The air in the dungeon didn't just smell of decay; it smelled of forgotten time. Moisture seeped through the porous limestone, dripping with a rhythmic tock... tock... tock... that echoed like a heartbeat in the oppressive silence.
"Even shadows tremble when grief breaks free," a voice rasped.
Leornars slumped in the corner, a ghost of a boy woven from grime and hollowed eyes. Rusting brass cuffs bit into his skin—two binding his ankles to a heavy iron ring in the floor, one cinching his left wrist. His right hand remained free, a cruel necessity for him to feed himself, though he often forgot what hands were for.
"Why am I still alive?" he whispered. The sound was like dry parchment tearing. "I should've joined Mother by now… My mind aches… my bones feel dry. Am I hungry? Am I thirsty?"
He paused, his unfocused gaze drifting to the ceiling. He began to rhythmically thud the back of his head against the cold stone. Thump. Thump. "No... that's not it… then what is it? Who... am I?"
The heavy iron door groaned on its hinges, spilling a sliver of torchlight into the gloom. Sahara Kurnov, the mayor's daughter, stepped inside. She carried a tray, her face a mask of pity that Leornars couldn't—or wouldn't—see.
Behind her stood a guard, his hand resting on the hilt of a mace. "Keep it brief, Lady Sahara. The freak doesn't deserve the air you're breathing."
Sahara ignored him, kneeling in the filth beside Leornars. "This isn't you…" she murmured, her voice trembling. "This isn't the same Leornars I knew back then. Please, you have to eat."
Leornars didn't look at her. He looked at the bowl: a grey slurry of thin soup and hardened bread. As the guard stepped forward to unlock the single wrist cuff, Leornars lunged. He didn't attack; he simply grabbed the bowl with animalistic desperation, shoveling the slop into his mouth with his bare fingers.
The guard sneered, leaning over to spit directly onto Leornars' matted hair. "Disgusting freak. Look at him, licking the floor like a dog."
Leornars froze. He tilted his head back, looking up at the guard. His eyes were vacant—two bottomless pits of obsidian that reflected no light. The guard's sneer faltered. He took an involuntary step back, his skin crawling with a sudden, inexplicable chill.
"Tch. You should leave now, Sahara," the guard grunted, grabbing her arm. "This little pest is about to get his 'treatment' from the lead interrogator."
He shoved her toward the exit. Sahara lingered for a heartbeat, her eyes glistening as the heavy door slammed shut, plunging the cell back into a tomb-like darkness.
Days bled into weeks. The darkness was no longer an enemy; it was a shroud.
Unbeknownst to the jailers, Sahara had been desperate. Every meal she brought contained a fine, shimmering dust—crushed healing crystals. It was a slow, subtle restoration, mending the fractured synapses of his mind.
One night, the silence was broken by a voice that didn't sound like a whimper.
"I… I am Leornars…"
He sat bolt upright, his eyes sharp for the first time in four years.
"Son of Emalian Seers Avantris… and I will have my retribution."
His voice was a jagged blade. From the folds of his rags, he produced a stolen metal fork—tines bent and sharpened through weeks of obsessive scraping against the floorboards. Every day, while the guards laughed in the hall, he had been working. Scraping. Weakening the pins of the brass cuffs.
The next time the door opened, the routine felt different. The air felt heavy with the scent of ozone.
Sahara entered, followed by the same arrogant guard. As the guard reached down with the key to unlock the right wrist, he didn't notice that the ankle restraints were already resting loosely on the straw.
The lock clicked.
"There you go, you little—"
Leornars moved. It wasn't the movement of a boy; it was the strike of a viper.
He surged upward, the ankle chains falling away with a dull clatter. Before the guard could draw a breath to scream, Leornars drove the rusted fork upward, burying the tines deep into the man's throat.
Gurgle—
Blood, hot and metallic, sprayed across the stone walls and Sahara's face. The guard's eyes bulged, hands clawing at the air as he collapsed into the muck.
Sahara let out a piercing shriek of pure terror. Leornars turned to her, his expression disturbingly calm. Without a word, he delivered a precision kick to her temple. Her head snapped back, and she crumpled into unconsciousness.
Leornars looked at the bowl of soup she had dropped. He sat back down amidst the spreading pool of the guard's blood, picked up the bowl, and finished his meal. As he ate, he hummed a strange, tuneless melody that drifted out into the corridor.
When the bowl was empty, he stood and stepped over the corpse.
Kurnov Town did not wake up that morning. It screamed itself awake.
The prison was a slaughterhouse. Leornars moved through the halls armed with nothing but his sharpened fork and a heavy, jagged tree branch he'd snatched from the courtyard. He didn't just kill; he dismantled.
"The scent of fresh air… divine," Leornars whispered.
He stood in the center of the main thoroughfare, drenched from head to toe in crimson. Around him, the town was descending into a fever dream of violence. He caught a local baker trying to flee toward the cellar. Leornars tackled him with a manic strength, dragging the man toward a vat of boiling oil in the bakery window.
As the screams of the man echoed through the street, Leornars began to laugh—a high, fractured sound that rose above the crackle of fires. By the time the moon reached its zenith, the toll was catastrophic. Ten thousand souls, snuffed out by the "caged boy" they had all chosen to forget.
The Mayor's Great Hall was a scene of panicked chaos.
"This crisis will be dealt with!" Mayor Kurnov bellowed to his trembling council. "It is one boy! One starving child!"
Desperate to secure his own legacy, the Mayor rushed toward the dungeons to retrieve his daughter, only to find the cell door swinging wide. Inside, Sahara lay in the dirt, her face bruised and bloody.
The Mayor's face contorted into a mask of primal fury. "If you see him, kill him!" he roared at the arriving knights. "No trials! No cages! Kill the boy!"
The knights charged toward the exit, their armor clanking—only to stop dead as a blood-curdling scream echoed from the foyer.
The heavy oak doors burst open.
Leornars stepped through. He was unrecognizable, a living statue of gore. The tree branch in his hand was no longer wood; it was a sodden, red club dripping with viscera.
"You..." the Mayor gasped, drawing his ceremonial longsword. "You monster!"
The Mayor charged, swinging with the weight of his office. Leornars didn't flinch. He leaned back, the blade whistling past his nose, and delivered a devastating roundhouse kick to the Mayor's jaw.
CRACK.
The Mayor was sent flying backward, his sword clattering across the marble floor. Leornars walked over to the weapon and picked it up, testing the weight.
"You know…" Leornars said, tilting his head as he watched the Mayor struggle to breathe. "I've always been curious... What color is the human heart? A quick test won't hurt, will it?"
The Mayor tried to crawl away, his fingers scratching at the polished stone. He didn't get far.
Leornars pounced, pinning the older man down with his knees. The Mayor looked up, seeing his own terrified reflection in the boy's dead eyes.
"Now, I'm pretty sure… you're not going anywhere," Leornars whispered.
He smiled—a wide, cruel expression that reached his ears—and plunged the blade through the Mayor's thigh, pinning him to the floor like an insect.