Time ceased to matter. Beneath the earth, in that suffocating tomb of stone and rot, day and night dissolved into one unbroken murk. There was no sky. No sun. Only the torchlight smeared across bloodstained walls and the stench of violence that never faded—sweat, iron, bile, meat. The air itself was thick, oily with death. The arena was not merely a place. It was a maw. A creature. Living, breathing, feeding. And Eliana? She was its meal—and its becoming.
She no longer knew how many fights she had endured. Her body bore the count better than her mind—scars carved like tally marks across her arms, ribs, neck. She had lost track after the thirty-second kill. Maybe it was the thirty-seventh. Maybe more. The corpses didn't stay long enough to count. They were dragged away like trash, bones scraping against the stone, leaving behind only blood, teeth, and fragments of memory.
Her movements were no longer hers alone. Something darker guided them now. A rhythm beneath her skin. Her arms moved before she thought. Her legs dodged before she feared. Instinct sharpened into savagery. Strategy into slaughter. She could feel it—each opponent testing her, pushing her, breaking off what was left of her restraint. And with every kill, she felt something else leave her. Something warm. Something human.
There were no names in the pit. No pasts. Just roles. Predator and prey. And she had long stopped being the latter.
She remembered the first time she'd gutted a hobgoblin from groin to throat. How the organs had spilled out like secrets, the intestines wrapping around her arm like a clinging child. The way the crowd screamed—feral and euphoric—as she stood drenched in warmth not her own. She hadn't flinched. Not anymore. Her stomach didn't churn. Her hands didn't shake. Instead, a low thrum of pleasure bloomed in her chest. Not joy. No. But power. Real power. Raw and immediate.
The arena knew. It whispered to her between battles. In the grind of the iron gates. In the crunch of bone underfoot. In the blood that never dried on the walls. More, it said. Kill more. Become more. And she listened.
The fighters they sent now were bigger. Meaner. Better armed. A mutated orc with three arms and serrated tusks. A twinskin goblin who screamed with two mouths and bled from its eyes. A blind beast that moved only by hearing heartbeats—but hers, by then, had grown too still. Too slow. She killed it with a single stab to the ear, and the crowd howled as its body convulsed on the sand like a fish gutted alive.
After that, they started to chant her name. Not her full name—Eliana—but a version stripped to its bones. El. El. El. Three letters spoken like a curse. Or a prayer.
She didn't correct them.
And yet, despite the roar of her victories, the hollow inside her grew deeper. A cavity in the center of her being. A hunger that no amount of blood could fill. The more her body adapted—her claws lengthening, her skin thickening, her vision sharpening in the dark—the less she felt like herself. When she looked in the puddles of gore, her reflection barely resembled the girl who once fled from her uncle's wrath. Now her eyes glowed faintly red. Her teeth jutted too long. Her silhouette had bulked into something alien.
Worse still was the thing behind her eyes.
Something watching.
Sometimes, she swore it whispered to her during fights. A low, guttural voice that hissed promises beneath her screams. Not words she could understand—just hunger. Endless hunger. And when she fed it—when she tore an opponent's throat out with her teeth instead of a blade—it laughed. Or perhaps that was her.
She didn't remember the last time she wept.
There were no tears left in monsters.
And she was almost one.
Between the bloodlettings and butcherings, she retreated—not to heal, not to reflect, but to sink into the black rot beneath the world. In the hollows of the arena, past where the firelight dared flicker, she curled into herself like something wounded, something moulting, her back pressed to cold stone slick with condensation and old blood. Her hands trembled—not from fear, but from withdrawal. The fights were her drug. The violence, her sedative. And when it was gone, she unraveled.
It wasn't death she feared anymore. No, death was honest. Clean, even. Death made sense. What twisted her guts now was the silence between deaths—the stillness where nothing screamed, nothing bled, and she was left alone with the weight of what she was becoming. That was when the thoughts crept in, slithering through the cracks of her sanity like smoke under a locked door.
Her mind, once a scalpel—sharp, cold, calculating—had grown feral. No more clever legal arguments. No more schemes. Just guttural instinct and hunger, thoughts that circled like wolves, twitching and snapping and howling at her skull from the inside. She no longer planned. She hunted, even in memory.
The air down there wasn't right. It was too thick. Too still. And yet it moved, constantly, subtly, just beyond the reach of her perception—like breath behind her ear, like fingers dragging along her spine. She began to hear things. Not just the drips of old water or the groans of settling stone, but voices. Whispers that spoke in no language, murmurs that bubbled like bile in her ears.
In the darkest hours—if hours still had meaning—those whispers formed words. And those words knew her name.
"Eliana... Little beast... You're almost ready..."
Sometimes she saw shapes in the corners of her cell. Not goblins. Not guards. Things. Things that blinked with too many eyes, that smiled with too many mouths. They didn't move like living things. They pulsed, shuddered. They twitched like corpses dragged by invisible strings. And they watched. Always watched.
She scratched herself raw. Dug her nails deep into her arms until blood ran in sluggish streams. Sometimes she awoke with wounds she didn't remember making. Sometimes she didn't sleep at all. The urge to tear her skin off—to peel herself free from the girl she once was—gnawed at her like a rat behind the ribs.
But the worst part wasn't the hallucinations.It wasn't the madness, the insomnia, the sounds that weren't sounds.
It was the clarity that came with it.
Because in those long, stifling silences, she saw it.
The throne.
A throne not carved but grown—from bone, from tendon, from gristle. Spines twisted into its base like roots. Ribcages flared open like offering bowls. Its crown hovered above it, a ring of sharpened teeth and flame, whispering in a tongue that made her gums bleed.
