Then I see it—the tool—a slicer, long, curved, and shining in the firelight. I don't want to know what it's for, but I scream again. I twist, kick, and my voice cracks.
I stare into the sockets of the faceless monster before me—into the abyss where eyes should be. And it stares back.
I fight against it, uselessly. My limbs ache, my feet thrash like I'm on death's doorstep, and maybe I am.
Screams—others and mine.
Drowned at first—lost beneath the flood of screams, the unrelenting chaos. But then it rises—My scream, alone, cutting through the void. Maybe no one hears it but me. Perhaps only I can hear it, perhaps this hell belongs to me alone.
I look down, see it, face it, and I keep screaming.
I don't move my legs anymore; I don't dare to. My mouth hangs open—gasping, trembling—my vision drowning in a cascade of tears. Everything blurs. Shapes, color, pain, horror. All smeared together.
The ground below me is no longer dry dust but soaked with my tears. A flood born of grief, agony, and unbearable clarity.
I try to clutch my own hands, to pull myself together, but I fail miserably. My limbs shake like leaves under a storm, the storm of screams and of agony. I only stare—helpless—at my naked self. At my mutilated flesh.
They're not mine anymore. They lie in the hands of the Faceless.
I face him. My scream fades into something weaker, raspier—a shivering sound pushed from broken lungs. I press against the wound with shaking hands, instinct driving what sanity cannot. My fingers smear into warmth—my own warmth—the first I've felt in days.
My vision floods, and I can barely see, but I know what's happening.
The creature before me lifts the shredded remains of what made me a man—presses them with gnarled fingers—and drinks.
As if it were sacred.
As if it were the last drop of some divine nectar.
I curse and scream again. I sob, not like a man, but like a child lost in a burning world. In agony. In pain. In terror.
And then, as my voice cracks, others rise. Screams everywhere. I turn my head. Left. Right.
Like all of them. The same. No different. No escape.
I don't stand, I can't. I crouch, twisted over myself, still holding, still trying to keep my life from spilling out. With every heartbeat, more of me escapes—running down my thighs, pooling beneath me.
"W–wha––" I try to speak, teeth clattering together like broken porcelain. "Whaaat...?"
The Faceless stares at me, mocking me with his playful voice, while drinking the blood of my testicles. His head is tilted. No eyes, yet somehow... seeing me, grinning wider than before. Curious, amused, pleased.
My eyes flicker, my hands slip. The strength fades, and blood leaks like a quiet river, warm and steady, over pale skin. I feel it. I feel everything.
I'm getting cold. My breaths grow shorter. My eyelids too heavy to lift.
"For wh–what...?" I try again. What have we done to deserve this?
But I can't get the words out. My lips tremble too much. My tongue is useless. Just meat in a broken machine of skin.
I look away—into the distance, toward the one man I thought unshakable. The brave soldier, the one with the voice, the pride, the iron in his spine.
He sits like me. Naked. Broken. Eyes wide but empty.
Once a man who would've died for his homeland, but now... he stares into nothingness. Hollow, like I do.
The blade has taken what is dearest to us, it carved out more than flesh, it hollowed our souls.
He cries. And I cry with him. But even in this shared sorrow, we are alone.
I raise my trembling hand, inching toward him. I don't know if he sees me, or sees through me. He might already be gone.
Above him, another Faceless—this one in a black suit—stands like a priest over a corpse. It lifts a hand, and from its wrist, thick green blood pours.
It bleeds over Frank's wound. Find the source of this chapter at *.
The eye contact between us shatters, and I'm turned—roughly—by the same monster who drank from my child-producer.
His grin returns, and then his blood pours over me.
It seeps into my torn flesh, into the red mess of what's left. I feel it, that foreign heat—an unnatural pulse racing through my nerves. My heart jolts, my spine arches.
A rush, a shock. Adrenaline explodes through me, and for a moment, the pain vanishes. But only to return, worse.
I scream again, this time louder, as loud as the others. A chorus of tortured men echo through the chamber, all facing the same end.
Our manhood, our dignity—gone. The heat rises and falls, then crashes.
My scream dies, and with it, the strength to keep my eyes open.
The world slips away, the color fades, and the noise disappears.
Only utter darkness remains.