Blood coated the boy’s small, frail hands. He trembled like a leaf caught in winds far greater than him, winds far more ancient than him.

The blood looked like it was painted on his hands, seeping into the lines. It glinted in the room’s flickering candlelight.

He was only a boy of eight, so young and innocent, but there he was, the blood staining his worn coat. His friend’s eyes had pleaded, begged, as he was slowly, painfully slowly, heart wrenchingly slowly, choked to death. And then his eyes started to bulge like packets of ketchup that he used to squeeze in his hands. Bulging red. The very thought of it wanted to make him puke but he found himself unable to do so.

The incantation circle on the ground was now smeared with blood and sweat and piss. They hadn’t told him he would need to kill his friend until he was already in the room, staring into those eyes of someone who had done so much to protect him.

Time passed, the boy frozen in his actions, in thoughts and feelings. The guards had come into the room at some point, the boy did not know when, picked him up and half-dragged him out of the room. Gleaming dark tile turned to white marble floors, a weak smell of soap reaching his nose.

The two guards dragging him held onto him with grips tight as steel. It hurt but the boy wasn’t even registering the sensation at this point, confused as to if this were really his body, his mind suddenly clouded like his thoughts were swimming through molasses. Thick and syrupy, they moved from one thing to the next. His feet, if they were really his feet, skittered across the floor, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, a modest trail of blood following them.

The guards eventually stopped and set him to the floor. Another man walked into his line of sight with a face cold as the rest. He looked over the boy with a discerning eye, one that the boy didn’t notice.

“Clean yourself.” The sound cut through the air like a knife and it reached the boy through the fog he was experiencing. He drew his hands defensively in front of himself, instinctually, but remembered again that they were covered in blood. The eyes, pleading.

“Now.”

The guards dragged him off to the bathroom, dropping him to the floor and stepped outside the door. An intricate series of brass gears and pipes were connected to the sink. Like he himself were a steam-driven machine, he mechanically turned on the faucet, heaving the lever-gear that controlled it. There was no hot water, only cold, and he scrubbed the blood, using the dry-cracked bar of soap to clean himself. He scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed until his hands were raw.

When he finally noticed his own skin was under his fingernails from scratching so roughly, he stopped. His hands, tender and painful to the touch, glowed red and it only further reminded him of the blood on his coat.

He walked out of the bathroom, looking so small as he closed the door. The guards this time let him walk by himself and they made their way back to the man.

He sized the boy up again. The bones in the man’s face were angular and jutted out uncomfortably. His eyes were set deep in his skull, so deep that it almost seemed as if they were mere holes, dark wells, rather than eyes. His face was old and wrinkled, triggering a sense of danger as if there was a deep cruelty underlying his thin, aged facade. The boy, of course, knew such a cruelty existed, having undergone tense introductions on multiple occasions. It was the sickening kind, boundless and quick to rise.

The man bent over and seated himself on his haunches. His fingers, withered, brushed against the boy’s cheek. The man looked deeply into his eyes, soaking them in.

“You, dear son,” the man said, breath tickling the boy’s nose. “Will be our monster.”

The gravity of the words did not reach the boy, fear and that lingering sickness were stuck in his head like a dark, brewing cloud, preventing him from focusing on any one thing for too long.

“Take him back in.”

The guards ushered the boy down the hall. He let himself be led down because there was nothing else to be done. His quiet patter down the hall became a mantra. Pat pat pat pat. Before he knew it, he found himself in front of the door, the door, and the guards were pushing it open.

Realization dawned on him. “No, please,” he said weakly, trying to stumble away. One guard grabbed him and set him down in front of the door again.

“No, I can’t.” Tears suddenly streamed down his face. His puny arms held tight to the guard’s body. Shaking, crying, he mumbled unintelligible phrases, growing more and more panicked. He wasn’t even himself sure what he was saying. All he knew was that he wouldn’t, couldn’t, go back into that room. He couldn’t see the body of his only friend lying on the floor, that knife lodged into his chest. It hadn’t been able to do the job on its own and, for some reason, it seemed too monumental a task to remove it. Maybe it was because he had been crying too hard that he couldn’t see it clearly. At the time, that horrible time, the only solution was to wrap his stubby fingers around his friend’s neck.

The boy couldn’t see the guards’ faces but he knew that they would put him back in there anyway and that’s exactly what they did. They slammed the door shut like last time, leaving him facing it, doing his best not to turn around and see what he had done.

He tried screaming, through heaving sobs, as loud as he could, hoping that would get someone’s attention, hoping beyond hope that someone would open the door. But no one came and his voice hurt like his hands. Still he called and called for there was nothing else to do. But the terror turned into a deep fatigue, having been awake for the last twenty four hours and he curled himself into a ball, head pressed tightly into the still-damp fabric of his pants. Even that seemed less horrible than having to turn around.

He continued to cry and cry. They wouldn’t let him out. With each and every game of theirs, they always made him finish. Sometimes he would try to outwait them, refusing to participate but it seemed that they had no problem with letting him sit there until he became too hungry or thirsty to continue his strike. He had once been a healthy looking boy but now he was a rag of skin and bones, gaunt and sickly, just like every other boy here.

And then he heard a gurgle behind him. He spun around and saw the incantation circle was glowing. His friend had laid at its center but now his back was arched, hands balled up into fists and toes curled in. Blood coated his face as he coughed even more onto it. He was barely alive, a wispy thread-like grasp keeping him in the world of the living.

The boy was transfixed by his friend and his cheeks were already drying. He stretched a hand out, too far to reach his friend.

