The afternoon arrived not as a savior, but as an executioner. The sun, which in Devon's world had once been a promise of friendly warmth, here felt like the malevolent gaze of a giant fireball. Its scorching heat baked the drying mud on his skin, creating painful cracks, and worse, it seemed to conspire with the fever burning from within, turning his body into a furnace of suffering. Devon awoke to a new, revolting sensation. Not the slick movement of a leech or the kick of a goblin, but a sharp, repetitive touch on his thigh.
He peeled open his swollen, crusted eyes. His vision was a blur, the world swimming in a hazy, lavender light. He saw several dark shapes shifting over his leg. Birds. But these were no sparrows or doves. These creatures had feathers the color of spilled oil, shimmering with a sickly purple and green in the sunlight. Their beaks were long, black, and curved like surgical needles, and it was with these that they were methodically pecking at the edges of his infected wound. They weren't attacking him. They were cleaning him, consuming the rotting flesh, just as they would any carrion.
The realization struck him with a profound humiliation. He was still alive, yet the world already considered him a corpse.
"Go on..." he hissed. The sound that escaped his throat was just a dry, pathetic rasp, no louder than the rustling of leaves.
The birds hopped back for a moment, their heads cocked with a cold, reptilian intelligence, then one of them boldly stepped forward again. They knew he was weak. They knew he was dying. If he stayed here, he would be carrion, pecked to the bone by these small creatures before any larger predators even found him.
The tiny beetle in the mud. The stubborn instinct to keep moving.
With a groan that tore at his parched throat, Devon forced his body to move again. He used his spear as a crutch, its wooden shaft an anchor in a spinning world. He managed to get to his feet, swaying, his legs trembling uncontrollably. The pain from his infected thigh was so sharp and white-hot that it made stars dance before his eyes. He began to walk, a gruesome parody of human movement. Each step was a conscious choice, a battle against every cell in his body that screamed to give up and return to the earth. He had no destination, no direction. The only command that echoed in his foggy mind was: get away from the river. Get away from the open. Keep moving.
The forest around him became a hazy hell. The silver birch trees that had once seemed majestic now seemed to lean in, their bare branches like skeletal fingers reaching for him. He was hallucinating. He saw Rina's face in the bark, her spectacled eyes looking at him with disappointment. He heard the goblin's hoarse laughter in every whisper of the wind. He kept walking, dragging his wounded leg, leaving a faint trail of blood and pus on the rust-colored moss.
He didn't know how long he had been walking. Minutes? Hours? Time had melted into an endless cycle of misery. Just when he felt the spear would slip from his limp grasp, just when the darkness began to creep back in at the edges of his vision, he saw it. In the middle of a small clearing overgrown with knee-high grass, stood something impossible. A geometric anomaly in the chaos of nature. A house. A log cabin.
At first, his fever-addled brain rejected it, dismissing it as a trick of the light or another mirage. But it remained, solid and real. It was old, the wood weathered to a silvery grey, and parts of the roof had collapsed. Vines with strange, pale blue flowers crawled up one wall, as if the forest were slowly trying to reclaim it. But it was a structure. It was proof of intelligence, of hands that had built.
Hope, however small and fragile, is the most potent fuel. Devon stumbled forward, his feet catching in the grass, and he fell to his knees before the door. It was made of the same thick wooden planks, windowless, with only a rusted iron ring for a handle. With the last of his strength, he pushed. It groaned, a long, hoarse protest from long-frozen hinges, before finally giving way, releasing a gust of stale, dusty air.
Devon crawled inside and collapsed on the floor. The air within was cool and dark, a relief from the searing heat outside. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. The room was thick with dust, draped in heavy cobwebs that hung from the rafters like tattered shrouds. Shafts of sunlight pierced through gaps in the walls and roof, creating pillars of light that illuminated the dancing motes of dust in the still air.
This place had been abandoned for a long time. But it was not empty.
Across the room, beside a cold stone fireplace, was a sturdy wooden table and a chair. And in the chair, sat a figure. A human skeleton, yellowed with age. It sat upright, as if its owner had only just passed a moment ago, not decades. Its jaw was slightly agape, its spine resting against the back of the chair. One skeletal arm lay on the table, its bony fingers inches from an overturned wooden cup. The owner of this place had died here, alone, perhaps waiting for someone who never came.
