her like a man reaching into a burning house for the only thing that ever mattered.

But she didn't move. Didn't speak. Didn't reach back.

She only smiled— soft now, almost sorrowful— and in that sadness lived the truth he had always feared. The distance between them had never been hers to cross.

The shriek inside his skull rose again, a crescendo of knives, and he pressed his fingers harder into his eye, as if gouging out the pain might silence the truth screaming through his bones. "Maybe… maybe there's still something—" he whispered, lips coated in blood and broken memory, voice faltering beneath the weight of its own desperation.

"And still… nothing…" The final word fell from him like a stone dropped into a well without a bottom.

"In between us…? I can't remember…"

It came out like a last prayer whispered into a closed grave.

Then, she moved. Not in a slow farewell. Not in mourning.

She turned fast, with a dancer's grace and a dying star's urgency, and ran. Feet kicking up dust and dying light, body dissolving into a blur of motion and brilliance, she sprinted toward the horizon.

And with every step, she grew fainter, smaller, until she was nothing but a smear of gold devoured by an indifferent sky.

And he— left behind, hands still reaching, heart still breaking— stood alone, cradling the silence where her warmth had once lingered, and wept not for her departure, but for the unbearable knowledge that she had been real… and that now, she was truly gone.

And then the world rushed back in, not like a tide but like a judgment, brutal and cold, crashing over him with the force of everything he had tried to forget.

The blood in his ears pounded louder than any voice could reach, a deafening, primal throb that dulled the edge of screams.

Above, the once-glorious light fractured into something sickly and dying, like the last flicker of a candle swallowed by its own wax.

And all around him, the villagers waited— not as strangers, but as sentinels of grief, their eyes glinting with a hunger that was not for justice but for something far more personal, something carved from loss and fed by the fire of mourning too long denied.

Mothers clutched trembling infants as if to shield them from the memory of what they saw.

Fathers gripped weapons with white-knuckled fists, iron forged in anger, trembling under the strain of their hatred.

Even the children, innocent in theory, stood frozen, faces twisted with a fury inherited, not understood— hatred passed down like heirlooms from the lips of those who'd cried too long to speak clearly.

Their mouths opened again. The accusations came— not as words, but as storms.

Shouts, wails, the shattering of names twisted by grief. But none of it truly reached him. Because something worse had returned.

His friends from the crowd— no longer who they were, no longer what they had been— stood in the space between memory and nightmare, their bodies small again, reduced to the age when innocence should have been all they knew.

But they were not whole. Their faces still wore the soft bloom of youth, but it was corrupted, violated by the violence they had endured. Eyes hollowed out, sockets leaking darkness. Skin charred, blackened like overcooked parchment stretched thin. Limbs hung at grotesque angles, bones split and pointing in directions no body should ever allow.

They did not look at him with rage. They did not scream or curse. Their pain spoke softly, and that softness of sorrow, of betrayal, of something sacred broken, was what undid him.

They spoke not in cruelty, but in heartbreak.

You said you'd protect us...

You promised...

You let us die…

"Please…" His voice broke apart like old wood under pressure.

He clutched his head, fingers digging into his scalp as if he could press the pain back in, hold it still, silence it.

"Stop saying… the same thing… I admit it…" The groan that followed was not spoken so much as bled out, thick and trembling with helplessness.

Then came the heat.

His head ignited— not metaphorically, not poetically, but with a searing, divine fury that licked through his nerves and bled into every limb.

His body burned— not like fire, but like judgment, like punishment born from within, as if some old god had decided to purge him from the inside out.

He was aflame, yet still standing, unmoved, a statue forged in regret.

There was no collapse, only endurance. There was no scream, only breath sharpened by agony.

He understood then that he would not die— he was not allowed that mercy.

His flesh would heal, his bones would reset, and the fire would never truly consume him. It would just burn, and burn, and burn.

Until one of the villagers, perhaps a mother, perhaps a child, broke down— not in anger, but in tears. A cry ruptured the mob's unified fury, soft and choked, the sound of grief meeting grief and forgetting how to fight.

And in that moment, he realized: he was not only the monster. He was also the wound. He was the scar they all carried.

And strangely, horribly, impossibly— he meant something to them still.

And the fire dimmed.

Not extinguished, not gone— but it recoiled, recognizing that something had shifted.

The hate was not absolute. The world, for one brief breath, hesitated.

And then, without warning, as if consciousness itself had been peeled back, he was small again.

Not metaphorically— he was a child. Shrunken, fragile, flesh made of fear and memory.

