The recruitment truck rumbled like a dying beast, its suspension groaning over potholes that felt like craters. Veles sat squeezed between a shivering girl with dyed red hair and a hulking boy who smelled faintly of vomit. He closed his eyes, trying to sleep away the six-hour drive to the processing center, but sleep only brought the old nightmare.
It was always the same. The cold that bit through his thin jacket. The smell of cordite and damp earth. The relentless, thumping rhythm of artillery in the distance — the heartbeat of a dying country.
He was eight years old again.
"Keep up, Veles. Don't let go of my hand," his mother whispered, her voice tight with a terror she tried to hide for his sake. Her grip was bone-crushing.
They were running through the night, leaving behind the burning silhouette of Kharkiv. His father led the way, carrying two heavy suitcases that held the remnants of their lives. They were headed for the Polish border, a promised land that felt a million miles away.
They had been walking for two days when the shelling got closer. The sky flashed orange, silhouetting the skeletal remains of trees. They needed shelter.
They found the village by accident. It wasn't on their map. It didn't have a name post. It was just a cluster of blackened timber frames and collapsed stone chimneys rising from the snow like broken teeth. Everything was covered in a fine layer of grey ash that muffled their footsteps.
"We'll rest here for an hour," his father said, his breath pluming in the freezing air. "Just an hour."
They found a root cellar beneath the ruins of what might have been a baker's shop. It smelled of rotted potatoes and ancient dirt. His parents huddled together in the corner, whispering frantically about routes and rations.
Young Veles, too wired with adrenaline to sit still, wandered toward the back of the cellar. The darkness there was thicker, heavier.
He felt it before he saw it. A low hum in the air, vibrating in his teeth. It wasn't mechanical; it felt primal, like the growl of a sleeping predator.
He pushed aside a rotting wooden crate and saw it.
It shouldn't have survived the fires that ravaged the village. It was a totem, maybe two feet tall, carved from wood so dark it seemed to absorb the faint light filtering from above. It didn't look like the Christian icons his grandmother kept. This was older. Rougher.
Carved into the wood was a stern, bearded face crowned with curled horns. Below the face were symbols — runes depicting cattle, grain, and skulls.
Veles knew who it was, though he didn't know how. His grandfather used to tell stories about the old gods, the ones before the churches were built.
Veles. The god of the earth. The guardian of the gateway between the living and the dead.
The totem didn't look inanimate. It looked waiting.
An eight-year-old's curiosity is a dangerous thing, stronger even than fear. Veles reached out. His small fingers brushed against the cold wood of the totem's carved eye.
Zap.
It wasn't an electric shock. It was a cold spike driven straight into his mind. The world tilted. The smell of rotting potatoes vanished, replaced by the scent of deep, damp soil and old blood. A whisper, loud as thunder, echoed in a language he didn't know but somehow understood.
"Veles! What are you doing back there?" his father's voice snapped him back.
Veles jerked his hand away. The totem was just wood again. The hum was gone.
"Nothing, Papa," Veles lied. It was the last lie he would ever tell without pain.
An hour later, they were running again. Two days later, they crossed the border. Three years later, the drunk driver took them away, and Veles was left alone in this only slightly familiar country with a silent System burning a hole in his soul.
A pothole jarred Veles awake. He gasped, tasting the phantom ash on his tongue. He looked at his hand in the dim light of the truck. The invisible tattoo throbbed, a permanent reminder of the contract he didn't remember signing in the village of grey ash.