SoulBound

What's Left To Trust?

# Chapter Four — What's Left to Trust

I woke slowly, the ache in my side gone entirely where the claw should have opened me to the bone. Sunlight filtered weak through the trees above my lean-to, and for a long moment I let myself believe the whole night had been some fevered, dying dream — the monster, the knight, the light-paneled voice asking me something I couldn't quite remember answering.

Then I noticed my hand.

It rested loose against the dirt, fingers curled into a shape I hadn't asked them to make — knuckles bent wrong, tension held in muscle that didn't remember being taught this. I hadn't done that on purpose. Somewhere at the very edge of hearing, faint enough that I could have talked myself out of it being real, something like a low growl seemed to breathe out of my own chest as I exhaled.

I forced myself still and took stock. My body, whole. Better than it had felt in months, if I was honest — the low, constant hunger that had lived in my muscles since Nexus dropped me here had dulled, not vanished, but quieter than it had been in a long time. The hand took real effort to uncurl, like flexing a muscle I hadn't known I had until it disobeyed me.

The memories came back in pieces. The monster. The knight, screaming, then not screaming. The killing blow I'd driven home myself. The light hanging in the air — YES / NO — and saying yes without understanding what I was agreeing to. After that, the flood: a den carved into rock. Hunger, ancient and patient. One moment, buried in all of it, that felt almost like tenderness — something curling protectively around a smaller shape in the dark.

And the shelf. I remembered that clearest of all. A shard sitting in nothing, and something inside it that I could feel watching me back.

I reached for it, instinctively, and the world didn't answer the way it had the night before. No panel. No fold in reality. Just the quiet of camp and birds starting up somewhere above, indifferent to everything that had happened to me in the dark.

Whatever this was, it wasn't gone. It was only waiting for me to ask correctly.

"Verona?"

My voice came out rougher than I expected. I tried again, louder, and this time I heard movement — quick, careless footsteps that didn't belong to anyone trying to sneak up on me. She rounded into view a moment later and stopped hard the second she saw my face.

"Oh — you're actually up." Something flickered across her expression before she smoothed it into her usual dry tone. "Good. I was starting to think I'd have to explain to absolutely no one why I dragged a half-dead boy through the woods on my own."

She crossed her arms, studying me a beat too long. "You want to tell me what happened out there? Because I found you flat on your back, covered in blood that wasn't coming from anywhere I could find, next to something with seven rows of teeth I am never getting the smell of out of my nose." Her eyes narrowed. "And your hand was doing something weird. Twitching. Like it didn't know it was a hand anymore."

I brought it out from behind my back where I hadn't realized I'd hidden it. "You mean like this? I only just noticed it myself."

Her eyes dropped to my hand the second it came into view — fingers curling, slow and deliberate, back into that same wrong shape. It held there a beat too long, tendons standing out under skin that didn't look like it belonged to a fifteen-year-old anymore. She didn't step back, but I caught the small shift in her weight, toward the balls of her feet, ready to move if she needed to.

"...Right." Her voice had lost some of its bite. "That's new."

She didn't ask if I was alright. She asked the sharper question instead. "What did you do out there, Callum?"

"Can I trust you?"

The question caught her off guard — I watched her actually think about it instead of firing back something dry.

"That's not really something I can prove to you with words, is it." Not sarcastic. Just honest, which was rarer from her than the jokes were. "I've been out here two months longer than you. Nobody's come looking for me either. Whatever you did last night — whatever that thing did to you, or whatever you did to it — I'm not in a position to run back to Nexus and report it, even if I wanted to. Which I don't."

She sat down on a fallen log a few feet away, closer than she'd been standing before. "So. You can trust me because I've got nowhere else to be, and no one to tell even if I did. That's the honest answer. Whether that's enough is your call."

"It doesn't matter who you tell," I said. "I'm more worried about how you'll feel. So — can I trust you?"

That landed differently than she expected. Some of the guardedness slipped before she caught it.

"How I'll feel." She repeated it slowly, like she was checking the words were real. "You almost died last night. You come back with a monster's blood on you and a hand that doesn't sit right anymore, and you're worried about my feelings."

She was quiet a moment, and this time it didn't feel like deflection. It felt like she was deciding something.

