I bit down.
The taste was rotten and iron. Blood filled my mouth, thick and hot. My stomach heaved; I gagged, vomiting bile onto the stone. But even as I retched, something in me stirred—a hunger deeper than the sickness.
Salvatore pushed another strip into my palm. I didn’t refuse.
I ate.
One piece. Then another. Each bite was torment, each swallow less impossible than the last. My body betrayed me, devouring what my mind rejected. I chewed and sobbed, the sounds of the dead echoing in every bite, until pain and hunger blurred into one. Around me, I heard—more than saw—the others giving in to their own hunger.
When it was done, I collapsed. My stomach knotted, twisting with agony as my body tried to hold the filth I had taken in.
Across from me, Salvatore sat with blood smeared across his mouth, his teeth red as if he’d been born from the pit itself. He grinned—unnaturally wide, disturbingly calm—and licked his fingers clean like a man at a feast.
“We did what we had to do, Lazarus,” he muttered. “We had to live.”
I said nothing. Because he was wrong. We hadn’t survived—we’d surrendered. We hadn’t fought—we’d fed. We’d let them leech the last scraps of humanity out of us and call it life.
The iron door groaned above, metal shrieking against stone, and light spilled into the pit like a blade. It cut through the dark, exposing everything we’d done.
I flinched, raising my hands to shield my eyes.
They were coated in blood.
The dried gore cracked as my fingers curled into fists, but the stench was still fresh—fetid, metallic, clinging. It smelled of shame. Of degradation. Now, I’d eaten what should have been buried.
“Lazarus?” Salvatore’s voice came thin and hoarse now, no longer triumphant but pleading. “Say something. Talk to me.”
But what was there to say? That we’d “won” but lost the right to be called men? That this pit wasn’t behind us butinsideus now—lodged deep, gnawing from within?
I dragged myself toward the wall, clawing at the rubble. My fingernails split against the stone, leaving streaks of red—mine, theirs, I didn’t know anymore.
Salvatore climbed after me, quick, steady. He caught up in a heartbeat.
“They expected us to die,” he rasped, chest heaving. “But we didn’t.”
His hand reached for my shoulder. And in that breath between us, I didn’t know whether to recoil in disgust… or fall into him because he was all I had left. The confusion gutted me. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
I was emptied.
Less than a man.
A shell staggering on borrowed breath.
We stumbled out into the light together, blinking. Our shadows stretched long and crooked behind us—two figures drained of everything they had once been. Two ghosts walking free from a tomb that had unmade them. Behind us, the others crawled into the light.
But as the air struck my face, I almost wished we’d stayed behind.
Freedom didn’t feel like salvation. It felt like a mockery.
I wanted to feel something—anything—other than this vast emptiness chewing through me.
“Another trial is over,” Salvatore said, his voice steadier now, his chest lifting with something close to pride. He stood tall, victorious, like a man who thought he’d won.
But me? I felt small. Shriveled. Like an insect curling in on itself, waiting for the heel to fall.
We stood before the guards. Their faces were lost in the light above, the world beyond us burning too bright to see. To me, they blurred together—one monstrous sneer carved from the same cruel mold.
“Look!” one of them barked, jabbing a finger toward us before laughter broke through his teeth. “We have survivors! The fucking freaks survived.”
