What the voice had said echoed fiercely in his head, weighing heavily on his soul:
"You have consumed one of your flames, Reader."
Air tore into his lungs like a knife dragged through cloth. His hands flew to his throat. Skin. Warm. Unbroken. Under his fingers, a thin ridge pulsed with heat, a scar. He swallowed and felt the pull of it from the inside, as if the mark had roots.
He stared at the ash. It spread in every direction, the grains fine as ground bone. Heat pressed on him from a sky red and swollen without a sun. He remembered blood filling his mouth. He remembered not breathing. He remembered the light leaving. And yet he was here again.
Alive… but less than before.
He waited to see if the world would reject him again, if the ground would split, if the sky would peel back and show the gears grinding him to dust. Nothing moved but ash. He flexed his fingers, testing the limits of the body he had just borrowed back. The scar pulsed in a slow, stubborn rhythm, as if it were its own small heart arguing with the larger one. Two flames left, he thought. Two promises the book would force him to keep. He tried to imagine stopping, closing his eyes, letting the heat take him, and realized he couldn't. His sister's face was all that held him upright. The memory of her voice, her laughter when the world was still kind, weighed more than the dread pressing in from every direction.
Three embers on a page flickered in his mind. One had gone out. Two remained. Two breaths of a candle in a storm.
A scream split the sky.
It wasn't human. The sound hooked into him and pulled his head up.
The eagle cut across the furnace firmament. Its shadow fell over him, long and wrong. The air soured with rot and iron. The scar at his neck burned hotter, as if the thing's gaze had fingers and they were pressing there.
He rose too fast and staggered. The ash slid under his feet and whispered. He scanned for the broken spear he had carved before. Half a shaft lay half-buried. He wrenched it free and gripped it until his knuckles whitened.
«Oh, please… not again.»
The creature dived.
Wind hit first. He threw himself sideways. The beak knifed into ash where his head had been, throwing up a gray wave that stung his eyes.
He jabbed. The beak scissored, caught the wood, and bit through. Shock ran up his arms. Splinters tore his palms. He hissed and shifted his grip, left with a jagged stake.
A talon flashed. Heat lit his shoulder. He stumbled, almost fell, refused to.
The scar flared.
Not light. Not a voice. A taste, metallic and old, the sense of a wound blooming a heartbeat before it bloomed. He dropped flat as a second strike ripped the air. The creature overshot and slammed the ground, talons gouging trenches.
He rolled to a knee, coughing. Grit in his teeth. The scar cooled a fraction.
«The scar warned me.»
The eagle descended through its own storm of ash and spread its wings. Its eyes were milky lamps. A translucent membrane blinked with a slow, horrible slide. Strings of saliva hung from the hinged beak. The smell of rot forced bile into his mouth.
It came again.
He moved with the burn in his neck. Duck, pivot right, talons cut air. He smashed the stake into the wing root. The blow thudded into ragged flesh. The creature staggered a half-step.
He hurled a rock. It struck near the eye. The membrane dragged over the orb. He closed and stabbed for the gap where beak met skull. The beak snapped shut on the stake and wrenched it away. He let go before it took his fingers. He dove for another rock and swung. Bone, not flesh, wrists numbed.
A wing slammed him like a door. Sky, ground, sky, then ground again. His ears rang. He tasted copper.
«Move.»
The scar blazed and pulled him aside as talons raked ash where his spine had been. He ran toward a pillar jutting like a broken tooth and flattened his back to it, trying to breathe without gasping.
The bird circled, stirring ash into spirals. It vanished against the red glare, reappeared lower. The heat was a wall. Each breath scratched.
He scraped a shallow trench with his heel. The scar stabbed his nerves, he kicked a plume of ash into its dive and charged. His rock cracked the beak. Dark oozed. The teeth inside caught only the tail of his ragged shirt.
He stumbled clear, chest heaving. «I can't win like this. I don't even know what winning means here.»
A memory slid in: the detention yard, the biggest boy feinting high and kicking low. Read the hips. See the shift. Survival, not skill. Wings were hips. Head the foot. The scar the stolen second he had never had.
"Come on," he said. "Try me."
It obliged. Low, talons forward, head tucked. Step left, then lunge right into the pocket the wing left. He slammed the rock into the joint. Something gave with a wet crack. The eagle caromed into the pillar. Eros grabbed a splinter of stone and drove it up beneath the wing. The scream flayed his ears. The wing heaved and threw him away.
