The sterile light of the hospital room felt like an accusation. Leif Erwin blinked against the glare, the rhythmic beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor a metronome counting down his doom. Plaster encased his left leg, a crude monument to the Nissan Maxima that had shattered his tibia and sprained his ankle into uselessness. Cracked ribs screamed with every shallow breath, and his skull throbbed where fragmented memories hammered against the bone.
Two days. Miss Kim's eviction deadline loomed tomorrow. The phantom scent of scorched wool – a memory not his own, yet undeniably his – warred with the antiseptic stench. The car. The impact. "Next life…" The thought echoed with bitter irony.
Then, the other life flooded back, not as a dream, but as lived experience violently integrated:
Stone walls weeping condensation. The bite of rusted iron on his wrists. Agony, white and consuming, as a blade, glowing like a captured sunset, plunged into his thigh. The face above him, sharp as a shard of ice, adorned with a golden sun sigil that seemed to pulse with malice. Brother Theron. "Where is it, worm? WHERE IS THE SEED?"
Another fragment: Cold pliers, methodical, peeling back skin from his knuckles like rotten fruit. "The Seed, Alden! Confess!"
Years compressed into moments: Running through rain-lashed cobblestone streets that blurred into the cracked asphalt of this city. Hiding in the stinking recesses of a stable that felt like the shadowed crypts beneath a grand temple. Always hunted. Always the same maddening question, screamed or whispered, a relentless drumbeat against his sanity: "Where is the Seed?" Branded a heretic by the Dawn Goddess he'd once knelt before. Dying not in glory, but in confusion and dust, the "why" as elusive as the damned Seed itself.
Leif shuddered, the thin hospital gown clinging with cold sweat. These weren't borrowed memories; they were scars on his soul, newly ripped open. The despair of that hunted existence – the relentless, unanswered torment – fused seamlessly with the suffocating reality of Leif Erwin: orphan, reject, three months behind on rent for a roach-infested room, facing the street. One lifetime of failure screaming into the void of another. The monstrous hospital bill was just the latest, most tangible shackle.
A nurse bustled in, her cheerful facade brittle. "Mr. Erwin? Good to see those eyes open! Nasty business. Broken tibia, ligaments in that ankle shredded, three cracked ribs, concussion. You've been out two days." Her tone suggested a minor inconvenience.
Two days. The panic was immediate, primal, fueled by the ingrained terror of confinement from countless stone cells. "I need to leave," Leif rasped, his voice sandpaper on stone.
"Leave?" Her smile evaporated. "Doctor hasn't cleared you. Potential bleed in that noggin, that leg needs immobilization, the ribs—"
"I can't stay." He tried to lever himself up. White fire exploded in his side and skull. Yet, a deep, unyielding discipline surfaced – a core of endurance tempered in the fires of remembered torture. He locked his jaw, shoved the nausea down, and met her gaze. The intensity in his eyes, born of Alden's defiance, made her step back slightly.
"It's not that simple," she insisted, regaining composure. "Let me fetch Ms. Finch. She handles… these situations."
Ms. Finch arrived with the grim efficiency of a tax collector. Her tablet displayed the number like a death sentence: $78,432.17. Seventy-eight thousand dollars. An impossible sum, dwarfing the pathetic scraps he'd scraped together washing dishes or hauling trash. Fragments of memory surfaced – glints of gold coin, jeweled reliquaries – useless phantoms in this world of plastic and debt.
"No insurance on record," she stated, her voice devoid of warmth. "The driver? Uninsured. Hit and run." She outlined the trap with chilling clarity: Remain, accruing debt daily like a festering wound. Or be discharged "medically stable" – a process that could take weeks of observation and physiotherapy he couldn't afford – only to be dumped onto the street, broken and hunted by collection agencies. Charity funds required proof of indigence he couldn't provide without an address, which he was about to lose. A safe discharge plan demanded a home and follow-up care – luxuries as distant as the Dawn Goddess's mercy. The cage was constructed of bureaucracy and dollar signs, but its bars felt as cold and inescapable as Theron's dungeon, built around another impossible demand.
