The first week felt longer than the eleven years before it.
Days bled into one another, grey and without edges. I stopped keeping count after the third sunrise because hunger made numbers meaningless. You can't measure pain when it never ends.
The slums were louder in daylight merchants yelling, children fighting over scraps, the occasional scream from an alley where someone learned too late that kindness was a luxury. I learned quickly not to look when things happened. Looking made people notice you. And in the slums, being noticed was a curse.
I found a rhythm after a few days. Wake up before dawn. Search the piles near the bakery, or the butcher's waste barrels. If lucky, I'd find bones with a little meat left on them. If not, I chewed the bones anyway. The taste of iron was better than nothing.
Sometimes I stole. Not from people, not yet. From dogs. They were slower when it rained, their fur heavy with mud. I'd toss a stone to make them bark and drop whatever they had in their mouths. The first time I tried, one bit my arm. The wound festered for days, swollen and red. I tied a rag around it and kept going. You can't afford to stop when no one will miss you.
The nights were worse. The cold dug deeper, whispering promises of warmth if I just stopped moving. I saw others who did. Bodies half-covered with rags, eyes open but empty. No one ever buried them. They just disappeared by morning either taken by rats or by men who sold corpses to alchemists. Death had a market here too.
Once, I saw a boy around my age begging near the tavern steps. His voice cracked like mine used to. I almost joined him, but then I saw what happened when someone tossed him a coin. Two older boys appeared out of nowhere, beat him bloody, and took it. The boy didn't even scream. He just held his face and waited for it to stop. After that, I never begged.
Hunger makes you see things differently. The smell of food becomes a memory and a dream at the same time. When someone walked by with bread, my stomach twisted so hard it felt like I was being carved open. One evening, I followed a man carrying a loaf under his arm. I didn't mean to steal it nlat least, not at first. I just wanted to look. But when he turned the corner, I moved without thinking. My hands grabbed, tore, and ran. I heard him shout behind me, but my legs didn't stop.
I hid behind a broken cart and devoured half of it before I could breathe. It was hard and stale, but it was warm inside me. For a moment, I felt alive again. Then the guilt came slow, heavy, choking.
The man's voice haunted me the rest of the night. I didn't know his face, but I knew his anger. It sounded just like Mira's.
By the sixth day, my body started to change. My limbs thinned, my skin cracked. I could see my ribs every time I bent over. The scar on my arm from the dog bite turned black at the edges. I didn't feel pain anymore njust pressure, like something pushing from the inside, trying to break free. I didn't know what it was then, but sometimes when I breathed too fast, the air around me would hum faintly. I thought I was losing my mind.
One night, while trying to sleep under a cart, I felt something warm brush against my neck not a hand, not wind. Just warmth, like a heartbeat. When I opened my eyes, nothing was there. Only the echo of it remained, fading slowly like the last ember of a dying fire. I told myself it was fever. Fever was easier to believe than anything else.
The seventh morning came with sunlight, thin and pale. I crawled out from the shadows and watched the city wake up. The markets opened, children ran, bells rang. Life went on, as if it hadn't forgotten me — but it didn't need to remember either. I was just another face in the mud.
I found a puddle and looked at my reflection. My eyes looked different duller, maybe, or colder. The kind of eyes that had seen too much for a child's face. I touched the water, and the ripples distorted everything, turning my features into a blur.
That's when I realized something simple and terrifying.
No one in the world knew my face anymore. Not even me.