The world tilted. Reivo's breath rasped shallowly, each inhale burning like knives in his ribs. His body was wrecked, broken, leaking warmth into the dirt. His blood trickled down the wagon's planks, seeping into the cracks, mingling with the other corpses around him. The wagon groaned faintly, like a coffin lid sealing shut.
The bald man stood over him, shadow long and cruel under the firelight. His scimitar rested across his shoulder, dripping faint red where the spectral storm had ended. He leaned closer, voice low and steady, cruel in its calmness.
"You know why this hurts so much?" His eyes drifted over the boy's trembling frame, the torn flesh, the blood. He gestured with his blade to the corpses littering the ground. "It isn't the cuts. Not the broken ribs. No…" His eyes narrowed with delight. "It's the realization. All that effort. All that fire in your veins… and in the end? You're just another red stain on the dirt."
The words were soft daggers. And they struck deeper than any wound.
Reivo's lips parted, but no sound came. He tasted iron. His body sagged, heavy as stone.
Then the voices came.
Not whispers now. No, whispers had been merciful. These were intrusions. Hisses, laughs, the scrape of teeth against bone, a hundred mouths speaking inside his skull.
"He's right," croaked a voice like his own, but rotten, the syllables breaking, wet with rot. "Look at you. A broken doll. Threads cut, limbs loose. What's left of you but blood and ruin?"
Another followed, syrupy and warm, dripping with pity so thick it smothered. "You knew this would happen. You knew you weren't enough. But ohhh, you tried anyway. Such courage. Such stupidity. How pathetic."
The wagon at his back felt colder. His vision blurred. The world bent and twisted; in the corners of his eyes, the corpses twitched. Arms that should not move flexed faintly. Heads rolled toward him. Their eyes—glossy, dead—seemed to watch.
A third voice arrived, and it was not one voice but dozens—children, boys and girls, all speaking at once. Some sobbing, some giggling. "You could stop him. Right now. You could make him pay. All it takes is… a little help. We'll help. Say the word."
The bald man's shadow lengthened over him. The scimitar tilted forward, its edge catching the firelight. The execution stroke was coming.
And the voices surged louder.
The rotten one: "Bleed him. Drain him. Tear him apart like they did to your family."
The syrupy one: "Think of the warmth spilling, the soft whimpers as you carve deeper. You want it. You crave it."
The children, rising in pitch, shrill and hysterical: "Yes! Yes! Break him, cut him, choke him with his own screams!"
Reivo's chest heaved. His heart slammed against broken ribs. He should have felt terror—but instead, something else bloomed. Something feral. The emptiness that had gnawed him since his family's death was filling at last. Not with hope. Not with light. But with a hunger older than his grief.
The killer raised his scimitar higher. The arc was perfect, a practiced motion. "Time to rest, boy."
For Reivo, time stretched into cruel eternity. The scimitar hung above him, frozen in its killing arc, yet his mind was anything but still. His head throbbed, for some reason in the final moments his mind got back to his family, on how he couldn't save them, on how he couldn't even take vengeance for them. His head bursting with voices, all clawing over one another, a storm of jeers and venom.
"You couldn't even save them."
The voice was his mother's—soft, tired—but twisted with hate. "You watched them die. Helpless. Worthless."
"Your father swung harder than you ever will," another spat, deep and guttural. "He died protecting scraps of a family you couldn't hold together. Some son."
Then came the children's voices again, dozens layered over each other, shrill and broken, overlapping laughter with sobs.
"We burned, Reivo. We screamed. Where were you?"
"You hid."
"You ran."
"You lived, and we died."
The words gnawed at him, sinking teeth into his heart. The air in his chest seemed to vanish, every breath caught between a sob and a scream. His wounds throbbed with each accusation. The memory of fire, of blood, of screams clawed up his throat until he thought he would choke.
The voices grew crueler still.
"You fight, but you lose. Always losing."
"This man is stronger. This man is better. You're a corpse waiting to lie down."
"Not even a grave will remember you."
The storm battered his mind from every angle, shredding him. His body trembled—not only from pain but from the truth in their words. He had always been weak. Always too late. Always just shy of enough. And now, here, his strength had carried him only to this point: a broken boy in the dirt, about to be erased.
The emptiness that had followed him since the day his family died widened, threatening to swallow him whole. But within that void… something stirred. Not mercy. Not hope. Something older, hungrier.
Reivo realized then—if he wanted to be something, if he wanted to do something, he had to embrace it. The voices were not enemies. They were tools. Weapons. The power he had been resisting was the only thing left.
The mocking storm reached its peak. His skull felt ready to split.
And then he whispered, his voice breaking through the cacophony like steel through flesh:
"Silence."
The word rippled through his mind. Instantly, every voice died. No laughter, no sobbing, no jeers. Only a heavy, suffocating quiet, deeper than any stillness he had ever known. It was as if the world itself held its breath.
Reivo's head lifted. Blood dripped down his chin, his eyes blazing with a terrifying clarity. His lips curled into a smile—not desperate, not mad, but predatory.
He locked eyes with the bald man. And when he spoke, his voice was steady, cutting through the heavy silence like a blade.
"You should have killed me before I started listening."
The bald man stiffened. For the first time in years, his instincts screamed. Danger. The kind of danger that couldn't be measured by blade or muscle. His body recoiled, muscles tensing to retreat—but pride and habit chained him in place. With a snarl, he lifted his scimitar higher, ready to end it before the unease became fear.
Reivo tilted his head, his smile widening. His voice dripped venom, heavy with a promise no man should ever hear.
"Bleed for me, Verhen."