The air in the Abyss was a physical weight… a suffocating blanket of heat and pressure that tasted of scorched metal and forgotten graves. It was thick with the sacred stench of burning flesh and sulfur… a holy incense to a god of torment. Distant agonized screams echoed through the cavernous expanse, a constant low-frequency hum that vibrated in the teeth and bones…
Yet, in one cell atop Hell's roof… a cage of fused blackened bone and infernal iron, that shrieked at the slightest touch… a fragile peace endured. A mother sang to her son. Her voice was a tremulous thread of sound,a fragile shield against the horrors that stretched endlessly beyond their prison. The cell looked out over a grotesque panorama: a vast, subterranean chasm where rivers of molten rock oozed like open wounds, casting a pulsating… hellish glow upon jagged stalactites that bled from the cavernous ceiling like the stone teeth of a forgotten leviathan. Shadows thick and oily moved with a life of their own, twitching and coiling at the edge of vision.
Her fingers, with a gentleness that defied the damned world, stroked his snow-white hair… a stark beacon in the perpetual twilight.
"Hush now… my shadow, my dear little one,
The night is long, but the dark is your home.
Close your eyes, let the spiders spin~
They'll weave you a blanket, so soft, so sweet."
She knew the lullaby was a lie. There was no softness here… no sweetness… only the hollow echo of a world that never was and the abrasive grit of ash that settled on everything… She sang it anyway. Her voice was a frayed thread of false comfort unraveling in the dark. The lie was all she had left to give… so she cradled it like a blade, pressing its hilt into his small hands praying he would never learn the weight of its edge.
She remembered the first time she sang it, her voice cracking on the promised words that tasted like ash on her tongue. There were no dreams here… only the ceaseless gnawing of the dark and the faint… phosphorescent glow of fungi that fed on despair… but then he'd sigh against her, his tiny body curling into the hollow of her ribs, and for a moment she could almost believe the fiction… Almost.
A decade later, the lullaby was a ritual… a wound she reopened each night. Her son, Aamon watched her with eyes that were too bright, too knowing… reflecting the hellfire of the landscape below. She wondered if he heard the truth beneath the melody. The Abyss had no lullabies, only distractions. No cradles… only chains that seeped a corrosive cold into the soul. She had stitched the lie into his bones anyway, thread by agonizing thread, because the alternative was a silence she could not bear.
Some nights, when the weight of the deception threatened to crush her, she imagined tearing the song from her throat and letting the truth spill out. Then his small hand would clutch restlessly at her sleeve… seeking anchor in the void, and she would swallow the bitterness down. Let him have this. Let him believe, if only for a little longer, that there is something in this world worth gentleness.
"Mother, tell me about the knights again! Please! I want to be one, they're so strong! Like you!"
His voice was too bright for the dark… a spark in the endless gullet of the Abyss. He squirmed in her lap, restless as a caged animal. His horns were still so small, so soft as they grazed her palm. His eyes glowed like twin rubies pried from a dead king's crown… for a moment, she let herself forget the cell… the chains, the weight of the world above pressing down like a tombstone.
She was the reason he breathed in this cage. She could never deny him.
With eyes full of an ancient… unbearable pain, she sat him on the rough-hewn bed and told him his favorite story. Something in her broke and bled every time. She pulled his head into her lap and played with his short white curls, a stark contrast to the jagged landscape beyond their cage.
"Listen well, my shadow, my little Aamon. I'll tell it just as you like… The Knight's Oath… Sir Aldric was brave, but never cruel. Sworn to protect Noctharis, a kingdom of golden fields and just laws."
The lie came to her lips as easily as a breath. She'd never known a just law, only the teeth behind them. She looked at her son, hanging on her every word… his youthful face alight with a devotion she could never deserve.
"When a dragon scorched the villages, Aldric rode out. Not for glory… but because the weak burned brighter in the dark…"
"Mother!! Do you think I'll ever see a dragon? A real one? Big enough to swallow the sun?"
He was looking out at the chasm, as if expecting one to erupt from a river of fire. She patted his smooth horns. His fingers dug into her arm… claws pricking skin. She wondered if he knew how easily he drew blood already.
"Yes, my shadow. Every dragon meets its hunter. Someday."
She tucked his head beneath her chin, her voice dropping like a lullaby or a blade.
