SoulBound

Deemed Useless

"Oof, what's going on?" I asked, my voice cracking somewhere between confusion and the beginning of fear.

Meister Hendrick wouldn't look at me. He studied the tree line instead, like it had suddenly become the most important thing in the valley.

"There's no easy way to say this, kid." His jaw tightened before the next words came out, like he was forcing them past something. "So I'll give it to you straight. We're leaving you here."

The words didn't land right away. They just sort of hovered, the way pain does for a second before your body catches up to what happened.

"But why?" My hands had already started shaking. "I didn't do anything. And if I did — I'm sorry. Please."

"You don't get it, do you?" Hendrick's voice was flat, almost bored. "That's why we're leaving you. You don't do anything. You never do."

"Frail little thing," Borc said from beside him, grinning in a way that made my stomach turn. "Can't hold any real power in that body. Honestly, it's like you're getting weaker by the day. No guarantee you'd even live to see an Awakening — and if you did, you'd probably die before it finished anyway."

"There's no way we're taking responsibility for that," Hendrick added, like it was the most reasonable sentence in the world.

"I have nowhere to go." My throat had gone tight. "I'll be stranded out here."

"Kehkehkeh." Borc's laugh scraped at something behind my ribs. "That's the point, youngin. We don't want you. And no one else does either. This is your life now. You'll probably end up dead soon regardless — think of this as us doing you a favor. Putting you out of your misery early." He pressed a hand to his chest, mock-solemn. "You should thank us. No — revere us."

I looked to Hendrick's face, searching for anything that looked like regret. For half a second, I thought I found it — the corners of his mouth pulled down, his eyes soft in a way that almost passed for sadness.

Then he turned, just slightly, just enough for me to catch what he thought I wouldn't see: a smirk splitting wide across the side of his face he'd been hiding from me, wide enough to swallow the space where his left eye had been a second ago.

That was the moment it actually hit me. This wasn't a decision made reluctantly, above his authority, out of his hands. It was planned. By the two of them. The only two people in that entire damned organization I had let myself believe I could trust.

If this is how it's going to be, I thought, I'll show them.

For one long second I considered attacking them right there — they were close enough, unguarded enough. But I was weak. We both knew it. They'd have killed me themselves before I landed a single blow, and some small, humiliated part of me understood they might have enjoyed that too.

So I stayed still and watched their backs as they turned from me and walked away — Borc laughing without any attempt to hide it, already telling Hendrick how good it felt, how satisfying, to leave someone behind like that.

I'll make them pay, I told myself, once they were far enough that my voice wouldn't carry. But first, I have to survive whatever this is.

A week passed.

I hadn't noticed the hatred growing at first — it crept in slowly, the way cold does, until one day I realized it had settled into every part of me and made itself at home. Every hour in that valley fed it a little more.

No shelter. No one to call a friend. Barely scraping by on whatever the ground and the river were willing to give me.

I'd hoped, in the first few days, that one of the nearby settlements might take pity on a boy alone — even the small one across the river, where the houses looked barely sturdier than driftwood. They didn't. I couldn't even blame them for it, not really. Most of them looked like they were surviving on less than I was.

If I could just get out of here — if there was any way past this valley — but for now there was only weeds pulled straight from the dirt, and whatever fish I could catch with my hands in water too cold to feel anymore.

Is this really going to be my life, I thought, watching my own reflection shiver on the surface of the river, however long it lasts?