She left. The silence pressed in, broken only by the mocking beep-beep-beep. Leif stared at the water-stained ceiling tiles. The echoing cry of "Where is the Seed?" blended seamlessly with the phantom shouts of his life: "Where is the rent?" "Where is your experience?" "Where is your worth?" Two existences defined by questions without answers, demands without means. A cold, flinty resolve formed in the pit of his stomach, drawing strength not from hope, but from the sheer, bloody-minded refusal to be crushed again. Not trapped. Not by questions, not by debt, not by broken bones. Get. Out.
The nurse returned, oblivious. "Doctor's stuck in surgery. Could be hours. Try to get some rest." The door clicked shut with finality.
Rest? The concept felt like surrender, a luxury for the unburdened. Rest is what happens when you're too broken to fight. His mind, a fractured mosaic of Alden's tactical awareness and Leif's mundane observations, overlaid the sterile environment. Shift change. Approaching 7 PM. Peak chaos near the central station. Distraction maximum.
He looked towards the utilitarian closet. Clothes. The vulnerability of the thin gown triggered a deep-seated aversion, an echo of helplessness on the torture bench. His own jeans, threadbare t-shirt, faded hoodie – armor for the world outside. His worn boots were likely bagged as evidence, but maybe the cheap sneakers he'd been wearing? Ankle won't hold. Stairs. Cameras watching the elevators like unblinking eyes.
Knowledge surfaced, hard-won and brutal: how to move with ribs grinding like broken pottery, how to shunt agony into a distant corner of the mind, treating it as irrelevant noise. Ignore it. Find the crack in the wall. He scanned the room. The door – his gauntlet. The window – sealed, unyielding. Service corridors? Staff elevators? Fire exits? Instincts honed in the forgotten passages of citadels and the back alleys of this city merged. Less traffic. Less scrutiny. Follow the cold draft under the door – air means outside.
The murmur beyond the door crescendoed into a wave of sound. Raucous laughter. The metallic screech and rattle of a heavy med cart being maneuvered. Voices overlapping in rushed handover reports. Shift change. Peak. NOW.
No deliberation. Only the imperative of survival, hard-coded by two brutal lifetimes. Leif Erwin, survivor, chose: Move.
Gritting his teeth until enamel threatened to crack, he shoved the thin blanket aside. Pain, immediate and vicious, lanced from his ribs and screamed from his ruined ankle. He braced for the gray-out, the collapse. Too far to the closet. They'll find me crawling.
Then it surfaced. Not a conscious thought, but a visceral instinct, dredged from the darkest silt of Alden's suffering: a forbidden, soul-wrenching act. A way to force the flesh to obey, fueled by sheer, desperate will and… something else. Something cold and sharp, like frozen lightning, buried deep beneath his skin. A spark. Dormant. Starved in this world. Life-force. Essence. Magic. The word felt foreign, dangerous, yet terrifyingly intimate.
Theron's dungeon… left for dead in my own filth… ribs shattered, leg twisted… I pushed… past the agony, found that icy ember… forced it into the ruin… not healing… binding… just enough to crawl… to reach the water trough… to survive until dawn… The memory wasn't visual; it was somatic – the feeling of tearing something vital from his core and jamming it into the wound. A brutal, temporary stitch. It left him hollow, colder than the stone floor, but it worked.
No time. No choice. Only survival.
He didn't pray. He didn't focus. He raged. He slammed his consciousness inward, past the shrieking nerves of his ankle, past the grinding protest of his ribs, diving deep into the icy well of desperation that was his fused existence. He found the spark – faint, guttering, alien in this sterile place. He poured everything into it: the terror of the debt cage, the fury at Miss Kim, the bewildered betrayal by the Goddess, the relentless pain of Theron's question, the crushing weight of being Leif Erwin. << HOLD! JUST ENOUGH TO RUN! >>
There was no light show. No warmth. Only a sudden, vicious COLD exploding from his core, a river of liquid nitrogen surging down his leg, concentrating with brutal force in the swollen, torn ligaments beneath the plaster cast. The white-hot agony didn't fade; it shattered, replaced by a deep, grinding numbness and a profound sense of wrongness. The flesh wasn't repaired; it was frozen solid, bound by stolen vitality and desperate will. A temporary, agonizing suspension.
