I turned fifteen three days ago.
Not that it matters.
There was no one to greet me. No cake. No candles. No warmth.
Just a dying fire, a rusted blade, and the cold whisper of wind slicing through the cracks of a ruined chapel I'd stolen for the night.
It's been five years since they died.
Five years since I stopped being a child. Since I became this thing—this half-shadow crawling through filth and ash and screams.
The world never gave me time to grow.
So I bled into adulthood. Slowly. Violently. Alone.
I've eaten rats raw.
I've chewed bark until my teeth cracked.
I've drunk water thick with corpses and maggots just to feel something in my throat.
People say hell is a place you go to after death.
They're wrong.
Hell is a roadside ditch in winter, when your ribs are showing and the meat you eat still twitches.
Hell is sleeping in shallow graves to keep warm because the corpses still give heat.
Hell is being hunted by slavers who think a starving boy makes good profit—until they end up missing hands and eyes, screaming as they crawl into death.
I didn't survive because I was strong.
I survived because I refused to die.
I've killed to eat.
Killed to sleep.
Killed just to stay still for one night without a knife pressing against my back.
And each time I kill, it gets easier.
Their screams used to make me tremble. Now they calm me.
I remember once, at thirteen, I stumbled into a church. A real one—gold statues, silk-draped altars, divine light pouring through painted glass. And I begged.
I begged for anything.
Mercy.
Food.
A Reason.
And the priest there, cloaked in white, smiled.
He smiled and told me to kneel.
Then he called the guards.
I tore his throat out with a piece of broken stained glass.
That was the last time I prayed.
Now, I only speak to the dead. The real gods. The ones I buried myself.
They don't lie.
They don't smile.
They listen.
I remember their faces every night.
My mother's broken eyes.
My sister's bleeding wrists.
My brother's head rolling across the dirt.
I remember everything.
The empire still thinks I died that day.
They think the village burned and nothing crawled from its ashes.
Let them believe it. Let them forget.
Because soon—I will remind them.
And when I do, there will be no mercy.
Only screams.
Only blood.
Only the vengeance of a boy who should've died—but didn't.