The memory of the stone statue was not a memory at all; it was a phantom limb of the soul, a fresh brand that pulsed with a pain both psychic and physical. Its silent scream echoed in the cavernous space behind Asli's eyes, a constant, scraping counterpoint to the dying ember of Silas's resonance he followed.
Two days. It might have been two lifetimes. In the Trial, time was a fluid, malicious thing, dissolving not into hours or minutes, but into a continuous, grinding slurry of exhaustion. He staggered north, a drunkard without the liquor, each step a monumental effort that felt like it might be his last. The song of Silas was fading, a distant radio signal choked by static, growing fainter, more desperate with every labored footfall.
He was a ghost haunting a land that actively despised him. A week of near-starvation had performed a brutal alchemy on his body, transmuting flesh and muscle into bone and frayed, screaming nerve. His legs were not limbs but anchors, dragging through the loam. His mind was a swamp where reason and memory drowned, leaving only the basest instincts to flail on the surface: move, find Silas, survive.
The forest itself had become a sentient enemy. The air was cloyingly sweet, thick with the saccharine scent of rotting nectar, a perfume that tried to mask a fundamental wrongness. And the sound… the sound was the worst. It was the faint, half-beat echo of his own footsteps, a phantom twin dogging his heels, a presence that mimicked his every move a fraction of a second too late.
He dared not acknowledge it, for to acknowledge it was to give it power, to make it real.
So when the ground simply dissolved beneath his foot, the mossy carpet giving way to empty air, he felt no shock. No surge of adrenaline. There was only a weary, final acceptance that settled in his bones like a chill. Of course. This was the way of things here. Hope was a prelude to a fall. Literally.
The world upended in a violent, jerking inversion. A sharp crack of a snare rope, hidden beneath the leaves, sang out. A brutal, unforgiving jerk wrenched his ankle, the pain a bright, white-hot spike driven straight into the joint. He was flung upward, the momentum unforgiving.
He swung, a pendulum of misfortune, his pack slamming into his ribs with a force that stole what little breath he had. The forest canopy, a tangled web of green and gloom, spun around him in a dizzying, nauseating carousel. Blood rushed to his head, a pounding, oppressive drumbeat behind his eyes, throbbing in time with his frantic heart.
Then, cutting through the roaring in his ears, came the voices. Rasping, guttural things, tearing through the forest's false, respectful silence.
"Well, now." The voice was a dry drawl, scraped from a throat that knew only dust and spite. It was utterly devoid of any warmth, any humanity. "Look what the thorns caught."
A second, harsher laugh answered, a sound like rocks grinding together in a hollow chest. "Told you. The paranoid ones live. You owe me."
Hope didn't just die in Asli's gut; it curdled, turning into something foul and heavy. This wasn't just bad luck; it was a specific, targeted misery. He twisted his body, trying to see through the blood-filled haze that clouded his vision, the world a tilted, blurry nightmare. Two men emerged from the shadows between the trees, detaching themselves from the gloom as if they were part of it.
They were gaunt, hollowed-out things, their clothes little more than rags stitched together with grime and desperation. Their skin was caked with the filth of the forest, a patina of soil and something darker. But it was their eyes that held him—hollow, desperate, gleaming with the feral intelligence of predators not born, but made by the relentless cruelty of the Trial Grounds.
The taller one, with a matted beard that seemed to crawl with its own ecosystem, stepped closer. A dull, notched knife was in his hand, its edge gleaming dully in the filtered light. It was a tool for cutting, for skinning, for survival. "Stop wriggling, little fish," he murmured, his voice a low threat. "You'll just tangle the line."
"I find this position… disagreeable," Asli forced out, his voice strained, the words feeling absurd and pathetic even as he said them. Politeness in the face of predation. A last, feeble vestige of a civilized world that no longer existed here.
Their laughter was an ugly, broken sound, devoid of any real humor. It was the noise of hyenas sizing up a wounded animal. "Polite, ain't he?" the shorter one sneered, his gaze crawling over Asli's suspended form. "Means he's scared. Or he's got something to lose."
The bearded man didn't waste another word. He moved with a practiced, economical motion, the dull knife flashing upward. The rope gave way with a snap. Asli fell, the impact with the damp earth driving the air from his lungs in a single, painful, whooshing gasp.
Before he could even draw another, a heavy knee landed squarely on his chest, pinning him to the ground with a weight that felt immense, final. He struggled, a pathetic, weak motion, his starved body offering no real resistance against the man's crushing strength. It was like a child fighting a grown adult.
"Get off me," he rasped, the panic now a cold, sharp thread weaving through the thick wool of his exhaustion. "Take my supplies. Just take it and get off."
"Oh, we'll take everything," the man on top of him growled, his breath a foul, warm cloud against Asli's face. It smelled of rot and stale meat. He ripped the pack from Asli's side and dumped its contents unceremoniously onto the ground. The sight of the sealed water jars, the precious dried fruit, made their eyes gleam with a feral, unmistakable avarice. Here was life, handed to them.
"Where'd a blind rat like you get all this?" the shorter one hissed, dropping to his knees and tearing through Asli's coat with rough, eager hands. He found the seams, the quality. He whistled, a low, appreciative sound, holding up the dark, finely woven fabric. "This isn't scavenged trash. This is crafted. You're Academy." The word was an accusation. "One of their precious little spies, sent to watch the cattle get slaughtered."
Asli remained silent, pressing his lips together. His heart was a frantic, trapped bird beating itself to a bloody pulp against the cage of his ribs. To speak was to give them more of himself. Silence was his only remaining defense.
