Aridity was a taste—sharp, metallic, and endless.
Fissures mapped the inside of her cheeks. Her tongue, a dry slab of useless muscle, scraped over them, hunting for a phantom trace of moisture.
She was a sculpture of suspended agony. Two iron rods, driven through the corners of her mouth, anchored her skull to the coffin's cold shell. Her jaw was locked open in a silent, eternal scream.
Gravity pinned her limbs, but it was the spikes driven through her wrists and ankles that held her true. Years of immobility had dulled her regeneration, yet the curse of her biology persisted. She could feel the granular twitch of muscle fibers trying to knit, the flesh attempting to swallow the iron, only to tear itself apart against the metal with every involuntary spasm.
Time was measured in drops. Once a cycle, the dark gave way to a trickle of water—just enough to reset the dying process. Was it time? Or had they finally granted her the mercy of oblivion?
Then—vibration.
It traveled through the floor, up the casing, and into her bones. Footsteps. Heavy. Deliberate. Echoing in the tomb.
Muffled voices bled through the hull. The words were indistinct, liquid sounds, but the cadence was unmistakable. Anticipation.
The vibration stopped directly overhead. The silence that followed was heavier than the earth.
Then, the screech of metal on metal—the sound of a seal breaking.
The lid dragged back.
Light, blinding and violent, stabbed into her dilated pupils. As her vision swam into focus, shapes coalesced above her. They stood in silhouette, haloed by the torchlight, peering down into her iron box.
Their eyes glinted with a cruel, starving curiosity.
And they were smiling.
Her eyes didn't just narrow; they burned. If will were kinetic, she would have flayed the skin from their faces.
"Gods, the reek," one spat, wrinkling his nose and stepping out of the direct draft of the coffin.
"Rot and rust," the other agreed. A heavy boot slammed into the side of her iron shell. The vibration rattled her teeth against the rods. "Can't believe Hephryx is putting coin on this."
Putting coin?
The word hung in the haze, alien and sharp. Before she could process it, gravity lurched. They hoisted the coffin, and the sudden motion sent nausea rolling through her like a black tide.
She tried to force a sound, a demand, a curse—but her throat was a desert. All that emerged was a dry, skeletal rasp, followed by a cough that felt like inhaling broken glass.
The journey was a rhythmic torture. Sway. Lurch. Sway.
Through the gap in the lid, the ceiling blurred past. Recessed crystal lamps bled a sickly, necrotic blue light, casting long, shivering shadows that danced across her prison.
Where? Where does this tunnel end?
She strained her neck, testing the anchor points for the millionth time. The rods held fast, humming with a cold, numbing frequency. If it were ordinary steel, she would have sheared through it with her teeth on the first day. This was woven with magic.
She ceased struggling and retreated into the dark behind her eyelids. Only pain waited outside. It was the only promise kept.
She had believed the lie: Strength is absolute. She was the apex here, the one who tore through steel and bone to make them look. To make them proud. She thought she had succeeded.
But they didn't want the strongest. They wanted the correct one. They chose her sister.
She was the discard. The jagged prototype. Because she looked wrong. Because her mind was a cracked mirror they couldn't polish.
Their fault. The thought was a mantra, burning hotter than the thirst. They made her.
The reverie shattered as the world ended in a concussive crash.
The coffin slammed against stone, jarring every wasted bone in her body. The blue light vanished, swallowed by absolute shadow.
But the air... the air changed. The sterile metallic taste of the corridor was gone, replaced by a thick, suffocating musk. Old blood. Sweat. Fear.
Her stomach turned over.
No. Not here. Anywhere but here.
The escape was brutal.
The rods binding her jaw didn't yield; they tore, ripping the corners of her mouth in two jagged, wet lines. Then the nails securing her limbs hissed out, and the coffin—its purpose spent—splintered and collapsed around her in a deafening rain of scrap metal.
Air rushed in. It was cool, sharp, and biting, a shocking contrast to the sickly, humid rot of her prison. It stung her raw skin, burning her lungs, and she inhaled it like a precious drug.
She tried to rise. Nothing. Her muscles, withered by years of static agony, remained dead and heavy. Her legs were stone; her jaw hung open, slack and ruined.
Ahead, the vast, iron gates of the chamber groaned, the sound of grinding metal shattering the cavernous silence. Beyond them, a blinding wash of light spilled over a massive expanse of sand.
The arena.
But something was wrong. Profoundly wrong.
The ceiling was gone—the dome ripped away to reveal an impossibly pale, cloudless sky. The sand was freshly raked, the walls polished marble, decorated with red, untarnished banners. This was not the blood-rusted, urine-stinking pit where she had fought and killed fifteen years prior.
Her chest trembled with each ragged, wet breath. Across the polished sand, the opposing gates shuddered open.
Shapes emerged, crawling into the light—other experiments, each a unique architectural disaster. One creature lurched, its fused metal arm swinging a monstrous, useless arc; another stumbled on legs of violently uneven length, its ribcage jutting like broken knives. A third scraped along the dirt, propelled by a spine bent into an impossible S-curve, its jaws split and hanging loose.
She had never faced this many simultaneous aberrations.
