"Cold"
It chewed the marrow in Loid's bones, gnawed behind his eyes, and cracked across his skin. The waterfall above him was a god without mercy—its weight absolute, its fury endless. Hours had passed maybe days.
He no longer knew.
His legs had stopped shivering. His fingers barely clenching his sword. The edge of death had dulled into a hum, low and constant. The kind that either ended with collapse—or something else.
He was sinking into himself. A quiet place. A cruel place.
A place the Master had led him to, and left him inside.
He remembered the Master's words. "Let it flow around you, or break beneath it."
And break he did—Body, mind, hope again and again—all shattered in silent succession. He felt the cracks webbed itself through his ribs, his thoughts, his reasons for continuing. His sword slowly failing to overcome gravity. He screamed through clenched teeth until even that dried out.
But now… now it was different.
There was no scream.
Only fire. Faint. Small. Like a spark deep inside the ruins of his chest.
A flicker in the black.
His lips, cracked and blue, twitched. something stirring there. Something wicked and quiet and ancient.
The waterfall continued to beat against him again, unrelenting.
"How am I still standing underneath this much force?" he thought, his body knew, it should be impossible yet.... Still he stood and it made him excited.
Something.... moved.
Not the water.
Not the stone beneath.
Something in him.
A vibration. Like breath drawn in by the world itself. Like the pulse of a thought too loud for silence.
It didn't come from rage.
It didn't come from resolve.
It came from want.
Not the desperate, crying want of the weak.
But the quiet, sharp want of something about to happen.
Loid's heartbeat quickened. A single hitch in the rhythm. His eyes flicked open—half-blind, swollen shut, but the fire never dulled.
The world felt different.
The pain was still there—throbbing and unbearable—but for the first time, it wasn't alone.
It had company.
A kind of… pressure. Like something warm pressing against the inside of his skull. Not thought. Not memory. Will.
Not abstract, nor poetic.
Real.
A force that pressed through his body, stretching under the bones, reaching outward like tendrils made of breath and belief.
Move, he thought.
And something listened.
Not the water. Not the stone.
But the world beneath the world. The thing that watches when gods sleep.
And in that place—it quivered.
There was no thunder. No light. No divine omen.
Only a sensation of something snapping, bone giving way to a greater force, followed by a stillness so absolute it frightened even the wind.
And then it came.
The water struck him—but not as before. It no longer crushed. It yielded. Reality folded, like flesh parting beneath a knife of intent as he lifted his sword higher. The waterfall still battered his form, yet now it slipped from him, like oil in water—not out of respect, not fear, but compliance.
Loid's breath hitched.
His lungs burned, his ribs screamed with each motion, but he felt it—deep in the marrow, down where instinct and Will blur into one. A slow, searing warmth spread through his chest. His fingers twitched. His pulse accelerated.
This… this is mine.
His mouth parted in a ragged gasp, not of pain—but euphoria. The agony had not stopped, but it meant something. His body trembled not from cold but from the impossible delight that the world had moved—because he had willed it.
And then his lips curled.
A smile broke across his bruised face, involuntary and ravenous. It wasn't of joy or of triumph.
It was barely controlled pleasure.
The waterfall whipped his back raw, but it no longer mattered. Each droplet that struck him—each shard of cold, each stinging wound—only made the pleasure rise sharper, more urgent. His vision blurred with tears not from pain, but from the overwhelming ecstasy of knowing: the world was becoming.
His.
His Will sang in his veins. Not with words. But with the feeling of becoming.
Loid breathed, deep and shuddering, as if tasting the world anew.
And it tasted good.
The Master saw it all.
Beyond the cascade, the Master stood unmoving, eyes fixed on the boy.
He said nothing for a time. But his gaze betrayed something subtle—an emotion neither pride nor confusion, but a tremor in his certainty.
"You understand now," he said at last, even through the unrelenting fall of water Loid heard it clear as day.
Loid did not speak. Could not. His teeth chattered, not from cold—but from restrained delight. He was high on it. Drunk on his own existence being right.
"It slides off now," the Master said. "As though you are not there."
Loid turned slowly. The look in his eyes was too alive. Something pulsed behind them—mad, pure, wanting. He did not nod. He did not bow.
Because he was there.
More than he had ever been....
Why walking back Loid could feel the trees changing.
They had not moved, but something in them flinched—as though the forest, too, had felt the breach. As if it now feared that Loid might not just survive, but command.
Each step forward, his breath came faster, shallower, like a man aroused by conquest. He felt everything—every thorn against his ankle, every crunch of rotten foliage beneath his heel, every pulse of his own heart, reverberating through the ground like a claim.
He existed, and the world trembled around that fact.
When death brushed him, it recoiled. When he crossed a place he'd died before, the forest twisted—but no longer to consume. Now, it reacted.
He chuckled once, low and rasped, the kind of sound that comes when laughter and sobbing meet in one exalted breath.
A predator's pleasure.
In a small hollow, the Master sat. Silent. Watching.
Loid staggered into view, streaked in blood and sweat and filth, eyes alight with something unholy.
"I didn't ask for it to move," he said. "I wanted it to."
The Master said nothing. But his fingers dug slightly into the earth beneath him.
"Wanting, can be a sickness," he said finally. "A flaw in the stone. Best to become it. Let the river pass around you."
Loid found a spot to sit. His skin was split and swollen, but his smile remained.
"Master, why do we walk?"
The Master's eyes closed. A quiet, private moment.
"…Because it always has been."
Loid, blinking away dirt and salt, laid on the ground and began drifting asleep, whispered in return—like a prayer, or a curse.
"Then it must."
That night, Loid slept beneath the stars.
His skin throbbed with ache. His limbs were aflame. But his heart beat like a drum of war—steady, loud, alive. His smile would not fade. His mind pulsed with echoes, the phantom pleasure of shaping.
The grass itched beneath his neck.
The cold burned his chest.
He felt everything.
And in it all, he moaned once—soft, involuntary—as one might when tasting something forbidden and divine.
The world had not yet bowed.
But it would.
And that knowing—no, that feeling—filled him more than food or warmth or mercy ever could.