He glanced down. The angry swelling visible above the cast seemed… suppressed? Not gone, but contained, held unnaturally rigid. The cast itself felt suddenly loose, ill-fitting, constricting something that was no longer just swollen flesh, but frozen structure. The pain in his ankle was now a deep, bone-chilling throb, a constant reminder of the unnatural act. The ribs still shrieked, a counterpoint to the icy silence below. But the ankle… the ankle would bear weight. For minutes? Maybe an hour? The cost was immediate and profound: a wave of soul-crushing exhaustion, followed by a chilling emptiness deep in his chest, as if a vital flame had been snuffed. He felt… less. Temporary. Just get out the door.
Muscle memory, etched into his very bones from Alden's escapes, surged. Balance adjusted. Posture straightened despite the rib pain. Breathing became shallow, controlled gasps. He fixed on the closet handle like a lifeline. Move. NOW.
He swung his legs off the bed, the movement smoother, driven by the unnatural cold energy battling the encroaching fatigue. His good foot hit the cold linoleum. Then, carefully, testing the frozen construct that was his ankle, he put weight on it. The grinding throb intensified, a protest from the violated joint, but it held. No buckling. No white light. Just a deep, unnatural cold and the terrifying knowledge it was borrowed time.
He lurched forward, not a hobble, but a stiff, pained stride. The ankle moved with a strange, mechanical rigidity beneath the numbness. He covered the distance to the closet in three agonizing strides fueled by desperation. Yanking it open, he grabbed the familiar clothes – worn jeans, thin cotton t-shirt, the faded grey hoodie that smelled faintly of cheap detergent and stale fear. Dressing was a frantic, clumsy ballet. Pulling the t-shirt over his head sent bolts of lightning through his ribs. Shrugging into the hoodie felt like wearing lead. Wrestling the jeans over the cast was a nightmare of contortion and gritted teeth. He shoved his feet into the battered sneakers, the laces hanging uselessly. No time.
Door. Corridor. Left. Fire exit stairwell. Down. Out.
He turned, his body humming with unnatural, icy energy battling the deep, draining emptiness. The door handle was cold metal. He pulled it open a crack, heart hammering against his bruised ribs. The corridor was a maelstrom of noise and movement – shift change in full, glorious chaos. Nurses clustered around the central station, laughing, gossiping, signing charts. Orderlies maneuvered carts laden with linens and trays, calling out to each other. Phones rang unanswered. Perfect cover.
He slipped out, moving with the stiff, determined gait of a man held together by frozen magic and sheer refusal to die here. He hugged the wall, keeping his head down, the hoodie pulled low. The chaotic noise swallowed the scrape of his sneakers on the floor. He passed an open doorway where a TV blared a game show, ignored. He ducked past a laundry cart abandoned momentarily. His frozen ankle protested each step, the numbness starting to fray at the edges, letting slivers of the original agony seep back in. The chill was leaching upwards, making his fingers tingle. Not yet. Just a little further.
He spotted the heavy, industrial door marked STAIRS. Salvation. He pushed it open, the groan of the hinges lost in the corridor's din. The stairwell was concrete, dimly lit, smelling of dust and disinfectant. Cold air rushed up from below. Down. To the ground. To the street.
He took the first step down, his frozen ankle buckling slightly on the edge. He grabbed the cold railing, the metal biting into his palm. The temporary stitch was holding, but the cost was mounting. The emptiness in his chest yawned wider. He looked down the steep, echoing staircase. It was a long way down on broken ribs and a frozen ankle. But behind him was the crushing weight of $78,432.17 and a lifetime of unanswered demands.
Leif Erwin took the next step. Then the next. Descending into the dimness, one painful, unnatural step at a time, the cold magic his only ally against the crushing debt and the ghosts of two tormented lives. The escape had begun, held together by a stitch made of willpower, already starting to unravel.