He curled into himself, clutching his chest as if to keep the pieces from spilling out. And the sorrow— that unbearable, devouring sorrow— poured in, rushing through every crack he had ever tried to seal.

He was a boy again, drowning in a sin too vast for childhood to comprehend, in a nightmare authored by his own forgotten hands.

This reality, if it could be called that, was just him, him and the child version of himself, suspended in the space of guilt, held in the jaws of a crime he could not remember choosing.

Their voices returned.

Not in rage this time, but in need. In pleading. In the raw ache of those abandoned and unheard.

The ones who had loved him and died for it.

Their voices rose not as accusations, but as unanswered prayers. A cry from the forgotten. From the betrayed.

He staggered back, gasping, his legs no longer strong enough to bear the echo of their words.

He clamped his hands over his ears, tried to shut it all out— to shut them out— but it was useless. Their grief bypassed the flesh. It carved into the soul.

Every syllable was a knife, and each blade bore his name carved along its edge like a brand.

Tears came, finally. Thick and warm. Tainted by blood.

They spilled down his face in uneven rivers, streaking through the grime, washing nothing away.

He dropped to his knees, once more— not in surrender, but because the weight had finally crushed his spine, cracked the foundation of his pride. His breath came in wet, gasping spasms.

His body rocked, shaken by sobs that felt like the earth itself breaking open beneath him. "It's so hard..." he whispered, not as a confession, but as a truth too vast for words.

"Like I said... It's so hard to explain the weight I'm carrying inside!" he cried, blinking through the blood that now clung to his lashes, droplets falling to the ground like dying stars, each one a final, burning scream from a soul never fully born.

"Why can't you understand it?!" His voice wavered, cracked open down the middle.

"Every part of me aches..." And the words, fragile as they were, carried a sorrow so deep it no longer resembled pain, but reverence.

He wasn't angry anymore. There was no rage. Just the sacred quiet of suffering endured too long to be named.

"My heart… Even if you try to understand, you won't feel the same as I do!" He laughed once, low, hoarse, a broken exhale that scraped up from somewhere beneath the grief.

A laugh that wasn't joy, but the echo of something once human.

"I'm exhausted..." he said, not like a man pleading for rest, but like a soul acknowledging its final truth.

"This is not my selfishness— this was yours. The pride. The lust to live. The hunger to leave a mark on a life you never truly understood."

But in those words, there was no accusation— only something purer than hate. A longing. The most human of all longings. To be forgiven. To be understood. To be seen without judgment.

But the world does not offer peace to the ones it calls monsters.

The villagers still watched. The children still bled. The dead still wept in the hollow of his memory.

And yet, he opened his eyes.

And this time, they did not flicker. They did not tremble.

Something deep inside him, some distant and quiet core that had endured through fire, guilt, blood, and betrayal, had gone still.

Not weak, and it had been decided.

He stood. Not as a broken man. Not as a beast. But as something that had chosen— deliberately, irrevocably— to carry every shard of sorrow without retreat.

His limbs no longer trembled. His spine locked in place. His breath evened into silence. His face, streaked with ash and dried blood and tears, was calm now— eerily calm. He met their eyes— every last one— and did not flinch.

The buzzing faded to a breath. The shouting thinned into the wind. Silence stretched across the space like a burial shroud.

He had been judged. He had been condemned. But he did not cower. He did not wail. He did not plead.

He would bear it— all of it— not because forgiveness was owed or even possible, but because he no longer required it. The pain was part of him now.

The ghosts. The guilt. The grief.

They lived beneath his ribs. Slept in his marrow. Walked behind him like a second shadow.

And he would walk with them until the very end. Without mercy. Without salvation. But with dignity.

Because sometimes the truest kind of strength wasn't found in redemption, but in surviving the unbearable, and doing so with your head unbowed.

Slowly— excruciatingly— he rose. His legs groaned beneath him, raw from the weight of what the world had crushed into his spine. "I have fallen too much," he thought, the corners of his mouth twitching into something that might have once been a smile, "and this… this is my wrongdoing."

Blood clung to him like a second skin— sticky, stinking, sacred. It painted his arms, his chest, and his jaw.

It whispered stories only the dead could understand. Each drop is a memory. Each stain is a sin.

And still, he stood tall, unshaken— not because he had conquered, but because some small, stubborn part of him refused to kneel.

He did not rise as a savior. Nor as a symbol.

He rose as something else. A man hollowed by loss. Hardened by guilt. Reforged in fire.

He rose not despite the pain, but because of it.

