Time did not pass in the crypt. It collected.
Down where stone sweated and iron never warmed, days stopped feeling like days. They were only measured by lanterns being refilled, coals being changed, and how many times a scream echoed before silence crawled back into the corners.
At first, they treated Eryndor like something delicate.
They spoke softly. They moved carefully. They took notes.
The man with ink ground into the lines of his fingers was called Scholar Ervik.
The priest with the steady hands and the kind face—the one the villagers kissed on the knuckles after sermons—was Father Hargan.
Eryndor learned their names from the way others spoke them.
"Scholar Ervik.""Father Hargan."
They never said Eryndor.
They said "the boy", or "the subject", or "it."
The first experiment was simple.
Ervik stood at the edge of the slate slab, quill ready, expression taut between horror and fascination.
"We begin with shallow incisions." he said. "Observe the rate of closure."
The cutter—Jorn, though no one used his name down here—hesitated with the knife.
"He's awake." Jorn muttered.
"He must be." Ervik replied. "Death does not ask his consent. Why should we?"
Father Hargan stood a little apart, rosary coiled around his fingers like a chain of polished bone. His expression was composed, almost gentle, the same mask he wore when blessing children at the village well.
Only his eyes betrayed him. They were too bright. Too sharp.
"Proceed." Hargan said, voice calm as any Sunday.
Jorn swallowed. "I'm sorry, kid."
The knife slid across Eryndor's forearm, neat and practiced.
Fire tore along the skin. Eryndor gasped, back arching, chains biting into his wrists and ankles.
Blood welled, warm and slick, running down his hand to drip on the stone.
"Now." Ervik breathed. "Watch."
The three of them leaned in.
The blood slowed. The edges of the cut shivered, then pulled together. Skin crept over exposed flesh. In moments, the wound was gone, leaving only pink, tender skin behind.
Eryndor trembled, breath hitching, stomach heaving.
Ervik wrote furiously.
"Again." he said. "Deeper."
Jorn flinched. "He's a child."
"He is an anomaly." Ervik answered. "The sooner you stop pretending otherwise, the less this will trouble you."
Father Hargan's thumb moved along his rosary. "We are here because of what he is." he said quietly. "Not what he looks like."
The second cut went down to muscle. The third scraped bone.
Each time, the crypt watched his flesh knit itself together.
Each time, something in him broke a little more.
By the end of the first week, Eryndor had learned three things:
Iron always won against skin.
Pain always came back.
And no one down here would ever say his name.
They did not stop at cuts.
Bones became questions waiting for answers.
"How many fractures before alignment fails?" Ervik mused, pacing beside the slab. "How long until the marrow itself is depleted?"
They broke his fingers, one by one. Then his toes. His wrists. His ribs.
They counted how long each took to straighten. They measured swelling, color, the sound of bone cracking back into place.
They burned him, too.
Hand lowered over a brazier until the smell of cooked flesh thickened the air. Blisters rose, broke, vanished. Skin shivered and smoothed.
They drowned him.
Cold water in a deep basin. Hands on his shoulders, forcing him down while his lungs screamed. Trapped air rumbled in his chest, then fled; darkness pressed in; his heart staggered and stopped.
He woke on the slab to Ervik's delighted whisper:
"Cardiac cessation followed by spontaneous reversal. Remarkable."
The seal deep within him—God's punishment, the gods' fear, whatever that shackle truly was—took each resurrection and absorbed it.
Each death gouged a line in it. Each forced return widened the cracks.
It did not break.
But it fractured.
And as it did, something strange happened: his body's tether to time thinned.
He didn't notice at first. Not while everything hurt.
But later, much later, it would matter that he had been 5 when the spike went into his skulland 9 when the first white hair appeared in Father Hargan's beardand 9 when Ervik's hands began to tremble with age.
He heard the truth by accident.
The crypt was not entirely sealed. A heavy door at the far end led up to a storage room full of old vestments and altar oil. Sound slid through its gaps when people forgot to keep their voices low.
