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"The past does not sleep. It does not fade. It waits in the marrow, whispering through the cracks of every silence—not as memory, but as verdict."
—Keepers of Memories, Verse of the Unforgotten
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Ash hung. Not fell. Hung. A curse given weight, a shroud woven from Embermark's perpetual sigh. It coated the hovel's sagging rafters like grey fungus, sifted through cracks in the packed-dirt floor, and clung to the inside of Lugal's lungs – cobwebs spun from smoke and old, dried blood. Every breath was swallowing ground glass.
He was a knot of bone and flinching muscle beneath the sagging table. Ribs pressed sharp against knees drawn tight to his chest. Bare arms, thin and already mapped with older scars, wrapped around his head, a futile shield. The air above vibrated with menace.
Whip—snap.
The sound wasn't loud. It was intimate. Final. Leather on air, promising leather on skin. He didn't scream. Screaming was fuel. It fed the storm raging above him – broad-shouldered, reeking of cheap rotgut and deeper ruin. His father wasn't a man. He was a shadow given density, a bad dream made flesh that drank all the weak light filtering through the ash-fogged window. Not strong. Just big. A landslide in human skin.
"You think stretching scraps makes you clever, boy?" The voice was thick, words slurring into each other like drunks in an alley, dripping with a venom Lugal knew better than his own name. "You think boiling bones makes you better than me?"
Whip—crack! This time it found flesh. A line of fire across the thin canvas of his shoulder. Lugal's teeth ground together, iron flooding his mouth where his gums split. Silence was his only weapon. Silence was his armor.
A boot – heavy, crusted with Sinks mud – slammed into his curled ribs. Fire bloomed, white-hot, stealing his breath. Then the belt again, not measured punishment now, but frenzy. Whip-snap-crack! Striking the table leg, the wall, the air inches from his ear, seeking the flinch he refused to give. Seeking the music of his pain.
"You'll never be nothing!" The roar shook dust from the rafters. "Worthless! Like your whoring mother! Nothing!"
As the man turned, swaying, the knife on his hip caught a sliver of dirty light filtering through the ash-haze. Lugal saw it. Saw it clearer than the boot, clearer than the belt, clearer than the pain radiating through his small frame. The bone handle, worn smooth. The chipped blade. A hunter's tool, repurposed for domestic terror.
He should have been afraid. Knees shaking, bladder loosening, the primal terror of the prey.
He wasn't.
He remembered the root-bread, stale as stone. He remembered the bones, scavenged, boiled for hours until the water turned milky, pretending it was broth. He remembered the stupid, treacherous spark of hope. Maybe… just maybe… this time. This time, the offering would be seen. This time, the shadow might look at him, truly see him, and not just the space he occupied.
The belt had flown then, too. Not a warning. A viper strike.
His head had snapped back. Cracked against the rough stone of the cold hearth. The world hadn't gone black. It had gone red. Hot and wet and roaring. Then nothing.
Silence. Thick. Suffocating.
Cold seeped into his bones, deeper than the fading ache of the blows. The fire was dead ash. The hovel was a tomb soaked in the sour stench of spilled ale and despair. His father was gone. Only ghosts remained: the smear of a heavy bootprint darkening the bruise on his ribs, the shattered bottle near the hearth, glass teeth glittering in the gloom.
He didn't cry. Tears were for the hopeful, for those who believed comfort existed. He had learned.
He lay on the cold dirt floor, staring up. Ash drifted through the rafters, slow and indifferent, like sediment in a stagnant pool. The grey Sinks sky pressed down through the cracks, a breath too thin, too exhausted, to fill his lungs. The familiar thrum of the city's Akar veins felt distant here. Muffled. Unconcerned.
That was the moment.
Not the crack of the belt. Not the boot. Not the red-black oblivion against the hearthstone.
This silence. This profound, echoing absence. The absence of rage, of noise, of the crushing shadow. The absence of anyone coming. Anyone caring. The realization, cold and absolute as the stone beneath him: he was alone. Utterly. Irrevocably. In this hovel. In this life. In this city that ate its young.
Something broke. Not a bone. Not skin. Something deeper. Primordial. The last fragile strut holding up the illusion of safety, of belonging, of *mattering*, shattered like the bottle on the hearth.
Get out.
The whisper wasn't his own. It was the city's cold breath, the Akar's buried pulse, the final verdict of the silent rafters. It slithered from the cracks in the floor, from the taste of blood on his lip.
He pushed himself up, slow, every movement an agony that paled against the deeper wound. He spat. Blood and ash. He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth, smearing crimson.
He made the vow then. Not shouted at the uncaring sky. Whispered. Into the ash, into the cold, into the marrow of his own broken bones. A pact sealed with the copper tang on his tongue:
I will not die here.
I will rise.
I will become more than this shadow-born thing.
I will make the world kneel for ever calling me nothing.
The vision shattered like cheap glass.
Lugal bolted upright, a ragged gasp tearing from his throat. The ghost of the belt seared across his back, a phantom brand. The taste of blood and ash flooded his mouth.
But the air… the air was wrong.
Colder. Staler. Thick with a damp that crawled on the skin. The comforting, familiar reek of soot and spilled ale was gone, replaced by a choking miasma: mold blooming in stone, the sharp tang of piss, the cloying sweetness of despair gone rancid. Underneath it, the iron bite of blood – old, not his own.
Not the hovel.
Panic, cold and sharp, pricked his spine. He sat up too fast. The world tilted. Iron bars, thick as a man's wrist, crusted with weeping rust, slammed into his vision. Between them, etched deep into the pitted metal, dim yellow runes pulsed with a sickly light. Containment glyphs. Not just for flesh. For the soul. For the will to rise.
The cell was a stone fist clenched around him. Barely space to lie down. Cracks in the weeping walls wept icy tears. Somewhere, water dripped. Plink… plink… plink… A clock counting down to something worse than a belt.
Outside the bars: deeper darkness. Muffled sobs that hitched like broken machinery. Whispers that sounded like prayers, or curses, or the last breaths of the damned. The heavy rattle of chains dragged over stone.
Lugal coughed, the sound raw and scraping in the tomb-like air. The phantom taste of blood faded, replaced by the cold reality of the cell's stench. The vow echoed in the hollow of his skull – I will rise – a cruel joke against the rusted iron.
He didn't fight it. He curled back in on himself, knees drawn tight, arms wrapped around his shins, mirroring the boy under the table. The cold stone leached the warmth from his bones. The drip counted seconds he didn't have. The runes hummed, a low thrum that vibrated in his teeth, seeking the cracks in his resolve.
Sleep, when it came again, wasn't rest. It was a dark tide, relentless and clawing. It didn't offer escape. It dragged him back, down, into the memory that lived in his marrow, the hearthstone waiting, the ash still falling in the silent, hopeless hovel. The past wasn't past. It was the cell's fourth wall, cold and unforgiving.