His face changed. Slightly. The twitch of his mouth. The set of his brow. Not into rage. Not into madness.

But into stillness. A glacial, knowing stillness.

His eyes— bloodshot, sunken, cracked by tears— now held a glint of iron. Not rage. Not defiance. Something deeper.

He is no longer the boy who begged for forgiveness. No longer the man drowning in regret.

What stood now was something else: a relic of sorrow, worn smooth by the grinding of years, of screams, of silence.

He turned his gaze to the villagers, and in that one breathless instant, they faltered. The pitchforks wavered. The stones hung still in calloused hands.

They saw not a monster. Not a man. But something whole in its ruin— terrifying only because it endured.

He stood there, a monument to what it costs to remember.

And then he spoke. Slowly. Clearly.

Each word dragged from someplace deeper than lungs, closer to soul. His voice was low, rough, as if honed on bone. It cut through the hush like cold iron.

"You think you can destroy me." Each word landed like a hammer against stone.

"You think your hatred can finish what the world started?" He stepped forward.

Blood squelched beneath his boots. Some flinched. It was not a step of revenge. It was the step of inevitability.

"But you don't understand." His voice did not rise. It carried weight.

"You cannot kill what is already dead inside." He paused. Not for effect but for his truth.

"You cannot break what has already turned to dust." Another step. Another breath. The air grew colder.

"You cannot bury me," he whispered, voice trembling— not with fear, but something like reverence.

"Because I am already in the grave of my own."

The crowd recoiled— not from rage, but from the unraveling of it.

Their fury withered beneath the quiet revelation standing before them. The pitchforks wavered. Torches guttered.

Where once there had been howling certainty, now bloomed an insidious confusion, a shared silence that wrapped around them like fog.

Some turned to each other, searching desperately for assurance that no longer existed. Others averted their gaze entirely, unwilling to face what they now saw.

They had come to punish a monster. They had sharpened their hate for a beast.

But what stood there— bleeding, breathing, burning— was not a monster. It was worse.

It was the truth laid bare, standing unflinching beneath their judgment. Suffering given spine.

Grief given form. Pain that had refused to vanish, that had chosen to remain and remember.

And then, slowly, his gaze lifted— drawn not by the mob, but by something beyond them, above them. Toward the horizon, where the light hung pale and dying, golden and fragile like a memory he'd tried not to need.

She was there. Still waiting and watching.

Her silhouette blurred by distance, yet unmistakable. She smiled— softly, impossibly— as if the world hadn't ended, as if there was still something gentle worth looking back for.

It stirred something inside him. Not hope.

Hope had died long ago, buried in shallow graves with all the others. And not forgiveness— he had clawed that illusion from his ribs a lifetime ago.

But something else moved in him now. Slow and quiet. A breath.

The first breath after being buried alive. A throb of resolve, too faint to carry meaning yet too strong to ignore.

The simple, crushing knowledge that he must continue. That someone had to carry the weight. That when the dead could no longer walk, someone had to walk for them. And that someone, broken as he was, was him.

In that trembling light, in that echo of memory where her shadow lingered, he felt it— the name. A name he hadn't allowed himself to say in years.

He winced, clenched his jaw, forced his head to hold it, to dig for it, and pain bloomed in his skull like something splitting. Not a thought. Not a memory. Something deeper. Something sacred.

It came not like thunder, not like fire, but like a whisper buried in ash— a lullaby hummed by a mother long dead, a thread of silk in a storm of knives.

Sarah.

Yeah… That was her name…

That had always been her name.

Sarah, who had looked at him not like the world did, but like someone who saw.

Who hadn't flinched. Who hadn't run. Who had known his darkness and touched it with love anyway. Who had wept for him before he'd even earned her sorrow.

The name hit him like a quiet explosion— no scream, no collapse— just a profound, aching tremor in the chest. A thing he hadn't realized he needed to feel until it bloomed inside him like something long forbidden.

It didn't undo the horror. It didn't stitch shut the scars. But it didn't hurt to say it.

And in this place, that was everything.

He whispered it— Sarah— just once. His lips cracked. His voice rasped. But it came out whole. And it didn't break him.

It gave him one more step. And as his foot touched earth, blood still warm around his heels, ash still clinging to his skin, the memories began to thread their way back.

The first time he saw her, her eyes were like distant rain. The last time— lips trembling, hand outstretched as the flames rose.

The laughter between. The silences. The arguments. The forgiveness. The way she said his name, like it wasn't cursed.

He walked now not to flee, not to fight. He walked through it all. The grief. The memory. The ruin. He walked for her.