"…a fucking baby?"
Even through the mask covering his face, disbelief radiated from him like a scream in the dark. His eyes—two molten orbs of gold flickering with muted fire—widened beyond the limits of reason. His breath hitched, caught between his teeth as if the very act of exhaling might shatter this surreal moment. His jaw, usually clenched with the discipline of long years hardened by violence and solitude, hung ajar in raw, visceral bewilderment.
A baby.
In this desolate, forgotten wound in the world, where nothing but rot and madness belonged.
A baby.
Not in any of the infinite hells he had wandered—nor in any cursed vision dredged from memory or nightmare—had he expected this.
And yet, it was no illusion.
The infant lay nestled in the hollow of gnarled roots, its small body unnervingly still, like a thing misplaced by reality itself. But even as the word—baby—clawed its way across his thoughts, something deep within him recoiled. Not out of fear. Not yet. But out of a certainty so primal it bypassed thought: this was wrong. Profoundly, existentially wrong.
He stepped closer, boots cracking over rotten leaves, the brittle underbrush beneath his feet whispering warnings only the dead could decipher.
From a distance, it might have passed for an ordinary newborn. But proximity peeled away that illusion like a scab.
It was hairless—not in the innocent way of fresh birth, not the soft fuzz of mortality newly given form. No. Its scalp was grotesquely empty, as if something had scraped away every follicle with precision and cruelty, leaving behind not skin but a surface like scorched stone. There was no natural bareness here. Only obliteration.
Its flesh—gods, its flesh—was blackened, not with the tone of any living people, but with something far crueler: the black of rot, of death already halfway digested. The black of bark after fire, carbon flaking like ancient ash. Its arms, its legs, its belly—every inch looked brittle, burned, as though the infant had been exhumed from some smoldering battlefield and not born at all. As though it hadn't lived into this world, but had been dragged out of some nightmare into a shell barely able to contain it.
And the face.
The face was a mask of agony that should have belonged to no creature, let alone something so young. Its tiny mouth gaped—not in a cry, but in something deeper. A silent howl. A voiceless plea. Yet no scream came. No sob. Just the ghost of one—a faint, stifled grunt, low and strangled, like sound pressed beneath tons of sorrow. It wasn't the absence of sound that haunted—it was the presence of too much pain.
Even crying seemed to hurt it.
The tiny chest rose and fell in pitiful tremors, as though each breath was dragged across a bed of broken glass. And when it moved, it was not with the spasms of a living babe, but with the twitches of something enduring life rather than experiencing it. Every gesture seemed to cost it more than it could afford.
The sound—if such a thing could even be called that—barely disturbed a fragment of the dense woodland, a ripple too soft to be loud, yet sharp enough to be noticed. Not loud. Not sharp. But saturated with a depth of anguish that transcended pitch or volume. A sound that did not belong in the lungs of something so small. A sound born from something that had known too much torment for too long.
A sound that should not be.
The man staggered back a step. He had braved horrors that tore men's minds to ribbons. He had faced creatures that bent reality, that wore human skin like cloaks and fed on memory. He had walked through the remains of cities swallowed by the dark. And never had he faltered.
But now, he stood paralyzed—not by threat, but by uncertainty.
'What is this…?'
The thought rippled through him like a tremor through stone. His heart thudded once, twice, heavy as a war drum.
'What was this baby?
'Why did it look as though death had begun its feast, only to forget to finish?'
'Why did his very soul ache in its presence?'
The urge to flee seized him—not out of cowardice, but from the primal understanding that some things are not meant to be touched. That some suffering carries contagion deeper than disease.
But he didn't run.
Instead, he paced—tight circles around the silent child, his hands flexing in frustration, his breath coming quick and uneven. The golden gleam of his irises flickered erratically behind the shadow of his wrappings.
'Shit. What do I do? What the fuck do I do?'
The wind whispered through the dying canopy above, rustling ash-colored leaves that looked more like brittle paper than living things. The air smelled of rust, of stale earth, and something else—something faintly sweet, like rotting nectar.
He ran a hand over his head, through the cloth, and cursed again.
'Pick it up? Would it crumble? Would the rot leap into him? Was this some cursed illusion, some siren made of grief and deception?'
He nearly laughed at the absurdity—but no sound came.
His throat tightened.
And then, a thought darker than the rest slithered through him.
'Should I leave it here? Did someone leave it to die here? But who was the crazy one to come in here?'
Perhaps the world had deemed it too broken to save. Perhaps the gods, if they even bothered to look upon this place anymore, had already turned their faces from it. Perhaps it wasn't meant to be saved. Perhaps this—this stillborn anguish—was simply the way of things.
He stood still for a long time.
The wind passed. The trees moaned softly in their bones.
And after long, motionless minutes, the man turned.
His boots cracked over the earth. His fists clenched. His heart locked behind a wall of ice.
He would walk away.
Let the world take its course. Let the decay finish what it had started. Let the vow he'd once sworn—non-interference—remain unbroken. He had promised himself never again. Never to meddle, never to save. Never to damn himself for a cause too heavy for one soul.
He vanished into the dark.
But the forest had other plans.
Something surged.
From the underbrush, from the wet rot and bile of the world's forgotten bowels, it erupted—a mass of writhing flesh, slick with mucus and glistening with malice. Mouths bloomed across its surface like tumors, lips torn and teeth too many. Tongues licked the air. Eyes blinked wetly from impossible places.
It moved fast—too fast.
But it never reached the child.
Because the man had not gone far.
There was no sound when he returned. No grand clash. No war cry.
There was only a blur—gold and black—and the scent of something clean and ancient.
The creature's maw stretched wide, as though tasting the alien shape of a scream it had never known. Yet no sound followed—only the trembling of its form, as if the very act of silence was tearing it apart from within.
It fell apart in mid-air, its pieces twitching in agony before melting into the soil.
And in its place stood the man again—his frame tall, lean, cloaked in shadow. His chest rose and fell with quiet fury. His blade dripped with steaming black ichor, hissing as it touched the ground.
"Aish…" he muttered, dragging a palm across his forehead. "Damn it."
He turned, golden eyes now dull with exhaustion, and stared once more at the broken infant behind him. The baby still hadn't moved. Still hadn't cried.
He took a long, tired breath. Rubbed his temples.
"What the hell am I doing…?"
There was no answer. Not from the wind. Not from the woods. Not from the broken little thing whose presence had undone him so easily.
He knelt slowly, the knees of his tattered trousers brushing the soil.
The infant's eyes stayed shut—if one could even call them eyes, hidden beneath skin that seemed forged from coal and knotted bark—as though existence itself were a sentence of unbroken agony.
He didn't touch it directly. Not yet.
But he stared, as if by sheer force of will he might understand what this thing was. Who had left it. What it was meant to become.
Or what it might cost him.
The thought struck deep.
"What the hell am I supposed to do with you?" he whispered, barely louder than the baby's own breathless pain.
The question was not answered.
But he did not turn away again.