He gagged on ash and spat gray ropes. His legs shook. Pain spread in sheets. The scar beat in his neck like a second heart.
The eagle steadied, blood smeared across feathers. Its eyes held him with hateful frost.
«It knows I come back. It thinks I'm food.»
Rage woke, quiet, settling, sharpening everything into edges.
He lifted another rock. Smaller. "I'm not food."
The scar flared. He threw himself backward as the beak thrust. It scraped his chest and ripped a line of flesh. Heat and cold exploded across his ribs. He rolled, the world a blur of red and gray and white pain.
He crawled to a collapsed statue: a carved foot half-buried, big as a table. He slid behind it. The eagle struck the far side, marble rattling, cracks spidering.
He pawed through ash and found a shard of chain, a fused length like a crooked bar. He wrapped it around his forearm and gripped the end like a handle.
The eagle came over the statue. He stepped in and swung. The chain-bar smashed its head. Blood sprayed. Talons punched. Metal screamed against bone. He shoved forward, the world narrowed to feathers, rot, and iron. The scar flashed, beak incoming, he drove the chain up with both hands. The beak skittered across metal and carved his shoulder instead of his throat. Fire poured down his arm. He held anyway, teeth bared.
The wings beat. The gale tore him off his feet. He hit stone. The chain ripped from his grip. The eagle dove.
He ran, stumbling, bleeding, dragging air that hurt to swallow. The scar tugged left, a talon's wind brushed his hair. He pitched into a shallow riverbed scoured by old water and slid under a ledge of rock, pressing himself flat.
The beak stabbed into the gap and snapped inches from his face. He jerked back. Stone scraped his scalp.
The beak withdrew. He grabbed it as it reentered, yanked sideways while kicking at the ledge. The hinge bucked. The eagle wheezed and pulled back. He scrambled out and sprinted down the trough, lungs on fire.
Open ash again. Nothing to grab.
Down, said the scar. He dropped. Talons raked his back, three burning lines instead of a severed spine. He screamed and staggered toward a ring of half-melted columns. Stone dripped and froze like wax. He ducked inside.
"You can't defeat me, huh?" His throat was raw. "Come on."
The eagle filled the mouth of the ring. The scar flared. He stepped toward the left column at the last moment and dropped flat. The bird smashed stone. A chunk fell and crushed a wing. The creature shrieked. He grabbed the fallen piece, jagged and heavy, and smashed it into the head. A fracture widened, dark slicked the beak.
It flapped backward, trying to clear the ring. He chased and struck twice more. It fled upward.
For a heartbeat he dared to breathe, counting the thuds in his throat to make sure they still belonged to him. He pictured the page again, the embers sketched and cruel. Two left, the book had said without saying. Two chances to learn, or two chances to die more beautifully. He wanted to laugh and found only a dry rasp. The heat pressed closer, intimate and impersonal. Beyond the columns, something vast rumbled, like a city turning in its sleep. He thought of the detention yard, of how the game had never ended, only changed its rules. He thought of Amanda, and the way her voice had always cut through the noise like a blade.
He fell to a knee, panting. He might have done it. He might—
The scar turned to ice.
He looked up. The eagle had climbed, not retreated. It folded its wings and fell like a thrown spear.
He moved. Not fast enough.
The beak struck his chest and drove him into the central slab. White noise swallowed sound. He raised his forearm, the beak carved a deep groove through skin and muscle. His hand went numb. Talons punched his thigh and dropped him.
The tunnel closed. At its end, two milky lights burned.
Make them pay to touch you. He dragged his good hand down the beak and jammed two fingers into the crack he had opened earlier. Heat scorched his skin. He pulled. The beak slewed sideways. He drove his forehead into it. Stars burst. The bird reeled.
No room left. No strength.
He slid down the slab and left a smear of blood.
The scar gave one last warning. He saw the path the beak would take, down, through the same soft place. His body moved, but too late.
The beak punched into his throat.
Heat poured out of him and took the world. He clutched at the wound and felt his fingers slip on himself. The ring of columns leaned as if the world tilted off its axis.
«Amanda…»
He wanted her name. It came out a wet rasp. The eagle's breath scraped above him. He thought of hands tapping a typewriter in the dark. He thought of a diary that didn't care if he screamed.
«So this is it. Again.»
The light went out.
He fell into blackness. Heat drained and left only cold that wasn't temperature. No up, no down, just a pull like a tide with no shore. He tried to hold on to something. There was nothing.
Eros screamed silently as the abyss swallowed him once more.