Marcus squinted, his lashes clinging together as though the darkness itself had weight. For a long, brittle moment, he didn't dare move. He didn't even look around. The first thing that greeted him was not the sight, but the smell. It struck him like a hammer. A stench of death, of rot and clotted blood, of sinew left too long in stagnant water. The odor hung thick in the air, clawing at his nostrils and throat until he gagged sharply, his stomach tightening with revolt. He pressed his lips together, forcing back the bile, swallowing hard. The taste of copper lingered on his tongue, though he couldn't be sure if it was his imagination, or if the air itself had turned metallic.
The space he had stumbled into was utterly black. The kind of darkness that smothers, swallowing every outline and every certainty. It was the type of darkness that made men feel blind and small, lost in a chasm without end. Marcus felt the walls closing in even though he couldn't see them. His breath was too loud, echoing against unseen stone, a reminder that he was not alone here—that silence pressed back against him, patient and unyielding.
He knew better than to linger. With shaking fingers, he reached into the battered canvas backpack slung across his shoulders. The bag was heavy, stuffed with supplies he had collected during his travels through the southern wastes, though it seemed more like a burden now than salvation. Still, he knew where to search. His hand brushed past dried rations, parchment maps, a water flask, before finding the small wooden box pressed flat against the back pocket. Matches.
Striking one against the side, he coaxed it into life. A hiss, a spark, then the sudden bloom of fire. Thin smoke curled upward, dancing in frail ribbons that vanished into the oppressive dark. A pale red glow spread outward, weak but defiant, casting the chamber into unsettling relief.
The sight that emerged before his eyes made his blood chill. The floor was sandstone, yes, but stained and warped until it was unrecognizable. Dark streaks of dried blood had seeped into every crack, giving the rock a mottled, diseased look. Shattered fragments of bone jutted out like broken teeth. Flesh—decayed, twisted, discarded—littered the floor in grotesque heaps. Severed limbs, twisted spines, and things half-recognizable as human or otherwise were strewn about with no sense of reverence or order. It was not the chaos of battle. It was deliberate. A slaughterhouse.
Marcus's gaze caught on a shape to his right. At first, it looked human. A body slumped against the wall, limbs rigid in death. But as the light licked across its form, the wrongness revealed itself. Its arms and legs were laced with jagged black spikes, curling from bone like grotesque armor. Its skin was not flesh but hardened, shell-like, a carapace dulled with blood. A scitterbug.
He froze. He had heard of them before—though few humans had seen them closely in years. Scitterbugs were no ordinary creatures. They had once been revered, renowned for their indomitable strength, their endurance that seemed impossible, their ability to regenerate from wounds that would kill other races outright. They were not beasts but a people, an ancient race that had walked alongside humankind in the building of empires. It was said that without their labor, the Great Palace of Zul'Azar would never have stood, its walls carved from obsidian and gold by the hands of thousands of scitterbugs.
But history was rarely kind. When the palace was complete, humanity had turned against its allies. Prejudice spread like wildfire—fear of their resilience, envy of their strength. Stories were twisted, painting them as monsters, as vermin that grew too close to human cities. And so they were cast out, driven into exile. Marcus remembered hearing old accounts—how they had left with dignity, taking their children and vanishing into the wild reaches. For years, the scitterbugs had been little more than whispers, their existence fading into rumor.
Yet here they were. And peace had not followed them into exile.
Marcus lowered himself to one knee, holding the trembling match closer to the body. His throat tightened when he saw the smaller shape clutched within the adult's hardened arms. A child. A scitterbug infant, its delicate shell cracked, its tiny body lifeless. The adult's chest had caved inward, but the manner of death was far too peculiar, too intentional. Both eyes and ears were gone. Not gouged, not torn—removed. Cleanly. As if harvested.
A sick realization spread through him like frost. This wasn't slaughter for cruelty. It was farming. Someone had been harvesting scitterbugs.
He knew why. Everyone had heard whispers of it, though most dismissed them as myths. Their bodies were more than strong—they were valuable. Their regenerative properties were unmatched. Flesh, bone, organs—all could heal if cultivated, transplanted, refined. A single vial of scitterbug marrow was said to cure fevers that no human physician could treat. In the hands of alchemists, their flesh could knit torn ligaments or mend shattered bones in hours. There were even rumors that their parts could halt death itself, though Marcus had never believed such tales. But seeing this place… he could believe anything now.
He stood, his shadow long against the broken wall. His match flickered, its flame threatening to vanish at any moment. Ahead, the tunnel stretched deeper into darkness, walls weeping with damp. He took a tentative step forward, the crunch of bone under his boot echoing. More bodies lined the path—scitterbugs of all sizes, their corpses stacked as though awaiting collection. Some bore clean cuts, others grotesque disfigurements. The air grew heavier with each step, as if the tunnel itself was breathing.
Then something caught his eye. Movement. Barely perceptible, but there. One body lay differently from the rest—its chest shuddering with faint, ragged breaths. Marcus's pulse quickened.
