Days blurred into one another. Work, lash, hunger, sleep. The cycle never broke.
But something shifted in Kael. Subtle. Fragile.
He still reached for the rope at night. Still whispered of ending it. But when Tomas's small hand brushed his arm in the fields, when another slave shared half a crust of bread, when laughter—quiet, cautious—escaped from cracked lips in the dark, Kael's despair faltered.
"Why do they bother?" he asked one night, voice rough inside me. "They know it won't last. They know it ends in pain."
"Because even a moment without pain," I whispered, "is worth fighting for."
Silence stretched long, heavy. Kael pressed his forehead against the shack wall, his breath shaky. For the first time, his tears came—not the bitter, silent ones he had buried for years, but raw, trembling sobs that shook his shoulders.
It was grief. It was surrender. But not to the rope. To life. To the unbearable weight of carrying it.
And through those tears, I felt it—the smallest crack in the chains binding him.
Not broken. Not freed.
But cracked.
Enough for light to slip in.