“No one leaves until someone feasts,” he said. “So go on, champions. Let’s see what kind of animals you truly are.”
Whips lashed. Chains clattered. We were driven forward like livestock toward slaughter.
They herded us through an iron door and down a narrow slope slick with filth. The air grew heavy with the smell of old blood and damp stone. I slipped once, caught myself, and kept going. Only a few of us reached the bottom without falling and being trampled.
The pit was carved deep into the rock, round and windowless, the air so thick it felt alive.
I crouched low, drawing my knees against my chest. Around me, the others sank into silence—waiting, breathing, trembling.
Salvatore was among them. He didn’t look at me.
Then the door above us clanged shut, sealing the world away.
And we waited.
The first day wasn’t so bad. My stomach rumbled, but I’d known hunger before. I could endure it.
By the second day, I tried to sleep through the ache—to pretend the emptiness inside me was something distant, something that didn’t belong to me.
But on the third day?—
That was when desperation began to sing.
It started as a low grumble in my gut, then grew louder, sharper, until it was all I could hear. My tongue felt like sandpaper, dry and cracked against the roof of my mouth. My lips split when I tried to speak. Every sound became agony—the moans of the men, the scrape of chains, the dull thud before someone fell.
I leaned against the wall, breathing slowly, trying to steady the spinning world. Hunger became a living thing inside me, clawing upward, demanding to be fed. My belly had gone quiet now—not from peace, but from exhaustion. It ached like a dying lamb.
Then I heard it.
Rain.
It fell in a torrent, drumming against the earth. I lifted my head, searching. There was no rain—only memory. The sound of it beating on the thatched roof of the hut I’d once called home. Wind had howled through the cracks in the mudbrick walls, carrying the salt from the sea.
I remembered washing my only tunic in a cracked basin of cold rainwater, my fingers going numb as I scrubbed away the smell of sweat and smoke.
When my mother was gone, I would wait for her.
Sometimes days.
Sometimes longer.
She worked as a prostitute.
Even now, I could barely make myself think the word.
She sold her body to keep us alive, and I hated the men who came to her—and I hated myself for hiding behind the wall, listening. I was only a boy, but I knew what it meant. I knew the shame that came with it, the whispers in the streets, the looks from the neighbors.
There were nights she came home bruised, trembling, her hands shaking so hard she couldn’t light the lamp. And still, she’d try to smile for me. She’d tell me she was fine, that she’d buy bread in the morning.
I never told Salvatore about her work. About the nights when hunger kept me awake, my stomach eating itself alive.
When she was gone too long, he would come.
The rich boy who slipped past the city gates with food hidden under his tunic. He’d find me waiting outside the hut and press half his meal into my hands.
I was ashamed to take it, but I was more ashamed of how grateful I felt.
He never made me feel small for it. He never said a word.