Eryndor lay still, eyes fixed on a crack in the ceiling stone, when voices drifted down the stairs.
"I did what was required." Hargan said.
"You poisoned them." Ervik hissed. "Call it what it is."
Eryndor's pulse spiked. His fingers tightened around rusted links.
He held his breath and listened harder.
"A single vial." Hargan continued. "A few drops into the well each morning. Enough to wake them. To make them see. Fear brings people together. Fear makes them obedient. We needed them to be desperate, or they would never have allowed this place to exist."
"There was a plague before you touched the water." Ervik said. "You made it worse."
"I ensured it spoke loudly enough!" Hargan snapped. "They would not have accepted the boy's… treatment… otherwise. Nor allowed you to keep him. The lord's men would have claimed him, or the bishops. They would have taken him far from us, where we could not watch him. We risked everything.I risked everything!"
"And then you held back the antidote." Ervik said. "You waited... You let them bury half their village."
"I poured the remedy when the demons were ash." Hargan said. "When the rot was cut out. Then the sickness faded. They saw the truth. God rewarded our faith."
"God? Or your calculation?" There was a tired, bitter edge in Ervik's voice Eryndor had never heard before. "Tell me, Father—when you stand at their tables and bless their bread, do you remember whose hands lowered their children into the ground?"
Silence.
Eryndor's throat closed. His heart hammered against his ribs, frantic.
He did this. He made them sick. He lit the fire. He…
No. Not just him.
"What about me?" another voice whispered inside his head. "Who pulled the child from the fountain? Who showed them something they couldn't understand? Who made them afraid?"
They died because of you.
The thought landed like a stone falling into a well.
They died because of you...
His mother burning. His father screaming under chains. Their hands reaching for him while men dragged him away.
"They died because of me..." he whispered.
His voice scraped the air.
Footsteps froze on the stairs.
The latch turned.
The door swung open with a slow, measured creak.
Father Hargan stood in the doorway, shadows cutting his face into pieces. Lanternlight caught the lines around his mouth, the hollows beneath his eyes.
"You heard." he said.
Eryndor strained against the chains.
"You poisoned them!" he rasped. "You did it. You brought the sickness and then you cured it and they—they thanked you—"
His breath hitched. Fury tried to rise, but there was guilt inside it like a knife.
"If I hadn't… if I hadn't brought that boy back… if I hadn't… they wouldn't—"
"They died-" Hargan said evenly, stepping closer, "because you should not exist."
The words dropped like iron.
Eryndor stared at him.
"You saved one child and damned a village." Hargan continued. "You twisted the order God set. You pulled breath back into lungs He had closed. That act demanded an answer. I simply—" his mouth curled in something that almost resembled a smile "—helped provide one!"
Ervik lingered in the doorway, face tight.
"That's not how cause and effect works," the scholar muttered. "But if telling yourself that lets you sleep—"
"This is not about sleep!" Hargan snapped. "This is about balance! A world where death can be reversed by a nine-year-old monster is a world sliding into chaos! Every miracle you perform is a stone thrown into a pond—ripples we cannot predict! I did what was needed to keep those ripples from devouring everything!"
He looked back at Eryndor.
"There is no world in which you live a simple life in a cottage." he said quietly. "You opened a door that must never exist. Your parents refused to close it. So the door, the house, and its foundations were torn out."
Eryndor's vision blurred.
"It's my fault..." he whispered. "It's my fault. If I had just stayed quiet… if I had let him drown… if I had never been born—"
"Now you begin to understand." Hargan said.
His tone was not kind. Not triumphant. Just utterly convinced.
He turned away.
"Add more chains." he told the acolytes at his back. "Elbows. Knees. He listens too closely. And gag him when we do not have questions. Nothing good grows from letting that voice spread."
They tightened the irons. They shoved cloth between his teeth until his jaw ached. They muffled his words before they fully formed.
But they could not touch the sentence scalded into his bones:
It's my fault.
