Three months, three hungers.
“Pain next,”the tome had said. “The echo of what you once were.”
Salvatore carried the jar as we walked the narrow road that cut through the southern quarter. The air reeked of brine and smoke. The shadows trailed us like obedient hounds.
We found what they wanted easily. There was always pain in a dying city.
A cluster of boys stood in a ruined square, jeering at another. The smaller child was barefoot, as thin as hunger itself. The larger ones threw stones and words sharper than knives.
Then another boy ran out from an alley—smaller still, his face streaked with dirt but his eyes bright with fury. He shoved one of the bullies back, stood between them, and the child cowering on the ground.
The moment froze me.
That had been us once.
Me—the boy in the dirt.
Salvatore—the one who stood between me and the world.
The memory struck clean through me, so vivid I could taste the dust, hear the sound of his father’s whip cracking through the air. The day I had taken his place beneath it. The day we became brothers, not by blood, but by pain.
Now, centuries later, we stood again at the edge of that memory—strangers to ourselves.
The boys fought. The smallest took another blow to the face and fell. The older ones laughed. The shadows stirred, hungry, sensing the charge of emotion rippling through the air.
I felt it too—not pity, not anger, but theshapeof those things.
Their heat.
Their rhythm.
Pain had its own pulse, and I could hear it beating in the blood of that little boy.
“Now,” Salvatore whispered.
I lifted my hand slightly. I did not speak. I simply reached—not for the boy, but for what surrounded him.
The air folded inward. The emotion bent toward me—the fear of the beaten child, the defiance of the one who protected him, the cruelty of the bullies who laughed.
All of it twisted into a single thread of feeling that burned cold as it passed through me.
The jar in Salvatore’s hands pulsed once, its glass glowing red.
Pain captured.
The bullies scattered. The two boys clung to each other, trembling.
Salvatore sealed the jar.
We walked home beneath a bleeding sky.
The cliffs shone pale under the moon, the path narrow and cracked from years of salt wind. The jar hung from Salvatore’s hand, still glowing, its red light breathing in the dark like a living thing.
Neither of us spoke for a long time. The only sound was the soft clink of the jar and the whisper of the sea far below.
Then Salvatore broke the silence.
“Do you remember your ascension?” he asked quietly. “The Pit of Shadows. The day we stopped being men.”
