Time doesn't pass here.
It pools.
It stagnates in corners, thick and unmoving, like old blood that refuses to dry. I know it passes anyway, because my body keeps betraying it. Because hunger returns. Because my beard does not stop growing.
Because I am still here.
The first weeks after the kill—if they were weeks—felt wrong. Not guilt. Not pride either. Something worse.A looseness.
A line had been crossed, and nothing dramatic happened. The world didn't react. The ground didn't swallow me. No god spoke. No memory returned. Just silence. Just me, breathing, alive, with blood on my hands that wasn't mine.
That disturbed me more than anything.
I started checking my hands too often. Rubbing them together like I could feel something that wasn't there. Sometimes I still do.
I caught my reflection by accident one day.
A curved shard of metal, dull and scratched, probably ripped from something that once mattered. I only meant to check if it was sharp enough to cut fabric.
Instead, I saw myself.
Gods.
A human thing stared back at me. Thin. Crooked. Filthy. Skin stretched tight over bone, smeared with ash and dried grime. Eyes too large for the face they were stuck in, sunk deep and ringed with black. The kind of dark that sleep doesn't fix.
My beard had grown wild, uneven, curling in on itself like it was trying to crawl back into my skin. Hair hung in clumps, greasy and knotted, falling into my eyes. I looked… old. Not aged. Worn.
Like something that had been dragged through time instead of living in it.
I laughed.
It came out wrong. Too loud. Too sharp.
"Well," I told the metal, "at least one of us survived."
The metal didn't answer. Rude.
I started talking more after that. To myself. To the shelter. To the bones nailed into the Roman's walls. Sometimes to him.
I still stayed there, on and off. His place. His grave.
But I couldn't stay all the time.
Too many memories that weren't mine.
So I built another shelter farther west, wedged into a narrow strip of land where territories overlapped — the kind of place only desperation would choose. One side belonged to things so powerful they didn't care about me. The other, to things weak enough to notice.
It was safer.
It was worse.
The pressure there was constant. A low, crushing presence that sat on my chest and behind my eyes. Sometimes it rolled through like a wave, and I would wake up on the ground with no memory of falling.
Blackouts became… normal.
At first, they terrified me. I would wake up clawing at the dirt, heart trying to escape my ribs, convinced something had carried me, dragged me, marked me.
Then I started planning around them.
I learned where I usually fell. How long they lasted. What I could afford to lose consciousness near and what would kill me. I stopped fighting the pressure when it came.
Resisting hurt more.
That felt like a lesson. Not a good one. Just a necessary one.
My arm still hurts.
Not the way it used to. Not clean pain. This is… memory pain. Phantom pain. The kind that mocks you. I feel fingers curl that aren't there. An itch I can't scratch. Weight I expect and don't find.
Sometimes I wake up gripping nothing so hard my shoulder screams.
Daily tasks became negotiations. Eating. Cleaning wounds. Trying to shave with one hand and a piece of metal that hates me. I cut myself often. Small nicks at first. Then deeper ones when my patience snapped.
Blood makes everything feel more real.
The beard kept growing.
That's how I measured time, I think. Not days. Not nights. Length. Texture. How much it got in the way. Same with my hair. I tried cutting it once, got angry halfway through, sliced my scalp, laughed again like a lunatic, and decided uneven was better than dead.
Paranoia crept in quietly.
I stopped trusting silence. Stopped trusting patterns. Every sound meant something. Every absence of sound meant something worse. I checked the same corners too many times. Counted my steps. Counted my breaths when the pressure spiked.
Some days I hated everything. The land. The god. The Roman. Myself. I raged in whispers because screaming felt like an invitation.
Other days I felt… empty. Not calm. Hollow. Like all the emotions had stepped outside for a smoke and forgotten to come back.
Those were the worst days.
Humor helped. In small, bitter doses.
"Still alive," I would mutter after waking up from another blackout."Unfortunate," I'd answer myself.
Months passed. I know they did because my reflection changed again. Because my body adapted. Because the pressure didn't knock me out as easily anymore.
And then one day — or night — something passed through the territory.
Something vast.
The pressure slammed into me like a wall. My vision narrowed. The world tilted. My knees buckled.
Not again.
I felt the familiar pull, the slipping away, the mercy of unconsciousness reaching for me.
And I refused it.
Not because I was brave.
Because I was angry.
Because I was tired of losing pieces of myself and pretending it was survival. Because if I passed out again, it would win something, and I didn't know what.
I snarled. Bit my tongue until I tasted blood. Dug my fingers into the dirt with the hand I still had and screamed silently into the ground.
I stayed awake.
The presence passed.
When it was gone, I lay there shaking, laughing and crying at the same time, unsure which one was real, weirdly, both seemed real in my head.