It repeated with every breath.
It followed him into death.And dragged him back out again.
The food stopped.
Not entirely at first.
A crust of bread here. A thin broth there. Less meat. More water.
Then the bread vanished.
The broth thinned to a greasy, translucent sheen.
Then even that disappeared.
"We need to know whether his regeneration is self-sustaining." Ervik said, pacing at the foot of the slab. "Is it drawing from external sources? Internal reserves? If we remove sustenance entirely, does the process slow? Halt? Reverse?"
Hargan's answer was simpler.
"Fasting refines the soul." he said. "Let him starve. Perhaps God will finally reclaim what never should have walked."
So they let hunger move in.
It started as an ache, a hollow pull under his ribs.
It grew into a gnawing thing that clawed up his spine and behind his eyes.
His wounds—once closing in heartbeats—lingered. A cut on his shoulder stayed open for hours, edges angry, skin slow to creep. A broken finger twitched and jerked before settling back into position.
He died once from blood loss, once because his heart stuttered and refused to start for a long time, once because his body simply… stopped.
Each time, darkness came.
Flat. Soundless. Peaceful in a way that terrified him.
Each time, something dragged him back.
He woke gasping, the taste of stone and iron in his mouth, chains heavy, voices murmuring above him.
"Again." Ervik said.
"He still returns." a younger scholar whispered, half-sick, half-awed. "Even like this."
"Starve him further." Hargan said. "If God wants him back, He will take him. If not… we will see how far this corruption of His design extends."
They starved him further.
At some point, time blurred. He stopped counting days and started counting breaths between spasms of pain.
Then, one evening when his vision had narrowed to a grey tunnel and every inhale scraped, Jorn came with a bowl.
It steamed faintly. The smell crawled into his nostrils and shook him.
Rich. Thick. Meaty.
"Drink." Jorn said. His voice was rough. "You're… you're slipping. I can see it in your eyes."
Suspicion flickered through the haze.
"Wh…at is it?" Eryndor croaked.
"Food." Ervik said from the shadows. "What else?"
Eryndor hesitated.
His stomach cramped, agonizing.
He drank.
Warmth flooded down his throat, heavy and strong. His body seized on it greedily—blood thickening, heart pounding harder, wounds tightening, the trembling in his muscles easing.
He drained the bowl and gasped, head falling back against the stone.
"Fascinating," Ervik murmured. "Note the immediate improvement in tissue repair and muscular control. We will repeat this with varied components."
Later, when they thought he slept, Eryndor heard two acolytes whispering by the braziers.
"Where did they get all that meat?" one asked.
"From the mass grave by the north field," the other muttered. "The ones who died in the last wave. Father says God made their bodies a burden to this world. Ervik says the boy turns it into data. Either way, at least the flesh serves something."
Eryndor's stomach lurched.
He retched dryly, nothing left to bring up.
The warmth stayed inside him.
His body used it anyway.
It's my fault, he thought, gagging on the taste. Even dead, they're being fed to me. It's my fault. It's my fault.
They proved what they wanted to prove.
Food changed the pace of his healing.
No food slowed it. Pain made it worse. Enough pain and lack together killed him.
Every time, he came back.
So they changed the rules.
They did not want to know if he could heal anymore.
They wanted to know how much it took to break him.
They cut deeper. They burned longer. They froze him in barrels of icy water until his skin turned a frightening shade of blue, then watched the color leak back into him.
They crushed bones with vices instead of hammers. More precise. Easier to control.
They removed his left hand.
He watched it lie there, severed on the slab beside him, fingers curled in an echo of his own.
Then he watched something wriggle at the stump.
It was slow.
Muscle knitting. Tendon forming. Skin crawling over the rawness like ivy.
It took minutes, long, crawling minutes where he could feel every fiber weaving itself back into place.
When it was done, his new hand shook violently, full of ghost sensation.
Ervik's eyes shone.
"Perfect," he whispered. "Utterly perfect."
Father Hargan vomited in a dark corner of the crypt where no one could see.
