Marcus stared at the bloodied corpse until the matchlight guttered and died. The tiny flame left a red smear on his vision that did not go away when the room fell darker; her face remained imprinted behind his eyelids — the slack jaw, the wet sheen of tears, the childish hollowness where a future should have been. His brown eyes were steady and raw, fixed on that small, wasted life as if by sheer force of will he might pull some warmth back into it.
She was so young, he thought, and the thought felt like a hand pressing a bruise.
"We could've saved her," he said at last, his voice low and rough with accusation. He did not look at Soren when he asked, though he already knew the answer. The question was for himself as much as it was for the man kneeling opposite him.
Soren remained prostrate for a few heartbeats longer, fingers tracing no pattern the stone could see. When he finally lifted his face, the change was a flicker — red eyes easing, for the breadth of a breath, toward an unlikely blue that had once belonged to a different life. The shift lasted only an instant and then the old color flooded back, crimson and hard as iron. Marcus watched it like a man watching a clock when something precious is about to break.
"Death," Soren said quietly, "is among this world's cruelties and its mercies in equal measure." He did not sound cruel. His tone carried the exhausted steadiness of someone who had weighed pain for years and found both ends wanting. "For some it snuffs out a life that was only beginning. For others it is the only release from a cruelty that never ceases. That 'citadel' she spoke of — whether it is myth or truth — was her promise of reprieve. That promise made this end something she accepted."
Marcus's jaw tightened. "She didn't ask for this. Not this way. She asked for help."
"There is a difference between asking for help and choosing the manner of one's end," Soren answered. He folded his hands together as if in prayer or in calculation; Marcus could not tell which. "One may beg for deliverance while still clinging to the idea of a tomorrow. Wanting death in the moment you hurt, and welcoming what you believe follows it, are different faculties of the soul."
Marcus thought of the child's face, imagined the places she would never see, the small spring mornings, the first taste of sun on a new road. "She was too young to have done half the things she deserved," he said. "Meeting people. Seeing new places. Learning. She'd been robbed — not only of life, but of the chance to grow into one."
Soren's laugh was brief, humorless. "Only those who have never been broken call death a crime outright. Only those who have never knelt beside the dying claim it a blessing. Religion taught her a path. It gave her hope, or delusion — the difference is a matter of which you prefer to call virtue." He looked at Marcus with a flat intensity that made the tunnel seem colder. "Yet," he added, voice sharpened by something like resolve, "if that faith can make the last moments gentler, is it ours to deny them? Is it our right to demand a longer suffering in the name of some abstract justice?"
A distant sound cut through the argument — metal scraping on stone, a cruel, grinding whisper that made the very air in the corridor tremble. The sound was followed by a shriek, high and animal, the kind that announced the presence of predators or of men who had resolved to be monsters. The tunnel took the noise and returned it, elongated and spectral, until each echo felt like an accusation.
Soren's face hardened. The softness that had been there when he consoled the girl retreated, replaced by something narrower and far more dangerous. Marcus felt the shift like a change in the wind before a storm; the two men, standing amid the ruin of a ruined life, became a single, terrible thing.
"Regardless of whether you agree with her choice," Soren said, voice now coiled and deliberate, "we owe her what she asked."
Marcus's fist closed around the empty matchbox until his knuckles whitened. The memory of the girl's last whisper — Kill him for me — seared through the quiet.
"We must grant her dying wish," Marcus finished, the affirmation burning hot.
Their voices rose together, a single oath in that subterranean cathedral of blood and bone. "AND KILL THIS BASTARD!" they shouted, and the tunnel swallowed the sound, returning only the echo of a promise that would not be kept in silence.