The bearded man's free hand, the one not occupied with the knife, began to move. It slid from Asli's thigh to his hip, the fingers digging in with a possessive, bruising force that promised worse to come. The pressure on his chest intensified, the man leaning forward, making the world spot and dance at the edges of Asli's vision.
A new, colder kind of fear, sharp and clean as a shard of ice, pierced through the haze of his exhaustion. This was no longer just a robbery. The intent in the man's touch, in the hungry gleam in his companion's eyes, had shifted. This was a prelude to something more intimate, more violating. Desperation stripped him bare, scouring away the last remnants of defiance and leaving only a raw, animal plea.
"Please," he choked out, the word tasting like ash and humiliation on his tongue. "Just… just take it all. The food, the water. Everything. Let me go. I'm… I'm so tired." It was the confession of a man already broken, offering his dignity as a final sacrifice for a chance, however slim, at escape.
The shorter one leaned in, his gaze becoming a physical weight, focusing on the strip of dark fabric covering Asli's eyes. "Tired?" he repeated, his voice a venomous whisper. "You can rest when we're done." His grimy, calloused fingers hooked into the cloth of the blindfold. With a single, brutal yank, he tore it away. The strip of fabric fluttered down, landing in the mud like a dead thing.
Asli flinched, a full-body spasm of shame and exposure. He turned his face away, squeezing his eyes shut against the world, against their gazes. It was a futile, instinctual gesture, the last refuge of something that wanted to hide.
A calloused, rough hand grabbed his jaw, the grip like iron, and wrenched his face back, forcing him to confront them. "So that's what you were hiding," the man sneered, his thumb roughly tracing the raised, jagged line of scar tissue that ran from Asli's hairline down across his closed eyelid. The touch was invasive, profane. "Nasty. Who gave you that?" He laughed, a hollow, mocking sound that held no joy. "Now, open those eyes. Let's have a proper look."
Asli refused. He poured every ounce of his remaining will into the act of keeping his eyelids sealed. His body tensed into a single, taut cord of defiance. It was all he had left.
The blow came without warning. A sharp, open-handed strike that snapped his head to the side. Pain, bright and explosive, blossomed in his cheek. His eyes flew open in pure, unstoppable reflex.
"There, there. That's better," the shorter one grinned, his face now inches from Asli's, his breath a visible mist in the cool air. "You know," the bearded man on his chest murmured, his voice dropping into a grotesque parody of intimacy that was more terrifying than any shout, "you're not that bad looking. Apart from the nasty scar." As he spoke, his hand, the one that had been gripping his hip, fisted in the fabric of Asli's shirt. With a violent jerk, he tore it open. The worn material gave way with a sickening rip, revealing the tight, constricting bindings beneath.
The men went utterly, profoundly still.
The transformation in the clearing was instantaneous and absolute. The shorter one's eyes widened, then dropped, a slow, dawning understanding spreading across his filthy features like a stain. The casual cruelty in his gaze was snuffed out, replaced by a different, more vile and specific kind of hunger. It was a revelation that changed everything. He let out a low, wet chuckle, a sound of pure, anticipatory glee.
"Well now, Merrik," he breathed, the words dripping with a terrible new promise. "Would you look at that."
It was the final trigger. The last lock breaking.
A flicker of absolute darkness, deeper than any natural shadow, deeper than the void between stars, bled from the corners of Asli's exposed eyes. It was not a light being extinguished, but an anti-light being born. His resonance, the slumbering, chained beast he kept buried in the deepest, most secret part of his soul, did not simply wake.
It detonated.
It was a breath of absolute zero against his spirit, freezing the very air in his lungs.
The shadows erupted.
They did not flow from him; they burst.
They vomited forth from his skin, from his spine, from the pores of the earth at his feet, from the very air around him. They were not an absence of light, but a living, breathing darkness, blacker than oblivion, shot through with searing, golden veins that pulsed and writhed with a malevolent, intelligent light. They were not a tool he wielded. In that moment, they were an extension of his most primal, buried terror and a bottomless, churning rage he never knew he possessed, given horrific, autonomous form.
The shorter man, Merrik, his face still locked in that leering, triumphant grin, was the first to die. He had no time to process the shift, to understand that the prey had become the apex predator. A tendril of solidified night, sharp and precise as a god's own guillotine, lashed out. It sheared through his neck with a wet, percussive thump. His head toppled from his shoulders, his expression frozen in a mask of stupid surprise, before his body crumpled bonelessly to the ground. There was no scream. Only the wet, final, meaty sound of separation.
The bearded man had a half-second longer—a single, horrifying heartbeat—to comprehend his doom. His eyes widened, the leer vanishing into a rictus of pure, unadulterated terror. He screamed, a raw, ragged sound that was torn from the depths of his being. The shadows were already upon him.
They wrapped around the arm that had torn Asli's shirt, the one that had held the knife. There was a sickening, wet crunch— the sound of a hundred bones being pulverized into dust simultaneously. The shadows constricted, twisted with savage, unnatural strength, and the arm was torn from its socket in a violent, spraying arc of crimson.
He was flung backward like a discarded doll, but the shadows were not done. They were hungry. They swarmed over him, a wave of devouring blackness, forcing themselves into his open, screaming mouth, into his eyes, into his nose, choking his terror into wet, desperate, final gurgles. His body convulsed on the ground, bloating unnaturally as the shadows filled him, before they contracted inward with a violent, internal rip that sounded like canvas tearing.
Then, silence.
A silence so profound, so heavy, it was a physical presence.