He wiped his mouth, straightened, and came back with his priest's mask already restored.
"Again." he said.
And they did.
He didn't age.
At first it was a curiosity.
"Bone structure unchanged," a young scholar murmured, measuring. "No lengthening of the limbs. No change in facial proportions. No new teeth."
"We've been at this for years," another said. "He should at least have grown taller."
"Perhaps the strain arrests development," Ervik mused. His hair had gone mostly silver. His hands shook slightly as he wrote. "Or perhaps whatever force keeps dragging him back from death has divorced him from time's flow."
"You mean he's stuck," someone else murmured.
"In this body?" Ervik nodded. "Yes. It appears so."
Eryndor listened, staring at the ceiling.
"Of course, he thought from some distant corner of himself.Growth belongs to children.Freedom belongs to children.Escape belongs to children.Not to me.I stay."
He was not sure if the bitterness was his or something leaking through the cracked seal inside him.
Either way, it didn't matter.
After years—decades—of this cycle, something changed.
A voice Eryndor hadn't heard in a long time grew hesitant, nervous:
"Kid… listen."
Jorn.
The cutter. The only one who ever apologized before hurting him. A man who looked at him not with awe or faith, but with guilt.
Jorn approached in the dim light of a night when most priests were gone.
He glanced at the stairs, then at Eryndor.
"You shouldn't be here anymore." he whispered. "I don't care what they're trying to prove. You're just a boy."
Eryndor stared blankly; the word boy meant nothing anymore.
Jorn pulled a small pick from his apron and pressed it to the first shackle.
Metal clicked.The bolt turned.
Eryndor's wrist came free.
His breath hitched. The freedom felt foreign, terrifying, wrong.
"We're leaving," Jorn whispered. He worked on the other wrist, then the ankles, then the chain around the waist.
For the first time in a lifetime, Eryndor could move his arms—weak, shaking, thin as branches.
Footsteps thundered down the stairs.
Jorn stiffened. Eryndor recoiled instinctively.
Father Hargan stood in the doorway.
His old age hadn't softened him. If anything, it had sharpened the malice in his eyes, the unshakeable certainty in his faith.
"Jorn," he said softly. "Step away."
Jorn stepped in front of Eryndor instead, shaking.
"No."
Hargan blinked.Slow. Calm.As if hearing a child mispronounce a prayer.
"No?" he repeated.
"This isn't right." Jorn whispered. "He lived long enough, through pains no one should bear, to deserve even a shred of mercy. Longer than most of the priests. He never asked for this."
Hargan sighed.
"Oh, Jorn…"He almost sounded disappointed."You think compassion makes you righteous. It doesn't. It makes you weak. And weakness spreads."
He nodded.
Two acolytes stepped out from behind him.
"Don't," Jorn begged. "He's a child. He's just—"
Hargan placed a hand on Jorn's shoulder, gentle as a blessing.
"I forgive your foolish heart," he said."God will not."
The acolytes grabbed Jorn.
He fought—once, desperately—then froze, looking back at Eryndor.
"Run." he whispered."Please. Run..."
Eryndor could barely stand. His legs buckled the moment he tried to move. His arms shook violently, unable to lift his own weight. The world blurred.
He reached forward—but only a hand's length.The chains on his ankles dragged heavily behind him.
Jorn saw it.
His eyes broke.
A blade flashed.
His throat opened.
Blood splattered across the stone, warm droplets landing on Eryndor's bare feet. Jorn crumpled, collapsing before Eryndor could reach him.
A strangled sob tore from Eryndor's throat.
The priests dragged Jorn's body away like garbage.
Father Hargan wiped spilled blood from his sleeve.
"Chain him tighter." he said. "He listens too closely."
Eryndor collapsed beside the slab, trembling so hard the iron rattled beneath him.
Jorn's blood soaked into the cracks of the floor.
He whispered the words that had hollowed themselves into him long ago:
"It's… my fault…"
No one denied it.