The mud tasted like copper and dead leaves.
Ruhan tried to push himself up, but his left arm collapsed under his weight. He slumped back into the freezing sludge. He didn't scream for mercy this time. He didn't have the breath for it.
Every inhale caught on the jagged edges of his broken ribs, creating a wet, rattling sound in his chest.
The rain fell in sheets, washing the thick, hot blood from his split forehead into his eyes. Everything was a blurry, bruised gray.
A shadow stepped into his line of sight, blocking the rain.
The man looked down at him. His unkempt hair was plastered to his face by the storm, but Ruhan could see his expression clearly. There was no sadistic grin. No maniacal laughter.
The man just looked... tired. Disappointed.
"Is this really it?" the man murmured. His voice was quiet, but it carried perfectly through the howling wind. "I thought you would be harder to kill this time. The Ahmed blood used to mean something."
Ruhan's jaw worked, but only a bloody froth spilled over his lips.
The man sighed, shifting his grip on the massive battle-axe in his right hand. Sharp, violent arcs of purple lightning crackled across the dark metal, filling the air with the sharp stench of ozone.
"You weren't like this before," the man said, tilting his head as if studying a broken puzzle. "You were supposed to become something dangerous. Instead, you're just crawling in the dirt."
Ruhan gritted his teeth, his fingers digging into the mud.
Crawl.
The primal, animal instinct to survive screamed in his head. His right leg was shattered at the knee, dragging uselessly behind him, but he pulled himself forward by his remaining hand.
He had to get away.
Through the haze of rain and blood, he saw a flash of white standing near the treeline.
Linara.
A phantom memory flared in his dying brain.
The sun, the grass, the wooden training sword in his small hands.
"I'll be the strongest," seven-year-old Ruhan had promised her, puffing out his chest. "I'll carry the Ahmed name. I'll protect you."
It was a lie. Even then, it had been a lie.
Ruhan hadn't wanted the weight of that name. He had always hated the expectations, the heavy stares of the family elders, the suffocating pressure to be extraordinary when he knew, deep down, he was fundamentally broken.
He had just wanted to be normal. He had just wanted her to look at him with pride.
I'm sorry, he thought, reaching a trembling hand toward the white figure in the rain. I just want to live.
His fingers brushed against something solid. He clung to it, a desperate sob caught in his throat.
"Who are you reaching for?"
The voice came from directly above him. The illusion of Linara dissolved into the harsh gray rain. Ruhan hadn't crawled toward safety; he had crawled in a circle, wrapping his hand around the man's heavy, mud-caked boot.
The man looked down at Ruhan's hand.
With a fluid, almost casual motion, he swung the axe.
The purple lightning flashed.
Ruhan didn't feel the pain immediately. He only felt a strange lightness, followed by the sickening realization that his right arm now lay several feet away, smoking in the rain.
A delayed, hollow gasp tore from Ruhan's throat as his body convulsed, arching violently into the mud.
"Stop trying," the man said quietly, raising the axe again. With two more methodical, brutal strikes, he severed Ruhan's legs at the thighs.
It wasn't done out of malice. It was done to stop the crawling.
Ruhan lay there, a ruined, limbless torso. The pain was so absolute that it pushed past agony and became a strange, floating numbness. He was fading. His vision was tunneling into a pinpoint.
But as his cheek rested in the sludge, his failing eyes locked onto something mere inches from his face.
A human skull.
Not placed. Not resting. It simply was—half-buried in the mud, as though the world had grown around it and failed to swallow it whole.
Its surface was ancient, yellowed by time and something darker. The hollow eye sockets drank in the stormlight, swallowing each flicker of lightning before it could exist.
Then, the storm changed.
The rain did not stop—it bent. Heavy drops curved mid-fall, sliding around the skull as though repelled by an unseen boundary. Thunder still roared, but distant now… muffled… like something heard from deep underwater.
"...Again."
The voice did not travel through the air.
It surfaced inside him.
Slow. Grinding. Vast.
Like the groan of rusted iron gears turning for the first time in an eternity.
"Still hollow. Still… breaking."
Ruhan tried to breathe. Tried to think. But his mind was unraveling, collapsing into a single, desperate instinct—
I don't want to die.
The skull did not respond to his fear.
It did not acknowledge it.
"You will continue."
No question.
No offer.
No mercy.
The words settled into him with the weight of inevitability—like gravity remembering its purpose.
Something gave way inside his mind.
Not a decision. Not consent.
Just… surrender.
And then—
It began.
As he surrendered, something inside him shifted.
Then—
It started with a single fracture.
A memory surfaced—sunlight, laughter, silver hair—
Linara.
For a fleeting instant, it burned brighter than everything else.
And then—
It was gone.
Not faded.
Not blurred.
Gone.
As if it had never existed.
Ruhan's thoughts stuttered.
What… was that?
Before he could grasp it, another crack spread through his mind.
A room. A voice. His mother's face—
Erased.
Another.
His name being called. Training grounds. Laughter—
Erased.
Faster now.
Moments. Days. Years.
Everything.
His past did not fade—it collapsed.
Memories didn't leave one by one; they were torn out in chunks, devoured by the silent void behind those empty sockets.
Ruhan tried to hold on.
To anything.
A name. A face. A reason—
But there was nothing left to hold.
Even the need to hold on began to slip.
Panic surged—but it had no shape.
No cause.
No origin.
Because even that… was being taken.
His identity fractured.
Who…?
The thought couldn't finish.
There was no "who" anymore.
Only a hollow awareness, stripped clean.
Cold.
Empty.
Open.
The skull did not move.
But the void within it deepened.
And when the last fragment was taken—
There was no Ruhan left to remember what had been lost.
Only a vessel.
The unnatural silence shattered. The roar of the storm crashed back into his ears.
The man stood over him, raising the purple-crackling axe high into the air.
"A pity," the man whispered.
The blade came down.
Ruhan felt the impact. He felt the sickening severance of his own neck, felt the world spin wildly as his head was kicked away, splashing into the murky canal water.
He was dead. The deal had failed.
But as his vision went permanently black, there was no bright light. There was no angelic choir.
There was only a terrifying, violent sensation of sinking. His consciousness collapsed inward, dragged backward through a suffocating, lightless vacuum, pulled by an invisible chain.
As the man on the road raised his hand, calling down a massive pillar of purple lightning to incinerate Ruhan's remains to ash, a final, echoing whisper reverberated through the collapsing void of Ruhan's mind.
"Two remain."