He was 9 when they chained him to the slab. He was 9 when Ervik's heart gave out during a fit of coughing decades later. He was 9 when Father Hargan's hair went white and his back bent and his hands shook too much to hold the rosary steady.
He was still 9 when Hargan was lowered into the same dirt as the people he'd poisoned, and another priest took his place above.
The names changed.
The questions did not.
Years became like breaths.
After Jorn's death, something inside Eryndor shut down.
He stopped speaking. Stopped pleading. Stopped fighting.
The only time he moved was when hunger forced him to.
Hunger became the only command he obeyed.
They starved him again, not out of curiosity—but because it broke him quietly.
He withered until his breaths sounded like torn cloth being dragged across stone.
They fed him broth thickened with human fat.
They never told him.
But he knew.
On the worst nights—when his vision blurred at the edges, when death pressed cold fingers against his ribs—they brought children down.
Some younger than him.Some older.Orphans.Runaways.Those with no one to search for their bodies.
They chained them at the far wall.
Every time, Eryndor tried to stay still.
Every time, the hunger in him tore its way forward.
The chain would scream.The child would scream.Then silence.
Eryndor would come back to himself with warm blood on his tongue and teeth aching.
Indistinguishable until you stopped having them.
He lost track after the first handful of decades.
New faces appeared above him—young scholars with Ervik's notebooks in their hands and arrogance in their eyes, priests who had grown up on Hargan's sermons and believed every word.
"Miracles and abominations are the same thing," one of them said once, voice quiet as he watched Eryndor's chest rise after a knife to the lung. "They both break the rules we rely on."
So they kept breaking him to see how the rules bent.
They brought an orphan.
Small. Thin. Eyes too big for his face.
They chained him to the wall opposite the slab.
Eryndor stared.
The boy stared back, swallowing hard.
"Why am I here?" the child whispered.
"Because of me," Eryndor said hoarsely. The words felt strange—his voice rusty from disuse. "Because I lived when I should have died."
The boy didn't understand.
They didn't feed either of them.
Hunger became less of a sensation and more of another presence in the room.
It spoke in Eryndor's ears, in his bones, in the cracks of his teeth.
Eat. Live. Eat. Live.
He fought it.
His body shook constantly. Wounds stayed open, oozing. His breath came in short, ragged bursts. His heart fluttered like a trapped bird.
On the fourth day, when he was sure his blood had turned to dust, someone slid a plate close to the slab.
Meat.
Cooked. Dark. Rich.
Not human. Not this time. Boar, maybe. Or goat. It almost smelled clean.
He stared at it.
He pushed it, as far as his chains allowed, toward the boy.
"You eat," he rasped.
The boy only sobbed harder, pressing himself against the wall.
"I can't," he said. "I'm… scared."
"So am I," Eryndor whispered. "Eat anyway."
He refused his own portion.
They left it there.
On the next day, they didn't bring anything at all.
The hunger grew teeth.
His vision swam.
All thoughts dissolved into a single, pounding beat:
Live. Live. Live.
On the last night, he woke with blood in his mouth and warmth on his tongue.
He blinked.
The boy lay slumped against the chains, neck at a wrong angle.
Teeth marks scored his shoulder. Flesh was missing.
Eryndor stared at him.
At his own stained hands.
At the red smeared across the stone.
"No," he breathed.
The hunger purred.
"You see?" a new priest said quietly from somewhere beyond the light. His name didn't matter; his eyes did. They were bright with disgust and grim satisfaction. "There is nothing human left."
Eryndor closed his eyes.
"It's my fault. I did this. I keep doing this." he repeated.
He forgot his own voice. He forgot his parents' faces. Their names eroded. The cottage burned again and again in his dreams until there was nothing left but ash and the way his mother had once asked him if he was hungry.
He held onto that without knowing why.
Everything else fell.
He moved when pain made him. He ate when flesh came within reach. He died when pushed too far. He woke without knowing why he had bothered.