"Aldric found the dragon, broken, its wings torn. A darker evil had driven it mad; a sorcerer, starved for thrones. But the knight saw the truth in the beast's pain. He knelt in the ashes and offered it water from his own helm."
She drew him up in her lap. Aamon settled into the hollow of her form, a small warmth against the pervasive chill of the enchanted cell. Its magic was a silent pressure… a boundary she could not see or touch… but could feel in the unnerving stillness of the air, a bubble of quiet in the screaming universe.
"Together, my little shadow, they exposed the sorcerer's lies. Not with fire. Not with steel. But with mercy. When the king offered Aldric a crown, he refused. 'Some things,' he said, 'are worth more than a kingdom.'"
Silence. Then…
"…Mother? Is mercy stronger than a sword?"
Her smile was sweet for him… a carefully crafted expression hollowed out by ages of pain and calculation. She had known many dragons in her time. Some were meals she had devoured to grow stronger. Some were leashes of war… tools she had wielded until they broke. But all without exception, had been monsters. Just as she was. Just as she would teach him not to be.
She smoothed a hand over his hair, her touch as cold as her sorrow, and whispered the words as soft as a venomous gift.
"Ask me again when the dragon kneels to you."
Eighty years.
Eighty years of sulfur and silence… of watching the same rivers of fire chart their sluggish eternal paths across the chasm.
Eighty years of Aamon playing knight with a sword of moss and memory, swinging at shadows that never swung back. The cell hadn't changed; Hell doesn't bother with time. The same jagged teeth of rock still hung from the ceiling… the same faint… desperate cries still echoed from the depths.
But she had.
Her flesh had withered first, peeling back from her bones like old parchment to reveal the hollow cradle of her ribs. Then her voice had gone… swallowed away, until all that remained was an eerie silence more profound than the screams outside. The arch of her spine had curled protectively toward where he still slept, a final… fossilized gesture of love.
Yet Aamon talked to her. Every day.
Today, like every day he brandished his moss-blade, its edges sharp from years of slashing at imaginary goblins in the flesh stained air. He struck a pose, chin lifted like the heroes in her stories… his silhouette a stark outline against the hell glow.
"Look, Mother!! I'm a knight now~ just like Aldric! I'll save a dragon someday! But… but first I'll save you."
A low, mournful sound escaped him as he stared at the ground.
"I want to be able to sleep with you again, Mother. I want to feel your chest rise and fall as you sing to me, again. I know it's greedy and you say greedy people should die… but I can't help it."
His voice wavered only a little. He'd practiced this. He knelt beside the bed… or what was left of it, a nest of rotted cloth and bones so white they glowed in the dark. Gently… so gently, he lifted her hand from the mattress. The fingers clicked softly, a sound like dice rolling in the void.
A tear fell.
It landed on her hollowed knuckles, sizzling for a second before vanishing into the Abyss's thirst.
His voice dropped to a whisper as he gripped her hand a bit tighter.
"…Mother, I promise you I will get out, I will make a friend, and I will take mercy on a dragon. That is my oath, no knight will break it."
Silence.
"I'll be stronger tomorrow." he promised the oppressive dark.
The silence that answered was different this time. It was not the quiet of his mother's absence… but the profound… deafening silence of the universe itself, and it spoke a clearer truth than any of her stories ever had. The words curdled in the air. Tomorrow would be the same as today, and today was the same as the ten thousand days before it. He was not a knight in a cell; he was a speck in a void. The stories were just sounds she had made. The moss-blade in his hand was not a weapon of destiny… rather a piece of decaying rot. The realization arrived with a cold… that still certainty seeped into the hollow of his bones: This is not a prelude. This is the entire song. There was no strength left to gain… only more time to endure.
For ninety years these walls, slick with a perpetual dampness had been his entire world… a suffocating tomb that even Hell seemed to have forgotten.
Aamon's horns now scraped the low, weeping ceiling as he stood at his full height… his once-small body now grown lean and hardened by decades of imprisonment. He had tried to break out… shouldering the iron bars until his bones ached, clawing at the seamless stone until his fingers were raw and bloody. Nothing had worked. Hell was a perfect… merciless jailer.
Beside his mother's remains… his smooth fingers brushing against the polished curve of her skull, a relic in the gloom.
"Sorry… Mother… I'm so sorry. But I can't stay here anymore."
