The blackness did not lift gently. It tore away in fragments, like scabs pulled from a wound that refused to heal. Pain clawed through every nerve, yet it was neither sharp nor dull—just persistent, a reminder that my body had survived when it should have died.
I lay in the mud, face pressed against cold, wet soil, my fingers still gripping the monster's heart. Rigor had clenched them into a fist that would not open. Black blood caked my skin, sticky and coarse, mixing with rain and filth from the pit. The heart itself was cold, heavier than any weight I had borne, smaller than a man's fist but somehow denser than all of me.
My chest rose and fell in shallow, rasping breaths. Each inhalation made cracked ribs grind against one another with a white-hot flare. The gashes across my abdomen and chest had slowed, not from healing but because there was little left to bleed. The cold rain seeped through my hair and ran down into my eyes, stinging, washing nothing away.
Footsteps came, measured and deliberate. Not hurried, not panicked. They were watching.
Moloch appeared first. The greatsword he carried was planted point-down in the mud, a marker more than a weapon. His armor was battered, one pauldron torn and flapping. Blood streaked from cuts along his face and arms, but his expression betrayed nothing. Not relief, not disgust, not approval. Only calculation.
"Still breathing," he said, more as observation than comment.
Behind him, Rulf and Grinder moved bodies with efficiency. The scarred woman from the infirmary passed among the wounded, her saw and bucket of tar tools of grim precision. A man screamed once when she worked on his arm, the scream cut off with a rag shoved in his mouth. There was no sentiment, no pause—only movement.
No one rushed to me. I understood why. I was not worth the effort yet. I had killed the creature, yes, but I was still meat. Meat that had served a purpose and could serve another.
Rulf approached me at last, his eyes narrowing at the heart clutched in my hand. With deliberate patience, he pried my fingers open, joint by joint. The cracking sounded like dry sticks. The heart thudded against the mud and rolled to join the others.
Then he hooked an arm beneath my shoulders and hauled me upright. The world tipped violently. Pain lanced through every wound. My mouth opened, but no sound came. There was no point.
They carried me—not gently, not cruelly, just efficiently—back to the infirmary dugout. The scarred woman had already washed her hands in a bucket of gray water. She glanced at me once, expression flat, indifferent.
"Put him on the table."
The plank was slick with old blood. When they dropped me onto it, I felt the impact jar every broken bone. I could not scream. I could only breathe—or attempt to—and every inhalation grated against raw tissue.
The woman worked in silence. Her hands moved like a machine, precise, unflinching. Each stitch through boiling tar pulled on my chest and abdomen like fire, eliciting small, involuntary jerks. I could not thrash, could not plead; paralytic aftershocks still lingered. I could endure, nothing more.
"This will scar," she muttered, not to me, not to anyone.
"You'll breathe shallow the rest of your life."
I watched the lamp flicker, flame small and harsh. It did not promise hope. It burned what little remained of me.
Grinder lingered in the doorway, the cane-sword across his shoulder. Moloch watched silently. Rulf had returned to other tasks.
When she finished, she wrapped my wounds in strips of cloth cut from the shirt of a dead man. The leg—already ruined—was splinted again, roughly, knowing it would never set straight.
"He lives. For now," Grinder said, nodding once before they left.
The infirmary was quiet but for the drip of rain through the canvas. Time became meaningless. Minutes or hours passed. Men came and went. Some stared. Some whispered.
"He crawled after it. Crawled, with that leg."
"Tore the heart out bare-handed."
"Nearly killed Moloch himself."
Fear laced their voices, not admiration. Useful, perhaps. Dangerous, certainly. To be watched.
I lay there, the pain a constant hum, cataloging it as one might catalog a ledger.
Chest: shallow breaths.
Abdomen: stitches burning with every move.
Leg: dead weight, infection brewing.
Hand: phantom fingers itching in the stump.
All permanent.
All earned.
Memories came unbidden.
The boy in the trench, begging. I had not spared him.
The seven convicts who violated me—I had not resisted enough, yet neither had mercy saved me.
Family betrayal, Lior's betrayal, Elyra's face—the laughter of those who once claimed love.
All of it had prepared me to survive, not to forgive.
Pain and humiliation had been my tutors. The pit had been my classroom. The monster was the final exam.
Kindness had never protected anyone. Mercy had prolonged suffering, often their own. Survival demanded observation, calculation, patience. I had learned it slowly, in tiny increments, but I had learned it.
I shifted slightly. Even the movement set every wound ablaze. The pain sang in my chest, but I cataloged it. Not as a complaint, not as despair, but as data.
Moloch had survived because he did not hesitate.
Rulf had survived because he broke what resisted without thought for consequence.
The woman survived because she acted with precision and indifference.
I had survived because I moved when I could, grasped when I must, and squeezed the heart until it stopped.
Not for glory. Not for revenge. Not for honor.
For survival.
Hours passed. The camp settled. Rain continued, thin and persistent, washing mud into every corner, every wound, every crack in the canvas above.
I listened to whispers:
"He's still breathing."
"Won't last the week."
"Bet he does."
Their fear was not admiration. It was recognition of an unfamiliar variable: someone who had endured the impossible and lived.
I tasted blood and rain in my mouth, licked the crusted black from my lips. Hunger gnawed at the edges of consciousness, but it was weak, secondary. Survival came first, digestion second.
I remembered smaller things: the warmth of my sister Lysenne's hair, the taste of bread in the old hall, the laughter of children who did not yet know fear. They felt distant, unreal. Almost alien. My mind had no space for nostalgia. Only efficiency. Only observation. Only waiting.
I considered the woman sewing my chest. Each stitch had burned, but she had done no more than necessary. Precision, not care. She lived because she understood rules. She was efficient. That was why she survived.
I cataloged everything in the pit: who had died, who had survived, who had acted, who had hesitated. Patterns emerged. Rules emerged.
Mercy never worked. Kindness was wasted effort. Only calculation mattered.
Sleep came—or something like it. Fragmented, uneasy. Dreamless, punctuated by muscle spasms and phantom pain. My one good eye opened again to the drip of rain, the sway of canvas, the distant shuffle of men burying bodies.
I imagined future decisions, small ones at first: which wounds to tend, which interactions to endure, which movement to make for survival. Then larger, abstract calculations: how to use pain, fear, observation, and precision to control outcomes without anger, without hatred, without mercy.
I would survive, because dying meant they were right.
That meat stays meat.
I would endure. Slowly, deliberately, with all the patience pain could teach me. The scars would mark every lesson. The limp would teach balance. The missing hand would teach ingenuity.
I would wait.
One day, the scale would tip. Not for revenge. Not for justice. Only efficiency. Only understanding the rules better than those around me.
And that was enough.
Rain fell.
I kept breathing.