Memories are a fleeting and bittersweet thing, sweet for those born lucky and as sour as spoilt milk on a hot day for those born in the slums of the empire — and Isakk was one of the unlucky.
He doesn't remember much from his childhood, just pain, hunger and the unbearable will to live pouring out of everything there, but one thing that did stick out in his memory was his mother — kind despite the situation, always managing to feed and clothe him with a smile on her face, and as such she was his light, the light he adored and always tried to protect. But even that was a fallacy.
It was on a Tuesday — he remembers because that's when his mother would bring in enough money to feed for the day — two soldiers had come to whisk him away. He was old enough to hold a sword and spear as the ledger decided, and he didn't blame her for not trying. What was she supposed to do, fight two trained knights in a kingdom that already decided his fate before he had a chance to do so himself.
He was brought to a camp at the furthermost corner of the empire — a forgotten post set to station a small strip of territory, nothing too important but watched regardless, like a sore tooth the empire couldn't stop prodding. Then there was Camp Commander Wideroth, lazy in all his bearings and utterly repulsive to Isakk, for all Isakk saw was a pig feeding off the merits of others and calling them his own the way any noble would. And so Isakk revolted. Stirred trouble. Was punished each time — whipping, flogging, starving, isolation. There was truly nothing that wasn't done to him, yet his will never wavered in the slightest. Not once. Not even close.
He just got sharper. Quieter. Learned which guards gossiped and which ones watched. Learned how the Captain moved and when he drank and how long his moods lasted. Learned the forest around the camp the way he'd learned the Gutter Quarter — block by block, corner by corner, until there were no surprises left. If they wouldn't break him he'd use every scar they gave him to build something they couldn't touch.
He was sixteen now. He had no last name, no house, no god worth praying to.
But he was still alive.
In his experience that was the only thing that counted for anything.
The memory released him the way sleep does — hard and all at once.
He was still standing in the ruins. Still facing her. His dagger lodged in her right eye socket and that sickening wide smile stretched beneath it like none of it mattered — because to her, none of it did. She reached up without hurry and plucked the blade free, the socket knitting shut behind it like water closing over a stone, black and seamless.
"Did you think that would hurt?"
"No."
"Then why do it?" she asked, turning the dagger over in her fingers with idle curiosity.
"Do I need a reason to stab a demon?"
She looked at him then — really looked, the way something looks at a thing it hasn't quite decided what to do with yet. Isakk held her gaze, face cold, hands loose at his sides but ready. Always ready. That much the camp had given him for free.
"Get ready, demon."
He assumed a fighting stance — weak, full of gaps, the kind that made trained soldiers laugh. It wasn't ignorance. It was just the truth of what he was — no master had taught him footwork or form. Just years of surviving had taught him, and surviving didn't care about elegance. He was hunting. Like a caged beast that had finally found the door left open, coiled and waiting.
She tilted her head at the stance. Amused.
That was her first mistake.
In one motion Isakk scooped a fistful of ash and grit from the ground and flung it at her face — a paltry defense for desperate men, but he wasn't desperate, just calculating. The instant her head turned he snatched a jagged rock from the rubble and hurled it with everything he had. It caught her dead center on the forehead with a wet crack, drawing black blood that ran in two thick lines down the bridge of her nose.
She blinked. Touched the wound with two fingers. Looked at the black on her fingertips like it was mildly interesting.
Then she was in front of him.
No warning. No step. Just there — the way a candle snuffs out and the dark is simply present where light was a breath ago. Her fist drove into his stomach like a battering ram and the world folded. He felt things shift inside him that weren't supposed to shift — a deep wrongness below his ribs, the particular agony of something bending that was built to stay straight. The air left him completely. He crumpled forward and she let him, let his weight fall against her, let him hang there gasping like a landed fish.
She was laughing softly.
He could feel his broken ribs grinding with every attempt to breathe. Could feel the deep interior damage blooming outward like heat — organs that were wrong, bones that were wrong, a body telling him in every language it had that this was the end of things.
He agreed with it completely.
And then he opened his mouth and drove his teeth into her neck.
Not a bite — a clamp. The full force of his jaw, every muscle in his face, locking down like a trap sprung on something that had gotten too close. She was still laughing when he bit down and the laugh died instantly, replaced by something she clearly hadn't expected to feel — pain, real pain, tearing through whatever passed for her nervous system. He felt the flesh resist and then give, felt black blood flood his mouth, bitter and cold as iron left in winter water, and he pulled. Wrenched his head sideways like an animal, like a boy who had nothing left but his teeth and the unbearable will to live.
She screamed.
The sound split the ruined village open — not a girl's scream, not even a human scream, something older and wronger that sent birds exploding out of the canopy a hundred feet in every direction. Her hands came up and grabbed his head and he felt his skull compress under the pressure like she was going to simply close her fists and be done with it.