The words tasted like betrayal, but the truth burned hotter than the rivers below. He couldn't keep pretending this was living. There were no knights in Hell… no dragons to slay or save… only endless darkness and the slow erosion of hope.
As he rose, his muscles coiled with pent-up fury. His eyes, still the same ruby red she'd loved, fixed on the ceiling where he knew...somehow, the mortal world waited. A world of sun and wind, a world he knew only from stories.
"I'll find a way out. And when I do…"
The promise hung unfinished… more dangerous for what went unsaid. The cell shuddered, and for the first time in years, Aamon felt something answer from deep within the bedrock… not the mocking laughter of Hell's screams… something darker and hungrier… a power that recognized its own, waiting just beyond the veil.
He gathered the larger fragments of her bones, the sacred relics of his life… clutching them to his chest. He sobbed as he whispered the command through gritted teeth, the words feeling like a desecration.
"Reformare."
The magic was a living shadow, a violent… unwilling re-shaping that sucked the light from the air. Her femur twisted and stretched with a sound of grinding stone, hardening into the long grim handle of a shovel. Her clavicle, with a crack that would haunt him forever… curved and flattened into its blade, its edge gleaming with a faint, sorrowful light.
He drove the bone-shovel into the packed soil and stone of the ceiling. With every blow, a sickening crack echoed… a blasphemy against the silence of her rest. His mother's bones did not glow with heat; they blackened and crumbled. Her final sacrifice burning away to ash in his scorched palms, each crumbling piece a memory extinguished.
Then came the sound that would define him: a crack so vast and deep it split the world in two. It was the sound of reality breaking.
The convulsion slammed into Aamon, hot blood bursting from his ears as the ceiling above him spiderwebbed with glowing… poisonous-green fissures. Through the ringing in his skull, he heard it… the distant, shrieking wail of mortal winds, the groan of collapsing dimensions, and beneath it all… his mother's voice, not from the bones below but from the Abyss itself, whispering one last… desperate command into the heart of the maelstrom…
"Climb."
A Spark in the Silence
The forest was a cathedral of quiet. A deep, reverent silence hung between the ancient trees, broken only by the soft plink of morning dew dripping from bare branches. Most leaves had fallen, creating a thick… and crunchy carpet of rust and gold underfoot. The skeletal limbs of oaks and ashes laced together like dark veins against a soft, grey sky the color of woodsmoke.
The air was cold and clean, carrying the rich… damp scent of loam and decaying wood, a perfume of endings. A single, hardy winter bird chirped a questioning note from a high branch… a sound that only deepened the surrounding hush.
A chubby tabby cat, its fur fluffed against the chill… picked its way with fastidious care through the damp soil, its paws leaving perfect star-shaped prints. Its ears, tufted and alert… swiveled once… then twice… before freezing mid-motion. There… between the swaying, bleached-blond blades of tall grass was the prize. Prey.
The cat dropped into a hunter's crouch, its belly fur brushing the cold earth. A grey-furred mouse… oblivious, nibbled on a fallen seed. The mouse's whiskers trembling with each tiny bite. The cat's tail, a fluffy barometer of intent, lashed once... Twice... It was a ritual of fifteen precise, gathering butt wiggles… a coiled spring of instinct. Then…
Pounce.
A flash of tabby fur, a single… definitive crunch of tiny bones. The mouse spasmed briefly in its jaws before going still. A primal thrum of victory coursed through the cat… until the earth beneath its feet moved.
Kwuh!
Dirt and leaf litter exploded upward. A pale clawed hand burst from the soil, fingers clawing at the air as if tearing through a burial shroud. The cat leaped backward… its body inflating to twice its size, a hissing spitting puffball of terror. Its prized mouse dropped… forgotten.
''Hiss~!''
The hand was followed by a slender arm… a shoulder… and then a head crowned with obsidian horns. Aamon hauled himself from the dirt, the soil itself seeming to recoil from his infernal touch before reluctantly yielding. He emerged… gasping the free air, his eyes burning like twin rubies in the gloom, casting jagged… dancing shadows across the sharp planes of his face.