He thought, vaguely, in those rare moments when the fog thinned: If I'd just stayed dead the first time… they wouldn't have had anyone to chain.
Then he decided he deserved it, anyway.
The thought still burned, even when there was almost no Eryndor left to think it.
Until the words lost shape.
Until he forgot what a fault even was.
He lost language. He lost memory. He lost his name.
He became reflex and instinct and agony.
Decades passed. Maybe a century. Time hid from him.
He remained nine.
He did not remember lunging. He did not remember biting.
He remembered the taste.
And he remembered deciding, somewhere far, far down, that if he was a monster, then a monster was what he deserved to be.
Speech fled after that. Words were too heavy to lift. Pain was easier than language.
He snarled when they came close. He thrashed when they cut. He lunged for any living thing that crossed the radius of his chains, not because he chose to, but because his body had been taught that silence and refusal meant more suffering later.
They called it instinct.
They called it proof.
They never called it what it was: a child's mind snapping under weight it was never built to carry.
Time staggered on.
Priests died. Scholars retired or broke or simply stopped coming to the crypt.
New ones took their place.
The chains were replaced three times. Parts of the slab cracked and were patched with more stone.
Eryndor remained.
They brought the girl long after numbers had ceased to matter.
She was small.
Light on her bare feet. Hair in messy knots to her shoulders. A plain dress hung from her thin frame.
Her eyes were not hollow like the others had been. They were tired. But not empty.
The door slammed shut behind her. Chains rattled as the guards fixed her to a ring in the floor.
The priest—the latest one, a man with sharp cheekbones and a permanently pinched mouth—gave the usual instructions to the scribes.
"Record his response to a new stimulus. Age-matched. Extended deprivation first, then controlled exposure."
Eryndor didn't hear the words. He heard only footsteps. Felt only warmth. Smelled only skin and blood and beating life.
Something in him—old, drilled, merciless—flared.
His muscles tensed. His fingers curled like claws. He surged forward, chains screaming as they snapped taut, metal biting deep into scarred wrists and ankles.
A snarl tore out of him, raw and low.
He lunged.
Chains tore taut, metal screaming, wrists bleeding anew as Eryndor hurled himself toward the small figure the guards had just dragged into the crypt. His breath rasped like something dying and desperate. His teeth bared. Instinct—hunger—years of conditioning—everything in him surged forward in one violent motion.
The girl flinched.
But she didn't scream.
She didn't crawl away. She didn't press herself into the wall. She didn't cry for the guards or shrink from the monster in front of her.
Instead—she looked at him.
Not with fear. Not with revulsion. Not with that glassy horror he had grown used to seeing in every human face for decades.
Her eyes were soft. Sad. Careful. Almost… concerned.
It stunned him.
He froze mid-snarl, breath shaking through his teeth. His chains rattled once, then fell still.
The girl swallowed, her small hands trembling against the iron cuffs. She stared at the bruises on his arms, the half-healed burns on his chest, the way his shoulders sagged from exhaustion.
"You…" Her voice was barely a whisper. "…you look awful."
The words didn't have cruelty in them. Or disgust.They weren't spoken like an insult or judgment.
They were gentle. Honest. Full of a child's worry for another child.
Eryndor's throat closed.
He couldn't remember the last time anyone had looked at him without fear. Not the priests. Not the scholars. Not the other children dragged down here to die beside him.
Her gaze was the first kindness he had seen in a lifetime.
"It must hurt," she murmured, her voice trembling even as she held his eyes. "Everything. All of it."
His breath hitched. His vision blurred.
She took a careful step closer.
"Are… are you hungry?"
The question slipped out of her like a fragile offering.
The world inside him lurched.
Everything in him—rage, pain, hunger, instinct—stilled for one impossible moment.
Those words echoed.
Are you hungry?
They did not belong in this crypt. They belonged in a cottage. A morning full of warmth. Bread steam curling from bowls. A tired mother smiling as she pushed a wooden spoon toward him.
