CHAPTER FIVE What I’m Becoming
274 Words
I woke choking on fire.
It wasn’t pain exactly—pain implies an end. This was transformation. My veins felt packed with embers, my bones humming like struck iron. I rolled off the stone bed and retched black bile onto the floor, hands clawing at my throat as if I could pull whatever he’d put inside me back out.
The water basin showed me the truth.
My eyes were wrong. Too bright in the dark. The pupils swallowed the colour until only a thin ring remained. Veins spidered faintly along my neck, pulsing in time with a heartbeat that wasn’t quite mine anymore.
I screamed, and the sound came out sharper than it should have.
Astridr stood in the doorway. I hadn’t heard him enter. I never did.
“They will smell it on you by dawn,” he said calmly. “My blood doesn’t ask permission.”
“You did this,” I whispered, backing away. “You’re turning me into one of you.”
“No,” he corrected, stepping closer. The stone cracked beneath his bare feet. “I’m turning you into something that shouldn’t exist.”
Memories slammed into me—snowfields slick with blood, axes rising and falling, screams in a language I didn’t know yet understood. I collapsed, clutching my head.
“What happens now?” I gasped.
His hand closed around my wrist, iron‑strong.
“Now,” he said, as the bells began ringing again—this time from the human village—
“they come to take you back.”
The doors of the castle began to splinter.
And I realised I was hungry.
- Writer