He dropped to his knees, holding the flame closer. It was a young scitterbug—female, from the curve of her frame and the softer ridges of her shell. Her body was draped in leather garments, simple yet functional, though now caked with blood, grime, and filth. Her limbs trembled weakly, the life inside her clinging with desperation.
Her eyes met his. Dark, luminous, but dulled with exhaustion. She began to weep. It was not a sharp, panicked sob but a quiet, hollow cry, the kind that came when the body had no strength left to scream. The sound pierced him more deeply than any shriek would have.
Marcus reached out, resting his hand gently on her shoulder. The shell was cold, clammy with blood. She did not recoil, nor did she acknowledge him. She was lost in her own storm of despair. Her lips moved, whispering something over and over.
He leaned closer, straining to catch the words. Her voice was cracked, broken, carrying an accent unlike any human tongue. He could not understand. The phrase was foreign, repeated with feverish insistence, as though the act of saying it was the only tether she had left to her sanity.
The match trembled in his hand. Its light swayed, shadows stretching long down the tunnel walls. Around him, the silence pressed closer, listening.
And Marcus, for the first time in many years, felt small. Very small.
"H–hey… what happened here?" Marcus's voice cracked in the silence, the words sounding fragile and thin in the heavy, stagnant air. He wasn't even sure she could hear him. He spoke anyway, his tone soft but urgent, trying to reach through the fog of whatever had broken her.
The young scitterbug didn't respond. Her head tilted slightly, but her eyes stared past him, glassy and distant. Her lips moved, whispering the same alien phrase over and over again. The sound was soft, wet with exhaustion—less like speech and more like a prayer uttered by someone who had already given up on being answered.
Marcus shifted closer, the match flickering dangerously between his fingers. "I'm sorry—but what are you saying?" he asked again, his words tumbling out quickly. "What's your name?" His voice rose slightly, desperate for an anchor, a sign of life in her expression.
For a heartbeat she didn't move, didn't breathe, didn't exist except as a broken shell clutching at the tattered edges of consciousness. Then her eyes slid up to meet his. They were dark, deep, reflecting the tremor of the matchlight in their depths. And when she spoke again, it was in his language.
But he wished she hadn't.
"Death comes to those who deserve it."
Her voice was a hushed monotone, like a child reciting a lesson drilled into her bones. Her trembling hands curled slightly as she spoke, claws scraping against the stone floor. She did not blink, did not break eye contact. It was as though something else was speaking through her—an echo of something she had been forced to memorize.
Marcus felt a knot form in his chest. His throat tightened. "You don't deserve to die," he said. His words came out steadier than he felt, each syllable weighted with a conviction he hoped she would hear. He reached out and took her hands in his, the shell cold and slick beneath his palms. "Do you hear me? You don't."
For the first time, her mantra ceased. She stared at him in silence, her breathing shallow. Something flickered behind her eyes—fear, confusion, perhaps even a sliver of hope. But then her gaze shifted. Her pupils darted from side to side, scanning the darkness.
"What is it?" Marcus asked, his grip loosening.
Her eyes snapped toward something across the chamber. Her hand rose shakily, a trembling claw extending to point at a ripped-up bag lying near a cluster of shattered bones. The gesture was weak, almost imperceptible.
Marcus turned his head, following the line of her finger. The bag lay in the shadows like a corpse itself, its leather flayed open, seams burst. He glanced back at her. She tried to move, to push herself up, but she didn't. She couldn't.
It wasn't until he looked down that he understood.
From the waist up, she was whole—scratched, bloodied, but alive. Below the waist, there was nothing whole to speak of. Her legs were gone. Severed clean at the hips, leaving only mangled stumps slick with fresh blood. It was a wound beyond any human endurance. The fact that she still clung to life at all was a testament to the scitterbug's infamous resilience.
Marcus's pupils dilated. His breath caught in his throat and a strangled sound rose up—half gasp, half scream. Before it could escape, her trembling hand shot up and covered his mouth with what little strength she had left. Her claws were cold against his lips, her shell heavy but shaking. Her eyes, once hollow, now burned with quiet desperation.
She pointed again at the bag.
Marcus hesitated only a moment. This was no longer about him. This was her last request—he could see it in the way her hands trembled, in the fading light of her eyes. He nodded once and moved quickly, boots crunching over fragments of bone and flesh as he crossed the chamber. The smell of iron grew thicker as he reached down, grabbing the bag and dragging it back to her side.
Her claws fumbled with the bag's torn straps, rummaging through its contents with feverish insistence. And then, for the first time since he'd found her, her expression changed. A faint light flickered across her face, a fragile glimmer of something like relief. She pulled out a book—an old, weathered leather tome bound with cracked stitching.
Marcus leaned closer. The matchlight caught on faint, worn letters etched into its cover, but they were too faded, too scoured by time for him to read. It didn't matter. The title was irrelevant. The way she held it told him everything. This book was important. This book mattered.
Her claws flipped it open, pages curling and cracking as though the book itself were alive and resisting. On the first page, Marcus caught sight of the same words she had spoken moments ago—words scrawled in a hand that was not hers, burned into the page as though with a hot blade:
"Death comes to those who deserve it."
