SoulBound

Another Chance

It stood over me without moving, patient in a way that felt worse than if it had simply attacked. Almost like it wanted me to try. I took a slow step back, testing a theory I barely believed myself — that maybe it couldn't see, that maybe the rustling leaves were the only reason it had found me at all.

I took a few more steps, put what felt like a reasonable gap between us, and turned to run.

I never got my legs moving. It was already there, filling the space in front of me before I'd finished the turn, close enough that I could feel the wrongness radiating off it like heat off stone. A grin spread across its face — wide, deliberate, almost amused — and looking up into it, I understood with total clarity that I had no chance against this thing. None. Not the smallest fraction of one.

So I let my knees give out, and I laid myself down in front of it like an offering.

If this was the end, I wanted it to be quiet, at least. As quiet as anything about this could be called.

The monster seemed to understand. It lifted me carefully, almost gently, toward a mouth lined with rows of razor teeth that didn't end where a mouth should — seven rows deep, maybe more, receding into a dark I didn't want to look at directly.

I surrender, I thought, and meant it in a way I'd never meant anything. Cruel universe, I was born weak. Treated like scum. Abandoned out here to rot, and now you finish the job like this — feeding me to something with more teeth than sense. I must be a joke to you. Even after everything I did to grow stronger, this is what waited for me.

My whole life passed behind my eyes in pieces too fast to hold onto, and all of it together brought nothing but tears, hot and useless, sliding down into my hair as I hung there.

Then —

A wet, tearing sound. A splash of something warm across my face that wasn't mine.

The monster's hand came away from its own wrist, still clutching air where I'd been a half-second before, and I hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath out of me.

I turned to see who — or what — had done it.

A man stood in the haze of drifting light, tall and lean, his body marked everywhere with the kind of muscle that only comes from surviving things, not training for them. He wore almost no armor — steel-grey boots, a breastplate, something to guard his groin, nothing more — and carried a sword that caught the light like it had been forged from something colder than steel.

He didn't wait for the monster to recover. He was already moving, closing the distance to its front in a blur, and the creature let out a shriek of genuine pain — the sound of something realizing, a beat too late, exactly what it had lost. Its eyes bled from black to a furious crimson, pupils narrowing into thin slits as it hunted for whoever had done this to it.

The knight didn't give it the chance to find him head-on. He was already at its back, sword opening a long gash down its flank, exposing a carapace slick with blood where organs should have been hidden.

Before either of us could think, the monster's remaining hand closed around the knight's leg and threw him bodily into a tree.

The sound his body made on impact would stay with me longer than I wanted it to — a wet snap, several ribs at once, maybe more. He coughed blood into the dirt and used his sword like a crutch to force himself back up, though it was obvious even from where I lay that something in him had broken badly.

He didn't get time to recover. The monster was on him again, slamming him into the ground once, twice, a third time, each impact smaller and wetter than the last.

I didn't decide to move. My hand found a stone on its own, and I threw it before I'd finished thinking the word no.

It struck the monster's flank, and its head swung toward me, red eyes fixing on something new to hurt.

Are you stupid, I thought at myself, distantly, why didn't you run the second you had the chance. But there wasn't time to answer that either. It dropped the knight and started toward me, unhurried, the same leisurely pace of something that already knew the outcome.

I fell backward onto the ground, staring at the knight — half-conscious now, bleeding from somewhere I couldn't even name — and understood that the one person who'd come to save either of us was already as good as gone.

If I was going to die anyway, I decided I'd rather die trying something than curled up waiting for teeth.

I forced myself up and ran toward the knight instead of away from him, the monster trailing behind at that same unbothered pace, like it knew running wouldn't change anything. I grabbed his sword from where it had fallen and turned to face the thing head-on, arms shaking under a weight they weren't built to hold.

It tilted its head at me, almost curious, and lunged.

I threw myself sideways, barely clearing its jaws, and in the panic of the fall the sword left my hands entirely — no aim to it, no skill, just blind luck — and buried itself in the exact wound the knight had already opened at its back.

It didn't fall. Worse — the blade stuck there, mine to reach for but not mine to use, and I scrambled backward as it rounded on me again.

By then the knight had come back to himself enough to scream. He bolted upright and ran, and for one heartbeat I thought he might actually make it — until the monster, irritated more than threatened by the noise, closed the distance in a single stride and lifted him from behind by the skull.

I watched the same grin spread across its face that it had worn over me minutes earlier.

I should have run. I knew that even as I stayed rooted where I was — if I left now, this thing would still be alive tomorrow, and tomorrow, and every day after that, and I would spend whatever life I had left waiting for it or something like it to find me again. So instead of running, I threw myself forward, pressed both feet together against the sword still lodged in its back, and drove my entire weight and momentum through the hilt.

The blade punched through its chest and found something vital.

It let go of the knight's skull all at once, and I heard the sound that followed only in pieces, my mind refusing to hold the whole of it. The monster turned toward me, mouth open in a scream that had no animal precedent I could compare it to, and for one endless second I was simply too afraid to move at all.

Then I remembered how to make my body listen to me, and I threw myself backward, rolling clear as it swung its one remaining arm in wide, dying arcs. I thought I'd cleared its range.

I hadn't.

Its longest claw caught me across the torso, and the world went white at the edges.

It dropped before I did — collapsing forward, finally, fully dead — and I followed a half-second later, folding into the dirt beside it, certain, in the last clear thought I had, that this really was the end this time.

My eyes were already closing when the panel appeared.

It hung in front of me, blurred at the edges, fading in and out of focus faster than I could read it — a pane of light where nothing solid should have been. I couldn't make out most of the words. Only two, glowing steady enough to catch before the dark took the rest of my vision:

YES / NO

I said yes without weighing it. If I was dying anyway, I told myself, there was nothing left to lose by accepting whatever this was.

For a moment, nothing happened. Just silence, and the cold creeping in through the wound in my side, and the sense that maybe I'd imagined the whole thing on my way out.

Then the world folded in on itself.

Light and dark reversed. I was no longer lying in the dirt beside a dead thing — I was somewhere else entirely, weightless, watching images pour past me that weren't mine and somehow were. A den carved into rock, seen from low to the ground, the way something without a human eye-line would see it. Hunger, old and patient, older than hunger had any right to be. And underneath all of it, buried where I almost missed it: one motion of tenderness, the creature curling itself protectively around something smaller in the dark, and I understood with a lurch that whatever I'd just killed had not always only been a monster.

Then, just as suddenly, I was standing somewhere new.

A room with no true walls, made of nothing I had language for, dark in a way that didn't frighten me the way dark usually did. In front of me, a single shelf jutted out of the nothing like it had always been waiting there for me to notice it. On it sat a shard — small, somewhere between glass and dried blood in color — and inside it, without seeing or hearing anything at all, I could feel the creature. Coiled. Quiet. Mine now, in some way I didn't have a word for yet.

I reached toward it without deciding to.

The room folded shut before my fingers arrived.

[HEALING SEQUENCE INITIALIZED]

The words hung there a moment, calm and mechanical against everything that had just happened, and then even those faded, and there was nothing left at all.

—

When I woke, I was back at my camp.

For a long moment I lay still, certain the entire night had been some fevered, dying dream — that I'd simply frozen to death somewhere in that forest and my mind had given me one last elaborate story before the end.

Then I felt the place on my torso where the claw should have opened me to the bone, and found only smooth, unbroken skin, and understood that whatever had happened out there, it hadn't been a dream at all.