Rohan knelt in the scorched earth. The burning coals seared through his knees, but he felt nothing.

  His world had gone completely quiet. Every sound — the roar of collapsing timber, the frenzied howling of the Odsu warriors, the shriek of wind cutting through the fire — had been swallowed by a silence so heavy it had no bottom. It pressed down on him like a sheet of lead, blocking out all warmth, all temperature, all sensation.

  He stared straight ahead.

  There, his brother's mountain of a body was held upright by a dozen spears, tilted and skewed, pinned at the centre of the ruins. The spear shafts crossed one another in a grotesque scaffold, nailing him suspended above the earth. Flames were climbing the wooden poles, licking black the soles of those feet that had once carried such strength.

  His brother's eyes were still open.

  Those deep brown eyes — the ones that had always held that stern but warm expression whenever Rohan did something foolish — were looking back at him now, in silence. There was no reproach in them. Only a blankness that had sunk past the reach of anything.

  I killed him.

  The thought turned slowly inside Rohan's nearly shattered mind. With every passing second, the blade called regret drove itself one turn deeper into his chest. He felt wrapped in a vast and absurd unreality — he was convinced this must be a nightmare, one of those terrible ones that feel completely real. Any moment now, surely, that calloused heavy hand would come down on the back of his head and drag him out of it.

  "Hey. Little rat. Seen enough?"

  A grating voice sliced through silk and forced its way into Rohan's consciousness.

  An Odsu squad leader stepped over the bodies toward him, cleaver in hand, reeking of blood. His face was painted in blue-black serpent markings that writhed and contorted in the firelight. He crouched down, reached out a filthy hand, and grabbed Rohan's tangled hair, wrenching his head back.

  "Nice head on you. Ears still intact." The squad leader grinned, drawing the flat of the cleaver slowly across Rohan's throat. The cold iron raised a line of goosebumps along his skin. "Don't worry. I'm fast. You'll go cleaner than your brother did."

  Rohan did not resist. His eyes didn't even try to focus.

  The guilt had paralysed his body entirely. He had forgotten he was in the middle of a burning hell. He had forgotten the blade at his throat. The Odsu warrior in front of him was nothing but a blurred shadow. He only wanted to go faster — faster, until he could catch the soul of his brother before it rose to the sacred mountain Aru Abaru.

  But then, in the instant before the cleaver swung down, a sound exploded deep inside his skull.

  HMMMMM——

  Not human. Not any creature of the forest. A vibration so sharp and dense it felt like a million cicadas had erupted inside his head all at once, beating their wings against the inside of his mind.

  "Accept me…"

  Rohan's body convulsed — a single violent tremor. Not a thought. Something older than thought, older than life itself, forcibly reawakened.

  "Give me your pain… give me your hatred… I will give you power. The power you want… rivers of blood."

  Rohan assumed it was the gods mocking him. He almost laughed. His throat could only manage a hollow, leaking rasp. He gave up on answering. He wanted only to sink into the dark.

  But the churning inside him would not stop — it rose like fire through his chest. The voice breathed at his ear like a demon, carrying a sickly-sweet malice, pulling and tearing at what was left of his broken will, over and over.

  His vision began to narrow.

  The fire around him drained of colour. The ruins bleached out. Everything fell to a dead, ashen grey — everything except one thing.

  The worn leather pouch at the Odsu squad leader's waist.

  It pulsed with a diseased, deep red — like a dying heart. Each beat sent visible ripples spreading outward through the air around it, concentric rings of distortion expanding and fading into the grey.

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  The light went out of Rohan's pupils. His consciousness began to come loose. In that moment, he was no longer the hunter Rohan — he was a fish, hooked through the jaw by that pulse, unable to do anything but be reeled in.

  "Accept… you…" Rohan murmured inside himself, like a man talking in a dream.

  The instant the squad leader roared and brought the cleaver down — Rohan moved.

  No human body moves like that. His frame bent at an angle that should have been impossible — like a strip of bamboo wrenched past breaking point and suddenly released — and the killing blow passed through empty air. His fingers, curved like iron hooks, clamped onto the heaving pouch.

  RRRIP.

  The stitching burst.

  A blade — black as ink, with no handle — slid into his palm.

  Reality collapsed.

  Rohan felt a torrent of heat pour through the web of his hand and flood his spine — heat so intense it should have dissolved bone. The ruins in front of him vanished, replaced by a vast crimson wasteland. The sky held no stars, only countless points of floating fire. He could see the dead of his tribe standing across the scorched plain below, stiff as puppets, heads tilted back, mouths open and hollow.