The thought had barely formed when a sudden, powerful gust slammed into her. One of the guards—still behind the ruins of the coffin, hand raised—had unleashed a burst of targeted wind.
She was hurled outward. In the arena.
She hit the ground hard, skidding across the dirt, the velocity tearing open the wounds on her limbs and face. Pain flared, immediate and sharp, a shocking reminder of sensation. Yet, moving like this—the involuntary roll, the scrape, the feeling of velocity—was intoxicating. After years of stillness, every collision was a defiant proof of life.
Screams erupted, sudden and piercing, not of pain but of excitement.
Her eyes snapped upward. Endless rows of faces stared down—draped in gleaming fabrics, their jewels catching the sky's cold light. Their skin was pristine, their smiles predatory. Nobles.
Their scent followed: sweet, complex, and suffocating. It was not the familiar tang of sweat or fresh blood, but perfume and powder—a suffocating aroma that clung to the air as they leaned forward, cheering their violence.
Her gaze climbed higher—past the rows of soft, watching faces—to the vast platform suspended above the chaos.
A single figure stood there, unmoving, framed against the pale sky.
Hephryx.
She knew him. He was the author of her existence, the architect of her terror—the one she had once killed for, clawing for a flicker of recognition. She never understood the compulsion, but even after years of iron and silence, some primal mechanism within her still clung to his approval. He was the only constant: the only one who didn't look at her and flinch. He was the one who, in a rare moment, had called her his masterpiece.
When the market rejected her, he hadn't blamed the product. He blamed the buyers, calling them shallow, incapable of appreciating true potential. And somehow, that minimal act of deflection had been enough to tether her heart.
The thought snapped her back to the immediacy of the arena floor.
Everything dissolved except the figure on the platform. She didn't want him to see her like this—exposed, broken, stripped bare of any tactical dignity. Part of her, the broken, old part, still desperately wanted his assessment to be favorable.
His gaze drifted down toward the pit, cold and absolute. When he spoke, his voice was amplified, impossibly high and sharp, carving through the cheering crowds and the settling dust.
"Subjects… our project here has finally come to an end. After years of relentless research and dedicated experimentation, one can't help but feel a touch of nostalgia. We have achieved many remarkable things together."
He paused, his eyes narrowing slightly, scanning the pitiful shapes scattered on the sand.
"You, however, were not one of them. But that is the nature of progress—greatness demands a mountain of failures. You paved the way for our greatest creations."
The dismissal was surgical, cutting deeper than any spike had.
He lifted a hand, almost casually. "So today, I've decided one of you will be granted freedom. If—" his voice sharpened, the pitch rising to an exhilarating peak, "—you prove yourselves better than the rest."
Freedom.
The word struck her like a physical blow, for a split second, the noise of the crowd was replaced by a high, thin ringing. Had the thirst finally broken her mind?
Freedom? It was a concept without definition, a parameter outside of her known programming.
"That's right," Hephryx continued, his smile a thin, cold line that swept across the arena." I gathered you all here for precisely that purpose—the last subject standing walks away."
He lowered himself onto the platform's ornate seat, a figure of serene cruelty. The immense stadium fell into a heavy, suffocating silence.
The silence stretched—so long the air itself seemed to contract.
Then, a faint sound broke it.
A wet, sharp stab.
A gargled, desperate breath.
A soft thump as a body toppled onto the red sand.
Her eyes, the only part of her that still obeyed, dragged toward the sound.
One of the creatures—the one with the jutting ribs—lay still, its neck leaking crimson into the dirt. Its attacker, a twisted thing dragging a length of broken chain, hadn't even had time to turn its head.
A massive, bone-white blur descended. A hammer came down with a sickening, wet crunch, flattening the killer where it stood.
Chaos exploded around her. Metal clashing, dull meat striking meat. Screams, high and guttural, tore across the vast arena. Blood and sweat instantly thickened the air, making it heavy and suffocating.
Panic clawed up her throat. Move. I have to move. Stabilize. Fight.
But her body remained a useless anchor. Her limbs stayed heavy, dead, and utterly disobedient.
Heavy footsteps cut through the noise—slow, methodical, deliberate. Each one sent a low tremor through the ground, drawing closer and closer, ignoring the carnage around them.
She forced her neck to twitch, a desperate, minuscule effort. Something deep inside her spinal column cracked with the effort, sending a flash of fresh pain.
And then she saw him.
A monstrous figure, part man, part polished exoskeleton. Armor plates gleamed under the pale sunlight, giving him the terrifying form of a towering insect. The hammer in his hands was a mountain of iron, easily larger than her entire withered body.
Her heart slammed against her ribs, a frantic prisoner desperate to escape.
She smashed her head against the ground in a desperate, final plea to her paralyzed body. React. Survive.
Nothing.
The footsteps stopped. Right beside her. The scent of ozone and freshly oiled metal overwhelmed the perfume of the nobles.
She dragged her gaze upward.
The hammer ascended, blocking the sunlight.
It descended.
Darkness, absolute and merciful, swallowed her before the sound of impac
t had even time to register.
Her mind fractured. The iron shell of the present cracked, and the past—bright, brutal, and saturated with the memory of power—flooded in.