The rain fell harder after the covenant was sealed, turning the alleys into rivers of filth.
Lonir stood just beyond the cemetery's rusted gate, his shoes sinking into black mud. The dark robe clung to his skin like a second, heavier hide. The gold belt at his waist looked absurdly ornate — too richly worked for a man who had spent years begging for scraps.
From it hung the Covenant Anchor: a scorched black card with fraying edges like burnt parchment, bearing the faint, distorted image of a horned figure bound in thorns, its face tilted toward the sky in a silent accusation aimed at the world.
He ran his fingers across it once.
Cold. Rigid. His arm trembled faintly — like the first shiver before a fever takes hold.
He remembered the path of the knife across his throat. No scar there now. No blood. But the ghost of the steel remained, haunting the act of swallowing, a spectral line that stung each time he tried to swallow the falling raindrops.
He began to walk.
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The narrow passage ahead was familiar — the same shortcut he had taken on countless nights back when he still had a roof over his head, however leaking and wretched it was.
The street-lamps, fueled by a mineral the city called Volta, flickered behind cracked shutters. A drunkard muttered curses without reason. A woman's scream cut off suddenly somewhere nearby — likely nothing good. Ordinary sounds for this side of the city. Nothing that should have mattered.
Three figures stepped out from behind a wall.
"Nice coat," said the tallest. His knife was already drawn, rain sliding down the length of the blade. "Hand it over. The belt too. Looks like we found tonight's entertainment money."
The other two spread apart. One held a broken bottle. The other had split knuckles and a hungry look.
Lonir stopped.
No pulse of fear. No flash of anger. Just a vast emptiness echoing where those emotions used to live.
He closed his eyes.
The warmth of the Covenant Anchor at his hip — barely perceptible, like an ember long extinguished but still holding heat. Behind his eyelids, images appeared without invitation: grey-black rectangles rimmed with frost. Names carved in cold white light.
One burned brighter than the rest.
[ The Bleak ]
He reached for it the way a man reaches for a blade in the dark — without thought, without permission.
And with it came the knowledge of how to use it.
Not as spoken words. Not as sound. It came as something planted deep in his soul, something that had been waiting inside his marrow from the moment he cut his throat and answered the god. The rules were not explained. They were carved into him — into his nerves, his bones, the weave of his mind. He understood with absolute, nauseating certainty:
Activate.
Endure.
Release.
No choice. No instructions. Only the brutal knowledge that to use it, he first had to break himself.
He activated.
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The pain arrived as a total collapse of his nervous system.
It began in his eyes — pressure erupting behind both sockets. Red flooded his vision. Then his left eye burst from its socket with a wet, meaty crack, dangling on slick threads of nerve and vessel. A viscous fluid trailed down his cheek in thick, clear streams streaked with black. His right eye followed a heartbeat later — swollen, torn, hanging like rotted fruit.
He staggered once. His legs buckled under the shock as though he were seizing.
Then the skin of his face split — fine networks of cracks racing outward from the eyes, down to the jaw and throat. The fissures tore open with force. The flesh dissolved in layers, slowly, evaporating in moments, exposing the gleaming muscle of his face and yellow fat beneath. His cheeks sagged. The shine of his jawbone glistened wetly through the translucent ruin. His lips melted into dripping threads.
He raised his hands instinctively to his face. His fingers trembled. The skin fell in wet chunks, exposing raw, pink tissue that pulsed with every hammering heartbeat. The smell struck him — burnt hair, cooked meat, copper, decay. His own smell.
His chest split along a long horizontal line. His ribs cried out as the muscle tore away. His heart hammered against exposed bone — visible, obscene. His lungs drew air through frothing fluid. Every breath was fire.
He did not scream.
More precisely, he could not.
The suffering was so intense that it overwhelmed everything else. His throat had already dissolved; his vocal cords were paste. What escaped him was a wet, raw sound — a gurgling, drowning noise, closer to a pressure leak than a human voice. No tears could fall — the tear ducts were simply gone. Instead, blood and fluid and vapor streamed from his face.
But he held.
He was counting in the one place that remained: the inside of his skull.
Ten seconds.
Fifteen.
Twenty.
And between each second, he cursed himself a thousand times over.
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The agony grew. His arms split along their seams. Muscle peeled back like overripe fruit. Organs moved visibly beneath widening wounds. The pain was no longer merely physical — every memory was materializing inside it. His mother's last strangled breaths. Nobles laughing while he scrubbed their floors. The nights he had spent so hungry that the hunger became a second heartbeat. All of it boiling beneath his skin, dissolving him alive.
And through the haze of searing suffering, he felt it.
The card — still hanging at his hip — seemed to lean toward him.
Not in sound. Not in light.
In satisfaction.
The horned figure on its surface looked... pleased. The thorns coiled tighter around its ribs. Its head tilted at a more contented angle. As though watching a long-awaited meal finally begin to bleed.
Lonir understood, in the small cold corner of his mind still functioning:
He felt dread.
Not at the public ruin of himself.
Not at the three men who stared at him in a state of existential shock — trembling like children, unable to speak, unable to tear their eyes from the abomination they had provoked.
He felt nothing at all beyond the pain consuming him.
Only a grey sadness. A vast, ashen grief that had swallowed all colors inside him and left nothing but cinders.
He let go.
Just a fraction. Barely enough.
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The wave rolled outward — silent.
The leader's eyes swelled first. The veins turned black. Both eyes burst in rapid succession — twin wet pops echoing in the alley. The skin of his face tore open and peeled away in steaming layers, the muscle boiling beneath. He screamed — loud and raw, a sound that raked reality from its intensity.
The man with the broken bottle had his cheeks torn open wide. Flesh fell in heavy folds, exposing jawbone and tongue. He dropped to his knees, gagging, fingers plunging into the dissolving tissue as though he could press it back into place.
The third man staggered. His lips melted away entirely. His teeth showed in a lipless grin. The skin of his arms and chest cracked — muscle laid bare, evaporating in the rain. He pitched forward, face-first into the mud, his body convulsing as the reflected pain of the monster he had provoked ate through him layer by layer.
They had suffered more than him — because they still had hope. They still had something to lose.
Lonir allowed the offering to end.
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The pain withdrew from him — slowly, cruelly. Flesh returned to its place. Eyes reformed with wet, sucking sounds, pushing themselves back into their sockets. New skin grew in raw pink patches, threaded through with fine black lines. His face felt wrong — too tight, too scarred — but it was whole again. More or less.
The three men lay in the mud, moaning, trembling, clutching faces that no longer resembled faces. One of the leader's eyes still dangled, swinging with every broken sob. They were not dead. They were simply... wishing they were.
Lonir looked down at them.
No triumph.
No guilt.
Only the bleak certainty that he could do it again if required.
And next time — he would endure longer.
The Covenant Anchor at his hip seemed to settle — satisfied, for now.
He stepped over them without breaking stride. When one of them weakly reached for his robe, Lonir paused.
"No need for that kind of bravery," he said flatly.
He kicked the hand away.
The rain washed the blood and fluid from his robe, but the smell remained — the scent of his own burnt flesh, mingled with theirs.
His footsteps were steady.
Inside him, what little empathy had remained shrank to a ghost. The grief stayed — vast, immovable, grey. It had simply absorbed everything else.
He turned the corner.
Deeper into the dark.
The rain continued to fall.
And the card at his hip waited — quietly satisfied — for the next time he chose to offer himself.
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