Cold. Not just on my skin—in my bones. Deep and brittle. Like I'd been frozen from the inside out and was only now starting to crack.
I don't remember waking. Just the ache of existing again.
I couldn't feel my legs.
I couldn't tell if I was alive.
There was no sky. No roof. Just a smear of dark above me that shifted when I looked at it too long.
I thought maybe this was death. Not the clean kind. The kind no one writes stories about. The kind where nothing explains itself and no one's waiting for you.
Then she arrived.
Or—it arrived.
The Creature didn't walk into view. It blinked into the world—and my lungs forgot how to work. Tall, thin, wrapped in what looked like shadow sewn into silk. Its face was almost human. Almost. The shape of a woman, maybe, if someone had carved it from memory and forgot what kindness looked like halfway through.
Eyes like cracks in porcelain. Fingers too long. Lips that smiled before they were done moving.
She crouched beside me. I couldn't move. Couldn't speak.
"Poor thing," she said, voice a hum made of breath and blades. "They broke you early."
I tried to speak.
Nothing came out.
My throat hurt like I'd swallowed needles.
"You're going to die here," she said gently. "Not soon. Not fast. Slowly. Piece by piece. Until even your bones forget your name."
She tilted her head.
"I can stop that."
I blinked up at her. My ribs ached. My tongue was swollen. My skin felt like it was peeling inwards.
She leaned closer.
"There's a cost."
Of course there was.
My lips barely moved. "...What?"
Her smile deepened, like I'd told her a joke we'd both heard before.
"I want your voice."
Silence pressed against my temples.
She didn't mean my throat. Not just that.
She meant the thing behind it. My will. My right to shape the world with sound.
I should've screamed. Laughed. Begged. But all I could do was think: what would I sound like without myself inside me?
"You give me that," she whispered, "and I'll give you the power to find him."
Solas.
The name stabbed through my ribs harder than any boot had.
I didn't ask how she knew.
I didn't ask why she cared.
I just asked, inside my own head: Can I still think of him?
She nodded, as if she'd heard it.
"But you won't be able to scream when you lose him again," she said.
And then she held out her hand.
Her skin shimmered like oil over bone. Her nails were glass. I reached out with fingers that didn't feel like mine.
I touched her.
Pain was the first gift.
It started in my tongue—a spark, then a scream, then silence. I couldn't move my jaw. Couldn't breathe right. My molars cracked from the tension. I tasted blood, then ash, then nothing.
My throat tried to scream. The sound caught fire in my chest. Every rib lit up like broken glass under pressure.
Then my eyes. It was like something was peeling them from the inside. I saw flashes of light that weren't light. Shapes that had no edges.
And my skin—
It didn't tear. It peeled. Like I was being exhaled from the inside out. Light poured from the cracks—not warm light. White, raw, sterile. Like surgery.
I couldn't scream. I could only be. And I hated it. And I wanted more.
My hair turned white.
I watched it happen in reflections that weren't real—mirrors made of water, of air, of memory.
My fingers curled. Twisted. Straightened again.
I vomited nothing.
I screamed inside my own skull and the sound echoed back with her voice.
"Yes," she cooed. "Let it hurt. That means it's real."
The last thing that changed was my heart.
It stopped. I knew it did. I heard it halt like a door slammed shut inside me. And I thought—this is it. This is the price. I'm gone
I looked up.
The Creature was smiling. Not cruelly. Not kindly. Just inevitably.
"There she is," she said.
And for the first time in days, weeks, centuries—who knows—my body stood.
Not because I told it to.
Because it remembered how.
There was a mirror in the next room.
I don't remember walking there.
But I saw myself.
And I did not know who that was.
She looked like a ghost who'd gotten tired of waiting. Pale hair like snow that wouldn't melt. Cheeks hollowed out like something had been digging from within. And eyes—
Red, raw, wet with something older than blood.
I raised my hand to my throat.
No sound.
Not even a gasp.
Not even a whisper.
Just silence.
And her voice, behind me, curling into my spine:
"You look like someone who's ready to take something back."
The first time I used it, it felt like bleeding backwards.
I stood at the cell door—unchained now, though I didn't remember how—and placed my palm against the lock. Cold iron. Unmoving. The hallway beyond was quiet, but I could feel them. Two guards, one leaning against the arch, the other pacing like his feet didn't belong to him.
I didn't have a key.
I didn't need one.
The Creature stood just behind me, not breathing, not blinking.
"Think of something you lost," she whispered.
I did.
Solas's voice. Not the words. The sound of him. That sharp, clipped way he said my name when I was being cruel on purpose. That low murmur when he didn't want me to panic.
Gone.
Ripped out of me.
I pressed my fingers to the lock and pulled.
Not on the door.
On them.
The guards.
They twitched.
I felt it—like threads pulling taut. I wasn't inside their heads. I wasn't reading minds. It wasn't that clean.
I was touching the worst thing they'd ever felt and dragging it forward like decay under skin suddenly remembering how to breathe.
One of them staggered.
The other dropped his weapon.
And I saw it.
Not with my eyes—with something under them.
A boy, maybe eight, kneeling beside a bed. His mother not breathing. The color drained from her mouth. No one coming.
A lover's hands leaving, slipping through fingers that didn't close fast enough.
A knife thrown.
A regret that never stopped itching.
I stepped through the cell door.
The guards didn't stop me.
They were still crying.
No—not crying.
Feeling.
All at once.
I walked past them like I was invisible.
Or maybe like I was sacred.
The Creature followed behind me. No footsteps. Just presence.
"Do you feel that?" she asked.
I nodded. Or twitched. Or something.
"It's yours now," she said. "It obeys you because it remembers pain."
The fortress warped as we walked.
I'm not being poetic.
The stone literally shifted.
A corridor shortened.
A set of stairs melted like wax.
One torch flickered, went out, then relit itself backward—flame reversing like time was hiccuping.
Reality didn't like what I'd become.
I didn't care.
We passed more guards.
They looked at me, and I reached for them—not with hands, but with grief. I cracked their guilt like eggshells and let it spill into the air.
One collapsed.
Another screamed and curled against the wall.
I said nothing.
I couldn't say anything.
My throat was a mausoleum.
But my silence was heavier than screams.
The Creature brushed her fingers against the wall and it peeled like skin. Behind it was a passage. Narrow. Flickering.
"This way," she whispered. "Almost there."
"Where?" I asked, but only inside.
She turned as if she heard me.
"To the place where he still breathes," she said. "The path forks there. If you want him, you'll need to burn through what's left."
And if he wasn't there? I didn't know what was left of me to lose.
But I walked anyway.
Because the fear had started to taste sweet.