I can feel it again, the burning incense sensation of ignition that Thane gave me. Only its different somehow, weaker - like a lighter low on fluid or a candle that's wick is all but gone.

The man only a few steps away from me seems almost as confused as I am, but none of that confusion translates to hesitation.

“yOur fATe UNdoNe" continued the thing sticking out of me. The longer it remained the more my mind seemed to slide around it. To casually refuse to acknowledge it even though it was actively in the process of ripping me in half and yelling at the top of its - of my? - lungs.

The swordsman completes his lunge, and his sword shoots forward, ramming straight into my chest, all the way up to the hilt. People, myself included, often describe pain as ‘shooting’ or ‘exploding’. But the truth is, pain just is. It’s a signal our bodies send to our brains to inform us that something is wrong, and would you kindly freaking fix it. When a sensible person experiences too much pain, the experience alone can kill them. The overwhelming number of warning flares your body sends to your mind crash the whole damn system. That’s termed shock. And fuck me if I didn’t wish I could go into that.

No, instead of going into shock, I was simply made excruciatingly aware of every individual atom of my body the sword passed through. Like when a kernel of popcorn gets stuck in your gums and despite it not being overly aggravating, you can’t help but spend the next hour flicking it with your tongue in a vain attempt to get it out. Only the kernel was a fucking sword, and I was now unfortunately familiar with every dent, groove and scratch in the blades surface.

What I’m saying is it really fucking sucked, and I couldn’t even manage to just fucking die and escape the pain that way. The male swordsman wasn’t even all that pleased with having functionally executed me. He just relaxed slightly and reached forward to pull the sword out of my chest, as I sank to my knees and sprawled out on the ground unable to move.

Which is another thing about fucking dying that you’d never know without seeing it. People die ugly. It wasn’t a dramatic fall into a crestfallen pose that I made. I just fell. Like a goddamn ragdoll. But then…

“oUR sOUL is bROkeN” crooned something out the corner of my eye. And my eye sockets jerked open. My head had rolled back so I was facing the ceiling, and my killer - so my Hydra Tongue was apparently still free to act. The swordsman panicked, blanching and turning to his partner who had charged forward with him to protect him from the eel headed appendages. They swiped desperately at the serpentine things surrounding them, always just barely missing. They adapted quickly, giving up on the Hydra Tongue and turning on me. Unmoving, helpless, me.

The three eel like heads made a grotesque horking noise when the first blow struck me, and they seemed to pause what they were doing, each one turning a painful ophidian eye on me. Something I was only aware of because I could feel them moving around still. Also because focusing on that was the only thing keeping me from trying to rip my own throat out. No matter how much damage they did to me, no matter where they struck, it seemed I was incapable of death.

Long story short though the swordsmen stabbed the shit out of me. I think at first it was panic, but when the Hydra Tongues seemed to leave them too it, they must have thought it was working. Jokes on them though. It hadn’t taken me long to realize that the horking noise the heads were making wasn’t pain. It was laughter. They weren’t stopping it. They were amusing it.

Then there was a break in the dismemberment, and that seemed to break the spell. All the noise in the tent seemed to stop at once, before the final verse of the strange rhyme Nadeen had first on me was whispered into the room.

“OuR wiLL’S aRe OnE.” It was a voice like breaking glass. Like a baby crying it’s last breath. It bubbled up and into the room like gas from a sewage line, and all at once, the swordsmen seemed to experience all at once the slow hazy disintegration I had first begun to experience a the hands of Nadeen seemingly forever ago. First they were their, then they weren’t. Their bodies turned to mist and then - dispersed.

That’s about the time I guess I finally managed to die - because the world turned black.

***

I was born on the banks of the Nereid, to two loving parents whom I spent the majority of my younger years hating. You see, when I was young the distinction between chosen nobles and hardworking vassals like my parents was fuzzy. If asked, in a very limited way I could have probably managed to explain that nobles almost invariably had the Spark that allowed one to become a Binder and use magic, but I couldn’t understand why that should matter. I was so hard headed and rebellious about it, that when I was sixteen I stole my father's sword - the one he’d brought home with him from his time in the infantry - and started walking to the Titan Palace.

My parents named me Barker, hoping I would be tough as tree bark. They added the extra syllable hoping it would make my name sound more like a nobles. A common practice at the time, when the roads were safe. Before lowborn like myself were allowed to test for the Spark. It’s unfortunate for them that I truly was as tough as tree bark, tougher even then the famed Ironwood Fir’s to the north. Maybe if I wasn’t, I would not have walked away as I did.

Such was it, that I - in my infinite wisdom, ranged out towards the frozen form of the first monster ever bound, to prove my worth.