"Yeah," she said finally, quieter than her usual register. "You can trust me. Not because I'm brave, or because I've got some big loyalty speech for a boy I've known two months. Just — nobody's ever asked me that. If I could handle it. Everyone who left either of us here didn't care enough to ask." She shrugged, but it didn't look casual. "So. Tell me. Whatever it is. I'll feel however I feel about it after, but I'd rather know."

So I told her. Everything — the knight, the monster, the strange panel I'd seen floating as I thought I was dying, the flood of memory and the shelf in the dark and the shard sitting on it like it had always been waiting for me. She listened without interrupting, which I was realizing was rare for her. Her face didn't do much until I reached the panel — the YES / NO, the fold in the world — and there her eyes sharpened in a way that made me wonder how much she'd already suspected before I said a word.

"You mentioned seeing me and the monster," I said, when I'd finished. "What about the knight? He should have been close to us."

Something crossed her face that hadn't been there before. Guilt, maybe. Or just the weight of saying something out loud she'd rather not.

"He was there," she said slowly. "Close. Closer than you were, actually — I found him first." She looked toward the treeline instead of at me. "He didn't make it, Callum. Whatever that thing did to him before you finished it — it wasn't something anyone walks away from. I checked. I made sure, before I came looking for you." She exhaled. "I didn't move him. Didn't seem right, not knowing what else was out there, or what state you were in. I just left him and got you back here instead. I don't know if that was the right call."

Her jaw tightened. "So no. Nobody's coming to ask what happened to their knight. Whoever he was, wherever he came from — I don't think anyone even knows he's out here yet."

"That's good and all," I said, "but I need to go to his body. I'll bury him."

Something in her face softened. Not surprise, exactly. More like she was recalibrating what kind of person she was dealing with.

"...Okay." She stood, brushing dirt from her knees. "It's not far. I can take you back." She hesitated before adding, quieter, "For what it's worth — I wasn't expecting that. Most people out here would just leave it. One less problem to deal with." She shrugged, covering whatever the comment had actually meant. "C'mon. Before the light goes."

The walk was quieter than the conversation before it. Verona led without needing to check if I followed, weaving through brush that had clearly become familiar to her over the months she'd spent watching me. The smell reached me before the clearing did — old blood, and beneath it, something faintly rotten that turned my stomach in a way it wouldn't have a week ago.

The knight was where she'd left him. What remained of the monster was there too, already drawing flies, smaller in daylight than it had felt looming over me the night before.

Before I touched him, I crouched beside the monster's carcass instead, searching for something I couldn't have named if she'd asked. My hands found it deep in its chest cavity — a core, dense and slick with blood, smaller than I expected, faintly warm despite everything, almost as if it hadn't fully understood yet that the thing it belonged to was dead. I wiped it clean against my pant leg and pocketed it without fully knowing why leaving it behind felt wrong.

One of its longer bones came free easier, already brittle at the joint from whatever the sword had done to it. I used it to dig, slow and ugly work with no proper tool. Verona crouched down after a few minutes and started clearing loose dirt with her bare hands, wordless, matching my pace without asking permission. Neither of us said anything about it.

When the hole was deep enough — not deep, not proper, but enough — we lowered him in together. I didn't know his name. Neither did she. That fact sat heavier than either of us said out loud.

We covered him, and I laid leaves over the fresh dirt, and for a moment we both just knelt there, in a clearing that smelled like blood and turned earth.

"Do you want to say something?" Verona asked eventually, careful with it. "Or is standing here enough?"

I found I did.

"Here lies the only human being to ever treat me like I was one too," I said. "Though I only met him in his final moments — a little later than he arrived, and he could've met me in mine, too. My helper. My rescuer. I'll be grateful, and I'll honor your sacrifice. Thank you."

The words came out steadier than I expected, given everything. Verona didn't interrupt, didn't fill the silence after with anything clever. For once, she just let it sit.

When I finally stood, brushing the dirt from my knees, she was looking at the grave instead of me, something unreadable in her expression.

"He didn't know you," she said quietly, "and he still came in swinging." A pause. "That's not nothing, Callum. Not out here."

She glanced toward me, taking in the blood, the dirt under my nails, the core-shaped weight now sitting heavy in my pocket that she still hadn't asked about — not yet. Whatever questions were coming, she let them wait, and for now, the only sound in the clearing was the wind moving through leaves that hadn't finished settling over a grave with no name on it.