“Georgie?” His voice cracked as he spoke like it was unsure of itself.

The friend sputtered more blood, body convulsing each time. His eyes still had that glazed look to them but they were shifting around with wild intensity.

“Georgie?” The boy asked again. This time he crawled forward tentatively as he spoke. More sputtering, more coughing.

The boy thought maybe he should try turning his head over so he wouldn’t keep coughing blood onto his face.

Another voice cut in, the same one that always did. “Same thing as last time. Kill him and you’re free.” Metal scraped on metal as the small slot that the man had spoken through was closed.

The boy froze mid-crawl. The room was suddenly terribly chilly. He looked again at his friend. Glassy-eyed and bloodied.

The same biting panic returned. The boy fell backwards almost as if he had been burned by a hot poker. They wanted him to do it all over again. He had known today would be a different game than all the others that came before.

“A war of attrition,” his teacher had said with a smile, like it was too funny not to smile. The boy had been confused at the time, not understanding what the word ‘attrition’ meant but, as he often did, he ignored it. There were too many big words, too many expressions and faces that he didn’t understand.

Now here he was and, for once, he understood. They weren’t going to really let him out. They would pretend to, make him clean himself up, talk with the cruel man and then they would send him back in, again and again until he collapsed. He would kill his friend and they would never be satisfied until he had been entirely broken.

His hand trembled and tears once more sprung to his eyes. He didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t even sure his friend was entirely there, that it was really back from the dead. He knew that he had killed him. He saw it. They would have never let him out if it had been otherwise.

He curled himself up into a ball and put his hands to his ear, hoping to block out that terrible sputtering. There was so much blood.

The boy sat like that for a long time, rocking himself back and forth as he did his best to try not to hear all those gruesome sounds his friend-not-his-friend was making. It didn’t matter because as much as he tried, the room was too small, his hands too little. The sound made its way into his head like a nightmare, one that he couldn’t wake from.

Would they make him kill his friend-not-his-friend? Would they come in and force him if he didn’t? Fear settled over him and he looked once more at his friend-not-his-friend. He had moved slightly, the coughing violent enough that his body had jumped slightly.

The boy tore his gaze away and looked frantically around the room. He had to get out somehow. He had to.

A vent. It wasn’t particularly large but it was large enough for his slim figure. He scrambled over to it.

The vent was at least four or five feet higher than he currently was. He scanned around the room. There was nothing he could use to give himself a leg up. He tried scrabbling up the wall but the brick was too smooth to grab a hold of and his shoes too worn and tattered to catch on any significant foothold.

The boy slid down to the ground and did his best not to look at his friend. There was so much blood on the ground now that it was reaching the boy’s shoes even though he was a good distance away from his friend. It just didn’t stop coming.

The knife must have punctured a lung but maybe it had something to do with the magic as well. The knife was certainly long enough to have done internal damage but the boy was too weak to have stabbed it in very deep.

A sudden realization settled on the boy. He scrambled forward, coating himself in blood and mucus. He tried to focus on the knife itself, ignoring his choking friend. The knife. The knife. The knife. He grabbed a hold of it, knees slipping on the slick floor, and pulled it out. It made a wet sucking sound as he did so and the boy did his best to ignore it.

This time he ran to the wall like his life depended on it because it very well did. He was unsure if there were people watching him so he moved extra quickly. Running at the wall, he stabbed the knife into it with such force that it slid into the brick. Not brick, the boy thought, his training kicking in involuntarily. An imitation.

He awkwardly set one foot on it and tried to jump up. The first try was unsuccessful but the second try worked better and he was able to use it as a footstool, pushing himself up and grabbing hold of the vent.

He suddenly heard voices talking outside the door to the room. They were agitated but the boy didn’t stop to ponder them. Instead, he hoisted himself up even further into the vent, which had no covering, and crawled inside.

The door slammed open.

“Hey, boy! Stop!”

But he didn’t. He kept moving forward, away, as far as he could go. Cold air brushed gently against him, moving in the opposite direction, back into the room. He followed the cold air. The pitch black darkness of the vent scared him but he was more scared by what the men would do when they finally caught him so he pressed forward.

Slowly, a light appeared. It wasn’t very strong but he moved toward it, crawling painfully on his tender hands. He reached the end and realized he was looking outside into the forest.

Moonlight rained down gently on the swaying trees. He had always been too afraid to go into the forest. One guard had warned him monsters lurked in its shadows.

He heard yelling, this time from the outside. People were close by.

The boy tried to rearrange himself so that he would fall feet first but the vent was too tight to do so. A terrible fright enveloped him and so he chose the only option available. He fell headfirst out, trying to spin midair so he would at least land on his back and land on his back he did. It knocked the wind right out of him with a woosh.

It hurt terribly and he struggled to breathe. He was vaguely aware of the voices growing louder, growing closer, but he was too worried about breathing. This had not been the first time he had the wind knocked out of him but it was certainly the first that was this bad. He couldn’t expand his lungs and he rolled hopelessly, doing anything to get a little bit of oxygen in.

Gasping silently, he fought for a moment before, bit by bit, his breathing returned to normal.

“I hear something!” A voice shouted in the darkness.

The boy hurried to his feet and started running into the safety of the forest. He ran and ran, going only forward. Sweat mixed with blood trickled down his face and he would occasionally wipe it away, only smearing more blood onto his face.

Voices continued to pursue him and so he kept moving, adrenaline keeping him going, relentlessly.

Into the deep night the boy ran and he would never stop.