Devon stared at the skeleton, not with terror, but with a strange and horrifying sense of kinship. "Hello," he rasped. This was it. This was the mirror of his own future if he did nothing. This world's version of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
His glazed eyes scanned the room, taking in every detail. This wasn't just a home; it was a survivor's workshop. On the wall hung various tools. A beautifully crafted hunting knife with a polished bone handle. An unstrung shortbow, its wood dark and supple. On the table, beside the empty cup, lay several arrowheads of sharpened obsidian, a small hatchet, and other various blades he didn't recognize. And in the corner, inside an open wooden chest, something gleamed faintly. Devon crawled closer. Magic stones. A few were a pale blue, cool to the touch, others a dull red that seemed to absorb the light.
But it wasn't the weapons or the stones that held his attention. On a small shelf above the workbench lay the real treasure. Several rolls of yellowed but clean-looking linen bandages. A small, stoppered ceramic bottle. And a hinged metal box. With trembling fingers, Devon opened it. Inside, nestled on a bed of faded velvet, lay a curved needle, a set of small surgical scalpels of varying shapes, and a tiny glass vial of a liquid as clear as water, but with a sharp, alcoholic smell. A kit for treating wounds.
Devon looked back at his thigh. The red streaks of the infection seemed darker, more pronounced. He could feel the heat pulsing from it without even touching it. He looked at the kit before him. He looked at the skeleton in the chair. A terrible, stark choice lay before him. To die slowly, rotting from the inside out, or to endure an unimaginable agony at his own hand.
He made his choice.
He dragged himself to the center of the room, where the light was brightest. He unstoppered the ceramic bottle. A sharp, bitter herbal smell filled the air. He didn't know what it was, but he poured it over the gash on his thigh.
The pain was immediate and blinding. It was like liquid fire being poured directly onto his exposed nerves. An inhuman scream, torn from the deepest part of his lungs, filled the cabin's silence. It was the sound of a trapped animal, the sound of pure agony. He bit his lip until he tasted blood, trying to ride out the wave of pain that threatened to make him black out. Tears streamed down his cheeks, not from sorrow, but as a purely physiological response to the overwhelming torment.
When the first wave subsided, leaving him shaking violently, he picked up the smallest scalpel from the metal box. Its blade gleamed as it caught a beam of light. His hand was trembling uncontrollably. He had to brace his right wrist with his left hand to steady it. He stared at the swollen, purpled flesh. He knew he had to cut away the infected parts.
He took a ragged breath, then pressed the tip of the blade to his own skin.
The cold sting of the steel, followed by the resistance of his flesh, then a fresh explosion of pain as the blade sank deeper. He sobbed, a broken, wretched sound. He cut, following the blackened lines of the infection. The smell of his own blood filled the air, coppery and thick, mixing with the scent of alcohol and dust. He had to stop several times, gasping for breath, his stomach churning with nausea. He threw up on the dusty floor, bitter bile burning his throat.
But he didn't stop. He looked at the skeleton, his silent witness. He would not end up like that.
After what felt like an eternity, the worst of it was done. The wound was now open, clean, and weeping fresh blood, not foul pus. Now for the next part. He picked up the small glass vial of clear liquid. He knew what he had to do. Gritting his teeth, he poured its contents directly into the gaping wound.
If the pain before had been fire, this was hell itself. His entire nervous system exploded. He could no longer scream; there was no air left in his lungs. His body arched in a convulsive spasm, and darkness danced at the edges of his vision. But he held onto consciousness with a death grip. He had to finish.
With his vision blurred by tears and pain, he took up the needle and the gut-thread. Stitching his own flesh was a surreal, grotesque task. The needle felt clumsy in his trembling hands. The first puncture made him cry out again. He sewed crudely, the stitches uneven and hideous. Every pull of the thread was a new wave of agony. He was both the executioner and the victim, trapped in a self-inflicted circle of torture.
Finally, it was done. He wrapped the wound with the clean linen bandages, his hands moving mechanically. He had done it.
He collapsed back onto the cold, dusty floor, his body a symphony of pain. He was soaked in sweat, tears, and blood. He was shaking uncontrollably. He stared up at the dusty ceiling, his breathing shallow and ragged. The skeleton seemed to watch him from its chair, its silence feeling like a kind of approval.
He did not feel strong. He did not feel like a hero. He felt broken, torn apart, and empty.