Page 22 of Beast of Blood and Ash
When I’d boarded that starship, I didn’t look back. I’d packed for a new life, not a memory. My bags were filled with practical things, clothes and tools, and not a single photograph or scrap of nostalgia to weigh me down. I’d wanted the stars, any stars, a clean break from the dirt and suffocating cities of Earth.
I just hadn’t planned on this place.
Not Volcaryth. Not a planet of monsters, volcanoes, and slavery, nights that pressed in until I couldn’t tell the difference between dream, memory, and the shape of my own body clawing free from a too-small room.
The nightmares were getting worse.
I kept waking tangled in rough bedding, sweat turning to ice on my skin. The room stank of fear, the shadow of terror so thick it felt like it should leave bruises. Some nights, the fear seeped into my bones before I even slept, a slow poison creeping in with the drip of water through stone, the distant clang of steel where Drakarn warriors sparred. But lately, it was the dreams that cut the deepest.
And they were making Kira bold.
She sat beside me now, knees tucked to her chest, hair sticking out sideways from another restless night. Kira always watched me like she was waiting for the cracks to show. The heat crystal on the wall flickered, throwing a sickly yellow light across her too-bright eyes. She looked exhausted.
Join the party.
“When you saw Larissa,” she started, her voice a fragile thing in the heavy air, “was she doing all right? Vega said she didn’t see her, but she’s alive. What’s it like there? How bad is it?”
Kira’s sister, Larissa. Taken prisoner alongside me and every other human unlucky enough to crash near Ignarath. Every day, Kira asked. Every day, I dodged. Today, I was already strung out, my edges raw with panic and the ghosts clinging to the walls.
I didn’t want to talk about Ignarath. Didn’t want to remember the shriek of cage doors, the screams that echoed through the stone bowels of that hell. I didn’t want to taste the sand packed in my mouth or the copper of my own blood, didn’t want to see the way the Draskeer and his guards laughed while they bet on how many days we’d last.
But it was there anyway. The memory. Hot and bright. The arena, the snap of whips, the hiss of flesh meeting hot metal. Larissa’s face, slack with exhaustion, her eyes dull but stubbornly, impossibly alive. That was all I could ever give Kira. Alive.
I wanted to lie. To conjure some shimmering hope from the dregs of what I’d seen. But I wasn’t built for it. The lie would crumble before it left my mouth.
She waited, her silence a twisting knife.
“I don’t fucking know! She’s a fucking prisoner, what do you expect?” The words exploded out of me, too loud, too harsh. A whip-crack in the stale air that left scorch marks on the silence.
Kira’s face flickered. Hurt, then a wall of anger. She pulled her thin blanket tight, her mouth a bloodless line. “Sorry for asking.” Her voice was flat, wounded in that way only someone close can make you feel.
I wanted to take it back. To tell her I was sorry, that she didn’t deserve the shrapnel of my nightmares. But the words were there, a lump of jagged glass I couldn’t cough up. All I could do was clench my fists, staring at the terror-stained stone beside my sleeping platform.
The silence between us cracked open, jagged and ugly.
Finally, Kira shoved herself to her feet, her movements sharp enough to slice the air. She grabbed her threadbare coat, patched in three places, and fumbled with the door latch, her knuckles turning white.
“I hope you feel better,” she muttered, her voice trembling with something I’d put there. “Because I don’t know how to help you anymore.”
The heavy door scraped open, the scrape of stone echoing the tension in my jaw. She slipped out. She didn't look back.
The slam of the door left me alone. Alone with the choke of sulfur, the pulse hammering a frantic rhythm in my throat. Alone with the small, battered trunk smashed into the corner, as if it could absorb the violence of just existing there.
My hands were shaking. I was going to throw up. Tears burned hot behind my eyes, and I squeezed them shut so tight it hurt. I just wanted to go home.
Why was this my life?
I pressed my palms to the rough stone wall, letting its unforgiving chill seep into my skin, more real than the fire in my lungs. The room was a coffin now, the corners closing in, the walls slick with condensation and the ghosts of a thousand sleepless nights.
You are not broken,I told myself. Again. Again. The words rang hollow, brittle as bone.
Safe is always a lie.
I tried to breathe around the thought, but the stale, sulfur-laced air only burned. It mixed with the scent of wilted mintine and dried fire-thistle spilling from the herb satchel by my bed. I could hear the city somewhere above, beyond the iron-latched door. Water dripping. Muffled voices. Clanging metal. Life going on, uncaring.
My body curled in on itself, knees to chest, arms wrapped tight. I was poison. That was the truth of it. I lashed out, and everything I touched curdled. The memory of Ignarath rose unbidden, mud sucking at my boots, the throb of blood in my mouth. Drakarn voices, guttural and gleeful, promising pain.
In Scalvaris, they said I was safe. But this stone was just a different kind of prison. Kira was gone. And even there, deep under a city built by monsters, I had nowhere left to run.