***

My eyes shot open and I lurched upward. I was still in the tent. I was… I was alive. Actually, forget alive, I felt fucking amazing. And that worried me, because the last time I was in my right mind I was on my way to being in more than a few different pieces. The sun had completely fallen below the horizon and only the moons soft glow provided me with any light by which to see.

The first thing I did - even before actually taking in my surroundings, which was stupid of me - was pat myself down in search of wounds, or changes. I had only ever slept once before this in my new life as a Thing, and the changes I had undergone then had been pretty much immediately noticeable once I got my shit together and started paying attention. Now though, I didn’t find anything different. I was still a skinny, preteen sized black Thing. I even patted my head, wondering if maybe I had grown horns or something else cool. In a moment of genuine curiosity I stuck my tongue out hoping maybe I had evolved something useful like a tongue that could make complex noises. Alas, it was not to be, and I slowly came to accept that I was still just plain old more or less useless me.

I carefully set aside the fact that I was completely healed from my previous ordeal as something I pointedly did not want to think about right now. Not because the why of it would bother me - though I’m sure it would - but because I was willing to do just about anything to distract myself from the memory of the pain.

Finally giving myself the go ahead to really look at the tent, I flinched. There was a new corpse in the room with me. He was dressed in the ragtag armor the locals seemed fond of, or at least resigned to. His arms and legs had been bound in front of him like a pig ready to go to roast. Only it was clear that someone had skipped cooking him. There was a deep furrow in the packed dirt beneath him that led outside of the tent, to where the two swordsmen had been talking before I had interrupted them, and I could see flecks of blood filling those desperate scrabbling rents in the ground the closer they got to where the corpse was.

Clearly he had not gone quietly into the night.

The corpse itself was arranged in an almost grotesque parody of a table. The hogtied arms and legs seemingly glued in place beneath it, holding the body completely still. The stillness was completely at odds with the ruin of the man's back, where something with long, sharp fangs had clearly slowly torn the skin and muscle apart to reveal the organs beneath. The corpse was hollow now, an empty soup bowl as it were and I shuddered. This was more than just murder. It was cruel.

And it reminded me of the whole reason I was out here in the first place. I didn’t know how long I had been laying here, or how much if any noise this guy had made as he died - but I really didn’t want to be here when the guard change came. I scampered towards the front of the tent before pausing, remembering my hungry brother back in our own tent.

Experimentally, I prodded the corpse, causing it to fall over messily and eliciting another sharp wince at the sputtering noise the few fluids inside it made. Carefully I walked over and hoisted the thing onto my back, using the hogtied arms as a sort of chest strap to stabilize it. Then I scampered out of the tent and back into the camp.

As I ran, and hid, and prayed no one would smell the corpse before I could have Thing Two dispose of it, I got the strangest feeling. LIke someone was watching me, just out the corner of my eye. Like knowing there is a fly buzzing about the room, but being completely powerless to spot or detect it before it lands on you. It was that kind of feeling, and it left me on edge all the way back to my tent, where I was face with a secondary problem.

I didn’t think the dead guy was going to fit into the me sized hole at the back of the tent.

Thinking carefully about it, I opted to try the simplest solution first. I shoved the dead guys head and shoulders into the hole. I was not disappointed, because moments later there was a sharp tug, and the body all but disappeared, accompanied by a tearing sound as some of the tent had to give way.

I quickly looked around to make sure that no one had taken notice, the slid into the tent myself. Thing Two was already happily pull the arms and legs off the dead guard, the gentle crunch of bones giving way to his prodigious strength filling the tent. Nadeen sat curled in the far corner, having clearly jumped away from her bedroll the minute the corpse had passed by her. She didn’t look scared, or angry, or anything really. High on LSD maybe, given how dilated her pupils were. But then she saw me enter, and seemed to shake herself, her eyes returning to their normal size.

I was really beginning to worry about her, and I hoped they’d send a doctor around to see her soon - If they even had one. Then I remembered how fucked we were and I decided to stop worrying about Nadeen because we were all going to be fucked if the locals put two and two together and connected me with their missing dead guy and prisoners.

If I was really lucky, I mean really, really, really, lucky. They’d assume those prisoners had escaped had taken the dead guy with them. It’s not like forensic science existed in this shit hole forest. Even if it did, there were too many types of magic that could easily obscure that type of thing from the King’s justice for it to be useful so -

I paused. Why did I know that? I literally don’t know anything about the fucking King. Actually, I didn’t know there was a fucking King. Scratch that, I don’t know theres a fucking King. The thought had come so suddenly and slid so smoothly into my normal mental meanderings that I almost took it for reality instead of an idle fancy. Which was weird. Because if there’s any one thing I’ve had a lot of time to listen to since coming here it’s my own thoughts.

And those were my own thoughts.

...weren’t they?