“Only in death I shall rest, be it soon, be it late. But I will use what remains, so it shall not be in vain.”
I run. My breath is steady. The sword in my grip is thin—too light to feel real. My arms are moving, but my legs feel like iron, like they’re rooted to the earth. They tremble under me, but I keep moving, keep pushing forward through a pressure that presses down from above like a nightmare that won’t break.
I’m not running toward anything. I’m running from something. I don’t know what. My shoulders burn. The sword scrapes against the ground behind me, dragging in the dirt, ringing in the fog. Every scratch gives away my position, but I can’t stop. I can’t think.
My heart hammers in my chest. My eyes dart through the fog, searching—but there’s no one. I am alone. Only me, and the tight coil of something unknown, something foreign—but not entirely. It’s like a limb I forgot I had. Like memory trying to return through muscle.
My sprint fades into a walk. My feet hit heavier now, as if the entire world leans down on my back. As if my world has climbed on and refuses to come off. My knee gives out. I stumble forward, catching myself on my hands.
The ground is warm. Slippery.
My eyes go wide. The sword slips from my hand—was it even there to begin with?
There’s nothing left but red.
I scream. It tears out of my throat, but the sound doesn’t travel. I whip around, searching the mist, but it’s no longer mist. It glows now. A dull red, like old wounds.
And then I feel it. A wet warmth drips into my ears. My legs are gone—swallowed by the blood of my kind. I try to stand, but I’m sinking faster. My chest tightens. The air thins. I reach for the light, for anything, but my arms are slow, and my head is already tipping into blackness.
I smell it. Copper and filth.
My eyes go under. My ears, my hair. Until nothing remains but silence. Until nothing remains but me and the dark.
All this time, I try to scream, but no sound escapes. Only tears.
“Golden Reaper,” a voice murmurs from inside the blood.
It’s twisted. Crooked. Familiar in the worst way.
“In this life you shall die for the greater good, and not for your selfish vengeance.”
The voice snaps through the silence like a knife. Sharp. Real.
My ears ring. I feel like I’ve been underwater. I blink. My eyes barely open. Light—faint and warm—comes from an oil lamp a few feet away. It flickers against stone and sewage.
Saliva pools at the corner of my mouth.
I sit up, barely, leaning on a shoulder—Cham’s shoulder. He’s tapping my chest lightly, looking worried.
A dream? No wonder after all these days of horror.
“What is it?” I ask, voice thick. My eyes squint against the flickering light. The smell hits first—shit and piss, old and fresh, the stench of blues.
Cham is thinner than most. Always has been. He’s the runner, the messenger. He doesn’t fight unless it’s bad. And if he’s waking me up...
I blink again, trying to keep the dream from creeping back. No, not a dream. Something else.
A vision? It has been weeks since my vision of Earth and its debris.
I rub my temples, trying to force clarity into my skull. My knee jerks as my boot kicks a dead rat across the floor.
“The blues have come, Eos,” Cham says, his voice quieter now. His head is slightly lowered. I stare at his dark hair—stained rust-red from dried blood, not naturally so. It’s black underneath.
I shift. Straighten my spine. “How many?”
Cham looks up. “A handful. Maybe more, Eos.”
I spit to the ground. It barely leaves my mouth. Too thick, sticky. The sewer floor is narrow, and slick. A few steps ahead and I can see myself reflected in the water they shit in.
“Eos!” another voice shouts.
The first of my kind I ever pulled out alive.