Around it: the dead. Her dead. Hobgoblins. Orcs. Ogres. Dozens, maybe hundreds. Their corpses bowed in reverence, their faces slack with admiration, their eyes scooped clean. And seated upon that throne—her. Or what was left.
A figure draped in sinew. Her skin darkened to the color of old iron. Her hair twisted into barbed braids. Her eyes twin pits of molten red. Hands that no longer held weapons but were weapons. Wings of bone sprouting from her back like the tattered remains of divinity. And her mouth… her mouth stretched into a smile far too wide for anything human.
A queen.
Not of people, but of corpses. A sovereign of slaughter. A beast not worshiped, but feared.
And in the dark, curled up and whispering through bloodied teeth, Eliana felt no revulsion.
Only yearning.
It called to her. The throne. The power. The evolution. Not just of body—but of purpose. This wasn't madness anymore. It was destiny.
And so, when the whispers grew louder, when the shapes crept closer, when the voices in the dark sang to her of conquest and crimson rain, she didn't cover her ears.
She listened.
She answered.
She smiled.
And in the silence that followed, something beneath the arena laughed.
She remembered the legends now—not told in reverence, but in fear. Whispers traded in mud-slicked caves by firelight, passed like disease among exiled goblins and the broken remnants of long-dead clans. They spoke of Kizin—the last, the ultimate, the cursed evolution. A form so complete it ceased to be goblin, hobgoblin, orc, or even beast. A sovereign of slaughter. A god not of the heavens but of the pit.
To most, it was madness. Myth. A warning.
To her, it was a blueprint.
Her body had already begun to shift. Not in ways she could fully see—there were no mirrors here—but she felt it in her bones, in the grotesque ache that crawled under her skin each night. Her flesh darkened to a shade that drank torchlight. Her nails grew jagged and thick, no longer nails but talons—meant not for defense, but for dismemberment. Her limbs packed with sinew that didn't fatigue, didn't tremble, only coiled. She moved now like something built for war, not born for it. And inside, deeper than organs, deeper than thought, her veins throbbed—not with blood, but with hunger.
It wasn't metaphor. She could feel it.
The need.
The need to kill. To consume. Not for nourishment. Not for survival. But because it pushed her closer—closer to becoming.
Her enemies ceased to be people. They weren't adversaries, weren't even animals. They were rungs. Steps on a ladder made of meat and screams. Every death, every torn throat and shattered skull, was another step up. Another offering to the thing she was becoming.
And the arena gave. Oh, it fed her. It offered monsters. Veterans. Chimeric horrors grown in pits far below, sewn together from species that should never have met. And she slaughtered them all. Tore them apart. Bathed in their shrieks and gore. Sometimes she feasted on their flesh raw, gnashing and gulping as the crowd howled in confusion and horror. Her mind whispered that it was wrong, that she was degrading, devolving—but her bones told her otherwise. Her bones sang.
The changes deepened. Her eyes adjusted to darkness not like a predator's, but like a thing born in it. Her spine began to knot and stretch in unnatural ways, her silhouette just slightly off from what it once was. Her mouth grew wider. Her teeth sharpened to uneven points. Her voice, when she did speak—which was rare now—came rasping, hollow, like it echoed through something ancient and rotted.
She should have been terrified. But terror was a memory now. Lady Eliana—that name, that person, that fragile lie—was slipping from her like dead skin. The noble exile. The clever schemer. The survivor.
She was none of those things anymore.
She was evolution incarnate. A vessel sculpted by vengeance and blood.
She was becoming.
And somewhere, in the festering dark beneath the arena, something watched her transformation with interest.
It did not speak. It did not breathe. It simply waited—for her to finish.
Because to become the Kizin was to cast off the last remnants of who she once was. To burn identity into ash. To become the apex.
And apex predators have no past.
Only the kill.
It came to her in the silence.
Not the silence of rest. Not the calm before sleep. No—this was the silence that lived beneath everything. The kind that throbbed in the marrow when the screaming stopped. The kind that followed the final heartbeat of something once alive. The silence that watched.
And in it, she heard a voice.
Not hers. Not quite. But familiar. Intimately so. Like a childhood memory rotted to black. A reflection of the self she had flayed away.
It didn't echo. It grew—like mold in her mind.
"Every step you take brings you closer to becoming a monster. And monsters don't have souls."
She didn't flinch.
She didn't weep.
She laughed.
Low and ragged, the sound scraped up her throat like it had claws. Not out of defiance. Not denial. But because it was true. Because it was right. Because it felt good.
She had fed herself to the pit like an offering of flesh. Let it chew her down to bone and nerve, grind her into the screaming dust. And now—now she had teeth. Now she knew how to bite back.
They wanted monsters? She would give them one.
But not the snarling beasts that drooled and raged in chains.
Not the dull-minded ogres drunk on violence.
Not even the howling hobgoblins who fought because they knew nothing else.
No. She would become the monster that chose its shape. The one that watched. That waited. The kind that did not chase power blindly—but willed it into existence with blood, blade, and silence.
And there, in the stale, rotting dark of her cell, she spoke—not aloud, but in thought so sharp it felt like a carving knife.
"I will become the monster."
Not out of madness.
Not even out of vengeance anymore.
But because monsters are not bound by mercy.
Because monsters are not held back by regret.
Because monsters—real monsters—win.
And as that truth settled into her like cold iron through flesh, she felt something within her shift. Not break. Align. Like a door finally clicking into place.
No more hesitation. No more self-debate. No more past.
The last whisper of her old self curled in her chest like smoke—and with one breath, she exhaled it.
Let it die.
And in the space it left behind… something vast and terrible began to wake.