Episode 2
1134 Words
“You ever seen someone burnt from the inside out, Mouse?”
Thomir’s voice cut through the stale dawn air like a bone knife. No greeting. No softness. Just that flat, rasping edge he used when something bad had already happened.
I stood frozen in the doorway of the hut, half-shadowed, half-dreaming, my fingers still sticky with poultice paste. The fire was low. The stranger on the cot writhed like he was trying to crawl out of his own body. His skin… gods.
He wasn’t just burnt. He was marked.
Symbols coiled down his chest, spiralling like molten brands, but they moved—twitching and slithering beneath the flesh, as though something alive curled inside his bones. Every time he convulsed, the symbols shifted. Not just in shape. In language.
I couldn’t read them.
But they whispered.
“I said get over here!” Thomir snapped. “I need your hands, not your eyes.”
I stumbled forward, trying not to gag. The smell hit harder the closer I got. Not just the rot of scorched flesh, but something underneath it. Oil and metal and wet earth. Something older than rot.
“He was found just past the ridge,” Thomir muttered. “Collapsed face-first in the moss. The wards picked him up before I did.”
The man let out a ragged scream. But no—wait. Not a scream. A sound. A word. Something too broken to recognise, as though his throat had been shattered by the truth.
He started shaking.
Hard.
“Hold him,” Thomir barked.
I gripped the man’s arm, my prosthetic leg groaning as I braced. The heat from his skin pulsed into my fingers like a forge. His eyes snapped open.
They were Black. Not like bruises. Like pits.
Like holes in the world.
“f**k”, I breathed.
Then he whispered.
“The Whisperer comes.”
His voice was like gravel rolled in ash—coarse, scorched, final. And when he said it, the symbols on his skin flared brighter. For a heartbeat, the entire hut glowed with red-orange light, like fire reflecting off bone.
“He’s boiling alive,” I said, choking on the words.
“No,” Thomir muttered, wrapping soaked cloth around the man’s chest. “He’s being rewritten.”
The man thrashed, his spine arching so violently I heard something snap. Then, suddenly, he went still. His lips parted.
“Oaths… twist. They lie. He speaks… and the skin obeys.”
Thomir dropped the cloth. “He’s not fevered. He’s bound. The command’s decaying inside him.”
And then the man laughed.
Not like a person.
Like a puppet with the strings jerking wrong.
The laughter echoed into a silence so deep, I thought the forest outside had stopped breathing.
Then—just as suddenly—he exhaled.
And died.
***
We wrapped him in linen laced with salt and river ash. Thomir tied three raven feathers to the binding cords.
“To mark him?” I asked.
“To warn others,” he said. “If anyone finds him buried in the wrong soil, I want them to know.”
I didn’t ask what he meant. I didn’t want to know.
Outside, the sky was a bruised purple. The kind of colour that always came before something broke.
I limped back to the well, fingers shaking. The prosthetic ached with every shift, but the pain grounded me. It reminded me I was still me. Still free. Still… unclaimed.
The wind changed again.
The hair on my arms stood up.
Something was listening.
***
“Evin!”
Kesh’s voice cracked through the trees like lightning. Her boots slipped in the wet earth as she rounded the corner into the clearing, face flushed, braid half undone, eyes wide with fear.
Not frustration.
Not mockery.
Fear.
“There’s a caravan,” she gasped. “North ridge. It’s—it's f*****g wrecked.”
I was already moving before she finished.
We ran.
Branches slapped our faces. Mud sucked at our boots. The ridge loomed like a broken tooth ahead. When we crested it, I stopped short.
Gods.
The waggons were peeled apart. Like something had taken their time with it. The wheels had been split clean through, but not with tools. With heat. The metal rims were warped. Melted. The canvas tops had holes burnt straight through in perfect, spiral patterns.
No bodies.
But plenty of blood.
Three survivors sat near a broken firepit. One was staring into the ash. Another rocked slowly, muttering. The third—an older woman with grey-flecked braids—looked up when we approached.
“They didn’t want gold,” she whispered. “Didn’t want food. Just… names.”
Thomir was already there. He gave me a sharp look but didn’t stop me.
“They asked us who we were. What we feared. What we regretted.” The woman’s voice trembled. “And we answered. Gods forgive me, I told them everything.”
The rocking man stopped. Looked up.
“I told them about my sister,” he said quietly. “Where I buried her. Why I lied. I couldn’t stop it. I just… opened.”
“They don’t bind your hands,” Thomir muttered. “They bind your will.”
“What the hell are they?” Kesh whispered.
I knew the answer before Thomir spoke.
“Oath-flame”.
I didn’t sleep that night.
***
The hearthfire hissed as Thomir fed it root ash and sulfur bark. The words above the door flickered. Not strong. Not steady.
I watched them from my cot.
“What happens if they fail?” I asked.
Thomir didn’t look up from the fire. “They won’t.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He turned, slowly. “If they fail, we run. Or we fight. But it’s already too late by then.”
I stared into the flames. “They know my name.”
He didn’t ask which they.
He didn’t have to.
***
Near midnight, the wind picked up again.
But it didn’t rustle the trees.
It whistled.
Not like wind.
Like breath.
I stepped outside. The cold bit hard against my face, but I barely noticed. The wards pulsed faintly as I crossed the threshold.
Then they went out.
Not sputtered.
Not blinked.
Died.
And from the trees, a voice slithered out, soft and low, like leaves brushing skin.
“Let me in.”
I froze.
The voice wasn’t angry. Wasn’t even cruel.
It was familiar.
“Let me in, Mouse.”
Only one person called me that.
But it wasn’t Thomir.
Because Thomir was standing behind me.
And he was whispering, “Don’t answer it.”
- Writer