The moment his full weight left the ground, the earth shuddered. A short, pained groan seemed to rise from the wound he'd torn in the world before the soil knit itself back together… weaving over the gap like frantic stitches over flesh. It left no trace, as if the forest was desperate to forget he'd ever been buried there.
finally, after a lifetime of crouching in a too small cell, he stood at his full… six-foot stature. His horns bumped a low-hanging branch with a soft tok. His large, leathery bat-like wings stretched out, an impressive fourteen-foot span that momentarily blotted out the grey sky… his spiked tail swung behind him with the eager, unguarded rhythm of a puppy's.
His wide, ruby eyes met those of the hissing cat.
"OH MY GOODNESS!!"
he breathed, his voice a raspy, unused instrument.
"You must be a kitty! My mother said so many wonderful things about you all!"
Utterly enchanted, Aamon dropped to his knees bringing himself to the cat's eye level. The cat was familiar with humans… the two-legged creatures who sometimes offered fish and scratches. But Aamon was not human. He was a demon. His very essence carried the scent of primordial evil… a stain on the natural order, no matter his intentions. Yet, Aamon's own tail wagged in open, hopeful excitement… thumping against the leafy ground.
"WOW! Look at those ears! They're so pointy! And I've never seen fur like that. It looks so soft, can I touch it? Oh, wait!"
He clasped his hands together, his expression one of pure, unadulterated yearning.
"Can we be friends, kitty cat?"
His bottom lip trembled. His one goal, the oath he had sworn in the dark, was to make a friend. Reaching behind him, he clutched the small cold fragment of bone… a comforting anchor in this overwhelming new world.
Hiss~ Squelch.
A velvet paw moved too fast for Aamon to track. A sharp sting bloomed right above his cheekbone. With a final, contemptuous flick of its tail, the chubby cat turned and dashed away into the brush… vanishing among the grey tree trunks.
Aamon pushed himself slowly to his feet, one hand clutched to his eye where three tiny pinpricks throbbed. A series of surprised tears welled up in his eyes, tracing clean paths through the dust and grime on his cheeks. The physical sting was bright and shocking; he'd never felt anything like it… rejection.
By the time he noticed, the flesh had already knitted back together… the demonic vitality within him rebuilding his cut ruby-red iris in moments. He looked down at his mother's bones in genuine innocent shock.
But seeing that fluffy tail disappear into the thicket without a backward glance… that stung so much more. It was a deep, hollow ache in his chest. Sniffling, he looked at the spot where the cat had been… his voice a wobbly whisper to the silent trees.
"That hurt. Why did it attack? I thought kitty's were nice."
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, trying to rationalize the rejection.
"Maybe I came on too strong? You know, scared it off because it was insecure."
His gaze then fell upon the source of the conflict: the barely twitching mouse, a small… dark stain spreading around it on the leaves. He felt a profound pang of sorrow for the little creature… its life bleeding out because of someone else's hunger. Aamon put on a serious face, the face of a knight from his mother's stories. He placed her remains carefully on a bed of soft moss.
He inched slowly toward the mouse… his movements cautious so as not to startle it further. Its body was limp and warm when he lifted it; he was shocked by the fragility of it, the simple fact of holding something so small and recently alive.
"Sanescere."
A soft, glowing white light, so at odds with his demonic nature emanated from his palm… enveloping the tiny creature. In seconds, the small puncture wounds sealed… its flesh knitted, its neck straightened with a faint pop. The mouse twitched, its legs pedaling the air as consciousness returned.
"Hey, little mouse…"
Aamon whispered, his heart hammering against his ribs.
"I saved you from death. Since I did that… will… you maybe be my friend?"
His words were a shaky, nervous plea. The last animal he'd asked had given him a stinging lesson in rejection… but these words felt different, weighted with a desperate hope.
The mouse, now whole twitched its nose. It didn't scramble away in immediate, blind fear. Instead, it sat up in his palm… its tiny paws held close to its chest like nervous hands. For a single, heart-lifting second… it seemed to look at him. Its bright black eyes took in the strange, suited boy with the tear-streaked face, the horns… and the hand that had moments ago glowed with gentle… healing light.
Then, instinct overcame the moment of strange connection. With a skitter of tiny claws against his skin, it turned and leapt from his hand… disappearing into the tangled safety of the long grass.
Aamon's outstretched hand slowly lowered to his side. The emptiness of it was a quiet, profound ache. He watched the grass stems cease their quivering… the sting felt different this time. It wasn't a sharp cut of betrayal; it was a soft, melancholic bruise. He had still been left alone... for one precious second, he hadn't been met with claws or immediate flight. He had been seen. He had been considered.