  And above them, shrieking with laughter — fire-beings, blood-red and hideous, swarming through the air like a plague of locusts.

  The largest one plunged straight down. Rohan watched, frozen in horror, as it extended a slender, burning hand and drove it through his chest.

  No pain. Instead — a sensation of absolute, boundless capability. And with it, a screaming, animal need to kill everything alive.

  "AAAAAHHH——!"

  He opened his mouth — not screaming, but because countless small fire-beings were clambering over one another to pour themselves inside him. The veins beneath his skin began to throb and bulge, glowing an unsettling deep violet through the surface.

  Back to the world.

  The Odsu squad leader's expression froze. He hadn't even had time to recover from his missed swing before the boy in front of him had become something else entirely.

  Rohan stood with the blade in his hand — no handle, just the naked edge, driven into his palm, drinking from his blood.

  "You… what are you—"

  The squad leader never finished.

  Rohan was gone.

  Faster than reason. Colder than anything living.

  From somewhere inside the ruins came a few brief sounds of fabric being torn apart. By the time the remaining Odsu soldiers understood what was happening, their squad leader had been reduced to scattered pieces.

  The warriors around him were frozen in place. They raised their weapons and lunged — but Rohan's figure had already passed through them like a ghost. Before their minds could catch up with their eyes, several arcs of deep red had already dismantled every attempt at resistance. A series of dull, wet cracks — and the limbs that had reached out to fight went limp and useless, folding like snapped deadwood.

  Rohan stood at the centre of the wreckage. The blade in his hand seemed to emit something like a satisfied hum. Around him lay several bodies in states too broken to look at directly — necks snapped by brute force, skulls split open by those dark red arcs of energy.

  The ecstasy of slaughter dissolved from his mind gradually, leaving behind a hollowness deep enough to drown a soul.

  The violet-red faded slowly from Rohan's eyes. He shook his head. The high-pitched ringing was gone. In its place was the clean, bone-cold morning wind moving through the forest.

  He smelled blood. The thick, specific smell of his own people.

  He looked down.

  He was still standing where he had been. Beneath his feet, mud and ash soaked through with blood. The Odsu warriors had run — or rather, the thing that had erupted from this boy in that single instant had shattered their nerve entirely, and they had scattered into the trees.

  Rohan was breathing hard. He became aware of a heaviness in his arms — aware that he was holding something close, carefully, like something precious he could not let go of.

  In that moment, he felt certain he had his arms around his brother's broad shoulders. He felt certain his brother was still there — that he was carrying his brother away from the fire, away from all of it.

  "It's all right, brother. We're going. We're going home…" he murmured. A strange, tender smile had found its way onto his lips.

  He looked down at what he was cradling.

  He thought it must be his brother's warmth.

  But as his eyes slowly focused — as the soft, merciful unreality was peeled back, inch by inch, by something cold and absolute — Rohan's breathing stopped.

  He was holding a head.

  The hair had been burnt to a brittle yellow. Several pale tendons still hung from the severed neck. That face had once been the most fearless symbol in all of Abonia.

  The eyes were still open. But they had gone grey and clouded, filmed over with the colour of ash — and as Rohan stared, unable to move, a clot of dark red blood slid from the corner of one eye, down the cheek, and dropped.

  His brother.

  It wasn't his brother carrying him to safety. It was him — in the madness, with his own two hands — who had reached into that forest of spears and taken his brother's head and—

  "HRAAAUGH——!"

  The nausea came up from his stomach like a fist closing around his throat.

  Rohan let out a broken, pitch-shifted wail and flung his hands apart as though struck by lightning. The heavy, cold weight hit the scorched ground and rolled — gathering ash and filth — and came to rest against what remained of his brother's body.

  Rohan staggered backward. His hands flew across his own body, scrubbing frantically, trying to wipe away that sensation — slick and cold and intimate and wrong.

  "No — no — it wasn't me — I didn't do that—!"

  He stumbled and crashed through a broken wooden frame behind him. Fear came over him like a wave that had no crest. He was no longer a warrior. He was no longer the hunter who had hungered for glory. He was only a cursed thing — a boy who had desecrated the body of the person he loved most in the world with his own hands.

  He let out a howl of raw anguish, and without looking back — not once — he threw himself forward and crashed into the black depths of the jungle.

  Behind him, the Longhouse of Abonia gave its final groan and came down completely.

  And at his waist, tucked into the vine cord against his skin, the black blade lay still and patient.

  It had tasted Rohan's blood now.

  It was waiting for the next time — waiting to use this boy's rage to harvest more souls.