Chapter 8
----
Varka straightened slowly.
Blood slicked the armor of his skin.
His right arm ended in a cauterized stump—charred bone, blackened flesh.
Burn marks ringed his remaining hand like bracelets of ash, crawled up his forearm, his ankles, his neck.
Glass shards jutted from his ribs and thigh, pulsing faintly in time with his heartbeat.
Carter felt each wound as if a ghostly version existed on his own body.
Not pain—
echoes.
Behind them, Snezna's voice split the clearing.
"Varka! Some of them are near the slave carriage!"
The air hadn't finished swallowing the shout before Snezna was airborne—wind curling around him, dragging him forward like a blade loosed from a sheath.
A thought drifted through Carter's mind:
Always so eager—
He didn't know if he'd formed it
or if it had bled in from Varka
or if there was even a difference anymore.
---
Varka moved.
His sprint came sudden, violent—
Carter felt it half a moment after it happened.
A lag.
The world stuttering behind them.
Glass inside Varka's flesh grated.
The sound was faint, internal.
Carter felt pressure under his own skin—imagined or borrowed.
A shimmer in the trees.
Stillness.
Then a blade of glass sliced for Varka's skull.
He ducked.
The edge skimmed hot air above him.
Another strike came down—
He lifted his right hand to block—
His missing right hand.
Carter's breath caught—
but Varka wasn't surprised.
The attack met something unseen, stopped an inch above the stump.
No—stopped above where his hand should be.
And Varka stared into a face shaped like his own,
except wrong—
a jagged, broken mirror of him.
The mimic smiled with a Varka-smile that didn't fit the bones.
Carter felt a tug in his chest—
a strange recognition, like watching someone imitate a person you've spent too long inside.
It moved again.
Fast.
Faster than the others.
Learning as it fought.
Varka shifted his weight to counter—
Carter shifted a heartbeat later,
a delayed shadow inside the same body.
The mimic noticed.
It lunged for the hesitation—
a blade thrusting straight for Varka's heart.
Varka dropped low.
Stopped halfway.
A mid-motion change the mimic hadn't anticipated.
Its strike overextended just enough.
Varka leaned close to its ear.
Darkness crawled up his shoulders, pooled around his jaw, whispered along his tongue.
He spoke.
Carter didn't understand the language—
he only felt a pressure behind his eyes,
a sense of something brushing across him,
testing the shape of his mind.
The mimic's body froze.
Cracks skittered across its skin.
It buckled—
collapsed—
and lay still.
Varka stepped over it.
"Fatal flaw in copying my existence."
Carter tried to think a response,
but the thought had fuzzed out before it formed.
---
The stench hit next.
Rot thick enough to cling to the tongue.
Iron pooling in the dirt.
Shattered slave collars scattered like broken halos.
Snezna crouched by the carriage, pummeling something—
his fists drenched to the elbow.
Bone cracked wetly under each strike.
Varka approached.
The thing beneath Snezna's fists wore Snezna's own face.
"It's already too late," Varka said.
Snezna twisted toward him, panting hard.
"Where were you?!"
Spittle and blood flew.
"Where the fuck—"
"I was delayed."
Carter felt Varka's pulse steady.
His own pulse matched it a beat later.
Another lag.
Snezna staggered up. Rot fanned across his left arm like spreading ink.
"They didn't deserve this," he rasped. "Even dead—it wasn't enough for them."
"Bodies?" Varka murmured.
"Inside."
A whisper.
A dread.
---
The wagon's cloth hung heavy, hardened with dried blood.
"Stay here," Varka said. "Fix your arm."
"You lost your whole damn hand," Snezna snapped.
Varka didn't turn.
Didn't answer.
When he walked forward, Carter felt his awareness slip again—
a half-step behind,
like he were trying to stand on moving ground.
Not separating.
Not merging.
Just…
thinning.
---
Varka pulled the cloth aside.
Carter wanted to close his eyes.
Varka didn't.
And so Carter saw.
Bodies torn into shapes that shouldn't exist.
Glass sprouting from wounds like luminous, malignant petals.
Limbs arranged with deliberate cruelty.
Carter felt nausea rise—
but Varka had no such response,
so the nausea stayed trapped,
silent, unacknowledged,
a thought without an owner.
In the center sat a girl.
Unharmed.
Still.
Hands folded in her lap.
The same girl Carter had fallen into before—
the memory of her terror still lived somewhere in him.
He felt it stir.
A thin breath.
A faint ache behind the ribs.
Varka reached out to her—
Stopped.
Cold brushed Carter's spine.
Not his fear.
Not Varka's.
Something else.
An attention.
Old as pressure.
Vast as deep water.
It looked at them from somewhere inside the girl's quiet.
Carter's breath caught—
half a beat after Varka's.
Varka whispered:
"How very intriguing."
---
He knelt before the girl.
Lifted her chin.
Her skin was cold, soft.
Carter felt the ghost-touch against his cheek.
Too real.
Too exact.
His awareness flickered.
For a moment he wasn't sure whose eyes he was seeing through.
"Your name," Varka murmured.
No response.
Snezna approached, went still at the sight.
"Why was she spared?"
Varka didn't look at him.
"She is marked."
Snezna stiffened.
"By what?"
"A Great One."
Silence.
Fear breathed through Snezna's teeth.
"We aren't leaving her," Varka said.
Carter didn't know if he agreed—
his thought tried to form,
but dissolved before words came.
Snezna swallowed.
"Fine. But if something goes wrong—"
"It will," Varka said simply.
"But we're still taking her."
---
Snezna lifted the girl carefully.
She weighed almost nothing.
Carter felt the emptiness in her limbs as if it passed through the air and brushed his arms.
The world outside the wagon was unnaturally still.
No wind.
No insects.
No breath.
Then—
A horn.
Long, low, ancient.
More a moan than a sound.
Carter felt it vibrate along his teeth.
Varka felt it in his bones.
Carter felt it a heartbeat later.
Snezna shifted uneasily.
"Varka…"
"I know."
Another horn answered from deeper in the woods.
Closer.
Calling.
The treeline stirred.
Something tall moved where trees shouldn't bend.
Carter's awareness dimmed.
Varka's heartbeat filled the space where his thoughts used to be.
Varka spoke.
Not loud.
Not afraid.
"Run."
A pause.
The trees answered with shifting shapes.
Varka's voice dropped lower.
"They're here."