"Oh, I understand, little buddy…"
he murmured to the rustling grass.
"Be safe."
He sadly retrieved his mother's bones from the moss. He noticed, not for the first time… that dirt didn't stick to them, as if the earth itself was revolted by their presence.
"Now where do I put you, mother? I can't leave you here, and I'd be wrong to put you with the dirt… you shouldn't get dirty…. I got it."
He gripped the bones tighter, an idea forming from desperation and a need for permanent closeness. He closed his eyes… concentrating.
"Reformare."
A familiar, living shadow seemed to consume the bones. They cracked and reshaped with a series of soft, grinding clicks… merging and forming not into a tool… into ten simple, pale rings, one for each finger. A permanent, intimate embrace. He slid them onto his fingers; they were cool and smooth against his skin.
"Come, mother. I have a friend to make."
He sniffed the air, his new, sensitive senses parsing the thousand new scents of the world. One was dominant, foreign, and compelling.
"What's that smell?"
It was something rich, savory, smoky… he assumed it was meat, a thing he'd only heard of in stories. He headed towards it like a moth drawn to a flame. His wings were stiff, a heavy, unfamiliar weight on his back. Aamon stretched them… the membrane tight and new. A single, powerful, experimental stroke launched him into the air… the gust tearing through the skeletal winter trees and sending a flurry of dead leaves spinning.
The horizon unfolded beneath him like a stolen dream. Snow-capped mountains hunched like sleeping giants in the distance. Rivers, reflecting the grey sky… it cut through the land like silver scars. Beyond it all, a castle… its broken towers spearing the low clouds, black and jagged against the bleeding twilight.
Aamon's breath caught in his throat. It was too vast, too bright… too much... An ancient buried instinct, a memory from a lineage of creatures that hunted in confined darkness, whispered that wings like his weren't meant for such open… exposed sky.
The thought shattered as a gust of wind buffeted him, carrying the scent of pine and open water. He tipped his head back and laughed, the sound raw… unfamiliar… utterly shocking in the vast quiet. The whole world sprawled beneath him, waiting.
"Oh, wow."
he whispered, the words torn away by the wind.
"I can see everything. Just like in your stories."
His voice was a faint rumble, lost to the thunderous beat of his wings. He focused, following a dark thread of cookfire smoke against the pale sky. His flight was wobbly, and eager… carrying him over an endless sea of trees until he found its source: a clearing by a river.
It was a violent scar of stumps and churned mud carved into the forest's side, leading down to the bank of a deep blue river that rushed over smooth stones. A massive pile of freshly chopped logs sat stacked like bones. Proof of people. His people. The friends he would finally make.
His spiked tail wagged, thumping the air behind him with rhythmic whoooshes~.
"Wow, an actual village…"
he marveled, his heart swelling with a painful hope.
"Maybe one day I'll own my own house here, with a little garden. I can ride out from here to save people like a true knight."
He slowed his descent, his great shadow falling over the clearing like an omen. as he dropped lower… his joy began to curdle into confusion. It was empty. No one chopped wood, no one tended the fires. The silence here was different from the forest's peace; it was watchful, heavy. Night was falling… he reasoned. That makes sense. Everyone must be inside.
He landed softly, his boots sinking into the soft, wet earth.His wings folding flush against his back with a rustle of membrane. He stilled, listening.
There was the same chubby cat from earlier…. now licking a wounded paw. It was missing patches of fur, the skin beneath raw and blistered where it had been burned by Aamon's acidic blood. He brought a hand to his cheek, to the skin that had healed without a scar. The phantom pain of the rejection remained.
At this moment, Aamon's stomach was filled with frantic butterflies. He was so nervous he felt he might sweat, a strange… human sensation.
He just walked into the village. He didn't see anyone at first… so he continued down the central path, looking in wonder at the different sized houses, each with its own unique design and smoking chimney. When he reached the middle of the village, he saw them… the first faces, the first souls, other than his mother's.
He walked closer, quickly and desperately… shaking in his boots with excitement.
"Hi, I'm Aamonith, or Aamon for short. Does anyone know where I can find a friend?"
