Chapter Fifteen — Quiet Walls
The door closed behind him with a thud that echoed like a final verdict.
Lucien stood in the small stone room, barely larger than a pantry. A single barred window, high on the wall, let in a thin band of light that didn't reach the floor. The cell stank of old blood, sweat, and mildew—but it wasn't the same as the one before.
This one had no others.
No groans.
No weeping.
No filth-caked bodies pressed against his.
No dying men watching him eat.
It was his.
His cage.
A bed of straw and brittle leaves was piled in one corner, uneven and dry. A bucket sat in the other. Nothing else. Not even a guard at the door.
Just silence.
Lucien didn't move for a long time. He just stood there, knees slightly bent, arms hanging limp at his sides, blood flaking from his fingers. His breath rasped in and out of his throat like sandpaper. His muscles were locked, too tight to relax, too tired to do anything else.
He had survived.
Somehow.
He was the last one standing in the pit.
But he didn't feel victorious.
Not even close.
He turned slowly toward the wall, then slid down it, his legs folding beneath him like dead weight. The stone was cold against his back, even in this heat. The straw in the corner looked like a joke—comfort made of broken things.
He didn't cry.
He couldn't.
There was nothing left for tears.
Instead, he stared at his hands.
Knuckles bruised.
Cuts lining his palms.
Dirt and blood caked under his fingernails.
He turned them over. Flexed them.
They shook.
He remembered the last man he killed.
He didn't even know his name.
Didn't know where he was from. What he'd done. Whether he had family. Whether he wanted to fight or was just surviving like the rest of them.
Lucien had strangled him.
With both hands.
The man's face had turned purple.
His mouth had opened.
He hadn't screamed—he'd looked at him.
Like he knew.
Like he saw him, even at the end.
Lucien's stomach churned.
He turned to the side and vomited in the corner, dry heaves and bile spewing out until his ribs ached. The bitter taste burned his throat.
He wiped his mouth on his arm and slumped forward, forehead pressing against the stone floor.
Time passed.
Maybe hours.
He didn't know.
He had no way of telling anymore.
Only that each second was sharp.
Too quiet.
Too loud.
He wasn't sure who he was anymore.
He remembered being thirteen.
He remembered clean sheets, cool air conditioning, vid-screens, and the smell of freshly made tea from his mother's kitchen.
He remembered laughing.
Sleepovers.
The sense that tomorrow was something you could count on.
But now…
Now he didn't feel like a child.
Didn't feel like anything.
His body was older—at least outwardly.
The muscles, the scars, the calloused hands of someone in their twenties.
But it wasn't just the body anymore.
He was older.
Inside.
What he'd done… what he'd become to survive the last few months—it wasn't something a thirteen-year-old should even be able to comprehend.
And yet here he was.
Alone.
In a stone room.
Staring at his hands like they belonged to someone else.
He sat back up eventually, moving like someone ninety years old. Everything ached. His right shoulder had been twisted badly in the fight. His left side had been kicked hard enough to bruise the bone. He pulled off what remained of his shirt and winced at the sight of himself—half-starved, covered in fading bruises and dried wounds, but alive.
Alive.
That word meant something.
Still.
Even now.
He crawled over to the bed of hay and settled into it. The straw scratched at his skin, poked into the bruises, but it was better than the stone floor.
He laid back and stared at the ceiling.
And it hit him.
What the hell am I doing here?
He didn't know what country this was.
What year it was.
What world.
He Hadn't heard his own language spoken.
Hadn't seen a woman, a child, a book.
He didn't even know if this was part of the Trial anymore—or if something had gone wrong.
He thought back to the Trial's start.
Waking up in the desert, confused. Alone.
He remembered walking.
The bones.
The cave.
The water.
Then the spears.
The cell.
It felt like a lifetime ago.
How long had it really been?
Two months?
Three?
Not a year.
Surely not.
And yet, it felt like everything before was fiction now.
The version of him that existed back then—he didn't even remember how that boy talked.
Laughed.
Lucien closed his eyes.
And for the first time since he arrived here,
he wished the Trial had never chosen him.
He wished he had just stayed in bed.
That the message had never come.
That his name had never been called.
Because surviving, it turned out, wasn't living.
Not anymore.