It knocked the air out of him.
He staggered back half a step, legs trembling.
The girl, seeing his reaction, swallowed hard, then whispered something so small and so devastating he thought he had misheard:
"…if you're hungry… you can eat me."
Eryndor's eyes flew wide.
"No—" his voice burst out, raw, terrified. "No—don't—don't say that—"
She continued anyway, before fear could silence her:
"I know what hunger feels like. The bad kind. The kind that hurts so much you can't think. "Her voice trembled. "I've felt it too. So if you have to… it's okay. I don't want you to hurt."
She wasn't fearless. Her hands shook. Her voice quivered. Her knees wobbled.
But her eyes…
They held no fear of him.
Only sadness.
Only compassion.
For him.
No one had ever looked at him that way.
Not in this life. Not since the cottage. Not since Lumiel wiped crumbs from his chin and Azaroth ruffled his hair.
Eryndor's legs gave out.
He collapsed to the stone, chains rattling violently.
Her brows knit together. She took another tiny step toward him despite the chains.
"You don't scare me," she said softly. "Not when you look like this."
No one had ever spoken those words to him.
Not once.
His knees buckled.
He dropped to the stone floor, chains clattering around him, breath shaking like something collapsing inward. The first sob tore out of him raw and uncontrollable, a sound he didn't recognize as his own.
The girl blinked in shock.
"You're… crying."
He hadn't realized he was.Tears streaked down his cheeks, hot and unsteady, cutting clean tracks through dust and dried blood.
"I—It's my fault," he choked. "All of it. My parents… the village… the children… the people they brought down here… the ones I—"His voice broke."The ones I ate."
Her eyes filled with horror—not of him, but for him.
"It wasn't you," she whispered.
His breath caught.
"What…?"
"It wasn't you," she repeated, fiercer. "You didn't choose any of this. They chose it. They did this. Not you."
"You don't understand," he sobbed. "If I hadn't saved that boy—if I hadn't breathed for him—none of this would've happened."
"You did a good thing," she said. "They twisted it."
"I killed people."
"They forced you."
"I… I didn't stop."
"You were child."
He froze.
"You're still child."
He stared at her like she had spoken a miracle.
No one had ever given him innocence. Not even as a lie.
A scream ripped from him—silent, broken, collapsing into sobs so fierce his whole body shook.
"You didn't choose any of this," she continued. "You didn't ask to be like this. You didn't ask to be hurt. And you didn't ask to survive it."
He stared at her, chest heaving, eyes wide.
"No," he whispered, horrified. "Don't forgive me. Don't look at me like that. I'm—"
"Hurt," she said softly. "You're hurt."
His face crumpled.
She knelt too—just close enough that her warmth touched him, but not close enough for the chains to pull her into danger.
Her voice gentled even further.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm sorry no one helped you."
He broke.
Completely.
He sobbed until his lungs burned, until his arms shook, until the stone beneath him grew damp. Not from hunger or fear or agony—
—but from grief.
For his parents. For the village. For the children thrown to him. For the boy he had beenand the thing he had been forced to become.
And for the first time in decades—in the first time in a lifetime—
someone didn't look at him with horror.
She looked at him as if he deserved to be saved.
And somewhere deep inside him, deeper than the chains, deeper than the rot, deeper than all the death forced through his body—the ancient seal that bound his divinity cracked again.
Not with rage. Not with hunger.
But with something he had forgotten how to feel:
Hope.
His shoulders shook.
Tears kept coming.
For a moment the hunger was still.
But the fracture deepened, and through the gap something warm and bright leaked out.
Not power. Not flame.
Just the memory of being loved.
He didn't know her name. He didn't know why she wasn't afraid.
But as he knelt on stone slick with old blood, crying like the child he had been and the monster they'd convinced him he was, he knew one thing with sudden, terrifying clarity:
For the first time since the world had decided he did not deserve to walk it,
he was not alone in the dark.