The air in the village center, once warm with chatter… turned to ice. Aamon's innocent smile remained a beacon of misplaced hope, even as every face locked into a mask of pure terror. His own expression faltered, the smile fading into bewilderment as the silence stretched. Then… a single… sharp wail cut through the stillness. A child pointed a trembling finger and began to cry.
It was the trigger.
The silence shattered into a cacophony of raw fear.
"DEMON!!"
"Leave, you vile creature!"
"KILL HIM!"
Aamon stood paralyzed, his ruby eyes wide… searching the contorted faces for a flicker of the welcome he'd dreamed of. A young boy, his own fear twisted into rage, snatched up a jagged rock and hurled it. It struck Aamon's obsidian horn with a hard tink.
The sound was small, still the effect was catastrophic. It was the final shattering blow to his fragile hope. Aamon flinched, not from the pain… but from the violence behind it. A hot pressure broke behind his eyes; a torrent of burning tears carved paths down his cheeks.
His choked cry… a sound of utter heartbreak… only fueled the mob's fury. The men converged, a wall of bristling pitchforks, gleaming knives… and crude wooden sticks. One man held a rusted sword… its point aimed at Aamon's heart.
Aamon looked around, his posture crumpling. He cowered like a kicked puppy… his massive form making the gesture of submission all the more pathetic. He made no move to fight, only to plead. Aamon's weeping eyes begging for a mercy that would not come.
With a collective roar, the men charged.
THWUCK.
The man with the sword was the first to reach him. He didn't just stab; he put his full weight behind a brutal thrust… plunging the rusted blade deep into Aamon's shoulder. The sound was a wet… meaty punch. Aamon felt the cold iron grind against his collarbone before a hot brand of agony seared through his entire being. He looked up at the swordsman, then down at the hilt of the blade buried in his flesh… stunned. He'd never felt pain like this; it was so all consuming it felt as if time itself had stopped.
"OUCH!! NOO, STOP! I'LL NOT HURT YOU! PLEASE! I PROMISE…."
His plea was cut short as a bigger man swung a metal pole with a two handed arc into the side of his head. The impact was a deafening CLANG of metal on bone. Aamon's vision exploded into white stars as he crashed to the ground. The taste of mud and his own coppery blood filled his mouth. He tried to push himself up… but a heavy boot stomped on the back of his head, mashing his face into the moist… worm filled soil. He couldn't breathe… only choke on dirt and blood as more kicks thudded into his ribs and back.
"Mmm, a demon's tears."
the swordsman spat on Aamon… leaning down, his breath reeking of cheap ale.
"I'll be a hero after people find out I made a demon cry. I'll mount your head on my fucken outhouse."
Before Aamon could form another useless plea, a rusted pitchfork was driven into his face with the force of a hammer blow. The central tine speared through his cheek… one prong tearing through his lips while another punched up through his palate. The iron erupted from his mouth in a spray of black blood, splintered teeth, and shredded gum tissue.
"Mmfff… Oouthh! S'th huthh!!"
His scream was a wet… gargling mess. The swordsman barely heard him, too busy staring at his own warping sword. The steel was writhing in his grip, the edge bubbling and flaking away where Aamon's corrosive blood had touched it… the rust spreading like a disease.
"You damn demon! You better hope those rings fetch a good pri-"
Aamon moved. Not with purpose… with blind… panicked reflex. His hands came up and pushed against the swordsman's chest… just enough to make space… he thought.
There was a sickening crunch of shattered ribs and sternum. The man flew backward as if launched from a siege weapon… his body smashing through the farmhouse wall in an explosion of splinters and straw, his scream cut short by collapsing timber.
Aamon didn't wait to see if the man rose. He just ran.
"SORRY!! I REALLY AM, PLEASE DON'T HURT ME ANYMORE! I DON'T WANT THIS!"
He cried out between coughs that sprayed his black blood. Aamon's spiked tail lashed out in a blind… sweeping arc of pure terror. It wasn't a strike, but a scythe. The men behind him collapsed to the dirt, their legs severed at the knee with a series of wet popping sounds, their shrieks joining the chaos. Aamon's boots tore grooves in the earth as he fled… his blood painting the road behind him in great, sizzling puddles that ate into the dirt.
Somewhere in the ruin of his mouth, his tongue probed the ragged… fleshy hole where the pitchfork had been. He felt the jagged edges of his broken jawbone already knitting back together with a faint… grinding sensation, the torn flesh stitching itself closed.
It was already healing.