He spat the flesh out and drove his knee into her midsection — felt it connect with something solid beneath the girl's shape — and as her grip loosened by a fraction he ripped his dagger from her hand, the one she'd been holding this entire time like a trophy, and drove it into her chest up to the hilt.
Black poured out around the blade.
She looked down at it. Then up at him. Her expression had changed — the amusement was gone, replaced by something that might have been the closest thing she had to genuine surprise.
"Hm," she said.
Isakk stood there with broken bones and black blood on his mouth and the dagger buried in her chest and said nothing. His legs were shaking. He didn't let them show it.
"A boy," she said softly, almost to herself. "With broken bones and a camp dagger."
She wrapped her fingers around the blade — not the handle, the blade — and slowly pulled it free. The wound closed behind it like all the others. She held the dagger out to him a second time.
This time he took it.
He swung.
The cut wasn't clean — it couldn't be, not with a camp dagger, not with broken ribs and shaking arms and black blood still slick on his hands. It was a saw more than a strike, grinding through flesh and something denser beneath it, his whole body behind the motion because he had nothing left to save. Her head rolled off her shoulders and hit the ash covered ground with a sound like wet stone.
His first mistake was sitting down.
He thought it was over. Let himself sink into the rubble, let the shaking in his legs finally have what they'd been asking for. One breath. Just one.
Her head grew back.
Not slowly — all at once, like something unfolding from inside her neck, wet and black and wrong. And this time there was a horn. A single curved horn splitting through the skin above her temple, darker than the rest of her, gleaming like polished obsidian. She rose to her full height and looked down at him with an expression that had shed all pretense of the little girl entirely.
She stomped on his hand.
The crack was loud. Too loud. Isakk heard it before he felt it and then he felt all of it at once — every bone in his hand folding under her foot, the kind of pain that doesn't arrive gradually but all at once like a wall falling on you. The scream tore out of him before he could stop it.
"AHHHHH—"
She lifted her foot to bring it down on his skull.
He rolled.
Purely on instinct, purely on the muscle memory of every beating he'd ever survived, his body moved before his mind caught up. Her foot came down on stone where his head had been and cracked it. He scrambled back through the rubble on one hand and two knees, ribs grinding, vision swimming at the edges, the crushed hand dragging uselessly.
"There is no way out," she said. She wasn't chasing him. She was walking. Slow, patient, like something that had already won and was simply enjoying the distance between now and the end. "I'll torture you until the last of your flames snuff out and you are nothing but a cold corpse with the rest of the villagers."
She smiled.
"Ashes," she said. "Ashes. We all fall—"
"Demon."
His voice came out steadier than it had any right to. She stopped.
Isakk was on his back in the rubble, one hand crushed, ribs broken, black blood drying on his face, lungs that felt like wet paper. He looked up at her with the particular expression of someone who has already made their decision and is simply waiting for the world to catch up.
"You want to know what separates ashes from the living?"
His one good hand found a length of wood in the rubble beside him — long, thick, broken to a rough point at one end. He didn't look at it. He kept his eyes on hers.
She tilted her head.
He drove the stake through her foot and into the earth beneath it.
She shrieked — that wronger than human sound again — and lurched forward and he was already moving, already reaching into his traveling bag with his crushed hand, every nerve in it screaming at him, fingers that couldn't close properly scraping flint out by feel alone. She grabbed his ankle and he felt the bone creak under the pressure and he struck the flint anyway. Once. Twice.
The spark caught the wood.
"Fire," he said.
It burned slowly at first — the way all important things do. She pulled at the stake with both hands, shrieking, the horn catching the light, black blood pouring freely from her pinned foot into the ash and soil. Isakk dragged himself to his knees and hit her. One punch, his good hand, everything left in him behind it. Then again. Then again. Not because it hurt her — it didn't, not meaningfully — but because he refused to stop. Because stopping meant accepting what she'd said about the ashes and he had not come this far to become part of the ground.
The fire reached her.
It didn't burn orange. It burned blue — a deep, cold, devilish blue, the color of something that had never been natural, crawling up from the wood and consuming her the way fire consumes paper except there was no smoke, just that blue, and the sound of something ancient screaming in a language older than the empire, older than the Gutter Quarter, older than any word Isakk had ever been taught.
She cursed him with her last breath.
He didn't understand the words. He didn't need to. He felt them — felt them land somewhere beneath his skin, beneath his bones, in whatever part of a person sits below all of that. The air around his right hand changed. He looked down.
A sigil was burning itself into his palm.
Not carved, not painted — burning, like something being written from the inside out, black lines branching and curling across his skin in a pattern that had no business being beautiful and was anyway. It spread from the center of his palm to his wrist, to the inside of his forearm, pulsing once with that same cold blue as the fire and then going dark. Going still. Settled into his skin like it had always been there. Like it was waiting to be woken.
Isakk looked at it for exactly one second.
Then he looked back at the fire and made sure she finished burning.
When he made sure she had burned he relaxed.
"Finnaly" he said
Whatever his was before it's definately taken a large turn.