The letters seemed to ripple in the dim red glow, their edges dark and wet as though still bleeding ink. Marcus's stomach turned. His fingers trembled, the match hissing in his grip. He felt, for a brief, chilling moment, that the book was staring back at him.
And in the silence of the tunnel, the only sound was her ragged breath, the whisper of pages turning, and the steady drip of blood on stone.
"What… what is this?" Marcus asked, his voice cracking under the strain of the silence. His eyes stayed fixed on the book, its weathered leather cover exuding an aura of age, secrecy, and dread.
The girl's hands trembled as she traced the spine of the tome. Her voice was faint, nearly breaking with each word, but there was a strange certainty in it—like someone repeating a creed they had lived their whole life by.
"This… this is my way of life," she whispered, flipping gently back to the cover page. Her claws lingered on it, stroking the faint grooves of the symbols carved into its surface, as though touching it anchored her fading soul.
Her eyes lifted to Marcus, glassy yet unwavering. "This is the way of the almighty and all powerful." Her voice caught for a moment, turning wistful, almost reverent.
Marcus's brows furrowed, confusion spilling into his tone. "The almighty and all powerful… who?"
The girl's breath shuddered in her chest. Then she spoke, her gaze piercing into him, voice heavy with both reverence and fear.
"The creator of creators. The destroyer of destroyers. The one who has never lost. The one who dictates all. The one who forsakes the unworthy." She leaned closer, her stare burning through Marcus's composure like hot iron. "He is Brahamut. He is the one and only true god of this world."
Her words echoed unnaturally in the cavern, as though the stone itself repeated them. For a long moment, Marcus felt as if the oppressive dark around them drew in tighter, listening.
Then, with fragile determination, she lifted both hands and placed them over her eyes. Her voice softened into something Marcus recognized as a prayer, though the cadence and rhythm were foreign to his ear.
"Oh great Brahamut, who lives in glory, may you bless my soul and allow it to reach the Eternal Citadel of the Sky. Bless me, oh great savior, and bless my fallen brethren who've died before me. Thank you, oh great lord… and may you forever rule across the lands, the skies, and the seas."
When the last syllable left her lips, silence fell like a shroud. She lowered her trembling hands, her hollow gaze returning to Marcus. And for the first time, her expression was not empty—it was pleading.
"Now… please kill me." Her voice cracked, carrying a weight heavier than her young frame could bear. "That is the only way I will reach the Eternal Citadel."
Marcus stumbled back, shaking his head violently. "What?! No! I'm not going to kill you!" His voice thundered in the dead air, half fury, half disbelief. "We need to get you to a doctor—someone who can—"
"It is already too late."
The words came from deeper down the hall, echoing with grim certainty. Marcus froze. He didn't need to see the speaker to know the truth of the statement. The voice was calm, deliberate—resigned.
From the darkness, a figure emerged. Soren. His presence was quiet yet commanding, the dim light from Marcus's dying match outlining the scarred planes of his face. His eyes were heavy, filled with the kind of sorrow borne only by men who had seen too much death to be surprised by it anymore.
He knelt beside the girl with a tenderness that belied the harshness of his voice. "How would you like to die, my sister?" he asked gently, his tone wrapping around her like a blanket in the cold.
Her composure cracked. Tears welled in her eyes, rolling freely down her cheeks. Her sobbing was frail, broken, but genuine. "J-just… as quick as possible," she managed between breaths.
Soren nodded once, firm and understanding. "Okay."
With deliberate motion, he reached for the holster at his hip and drew a pistol. The metallic click of him chambering a round cut through the silence like a blade. He looked at her with steady sorrow, the weight of what he was about to do pressing into the lines of his face.
"Any last words?" he asked softly, voice hushed with reverence.
The girl's lips parted, but she said nothing. Only silence, broken by the ragged sound of her breathing.
"Alright then," Soren murmured. "May you rest in peace."
He leveled the gun against her heart. For a heartbeat, the chamber held its breath. The match in Marcus's hand guttered low.
The gunshot cracked like thunder in the tunnel. Her body shuddered once, then went still. The light in her eyes dimmed, snuffed out as quickly as a flame in the wind. Her head slumped forward, the faint ghost of a smile lingering for half a second before fading into stillness.
But before death took her completely, her lips moved. A whisper so faint it could have been mistaken for the wind, yet both Marcus and Soren heard it clearly:
"Kill him for me. Kill that bastard. Avenge my people."
The words hung in the air, heavier than the smoke curling from Soren's pistol.
Soren rose slowly, holstering his weapon. He stood over her body in silence, his expression unreadable, before finally speaking. His voice was low, weighted with grim promise.
"Don't worry," he said, his tone sharp with conviction. "We will."
Then his gaze drifted upward, into the suffocating black overhead, as though searching for something beyond stone and shadow. His lips parted in a whisper, too soft for Marcus at first, but clear in its despair.
"If there really is a god," he muttered bitterly, "why must life be this cruel?"