Fiend's Fourth Hurdle

Brusk sat hunched in his corner of the dungeon chamber, where moss clung to stone like rot to meat, and silence was rarely silent. Somewhere, a cough echoed, and somewhere else, someone whimpered. Weaklings always whimpering.

He cracked his neck and ran his thumb along the serrated edge of his axe, thick as a tree's root and just as old. The count now was eighty-seven kills. Each one of them had fed the blade the same way meat fed the gut.

He believed he should be the king down here.

They were supposed to fear him. They still did, although now that fear felt thinner, like a hide stretched too tight.

And it all traced back to that boy.

That skinny, pale-faced, nothing of a boy who had once been no more than a sack of ribs and hate was no longer skinny. Muscle now wrapped his frame like chain over steel, taut and earned in blood. But Brusk still saw him the same way he had at first—hollow eyes, twitching hunger, and a creeping curse. Just looking at him made Brusk's molars grind like stones, because the boy walked on the nerves in his head, barefoot, dirty, and unwelcome.

How had he survived?

Brusk used to visit him, back when it had been easy. He would walk to the bars of the boy's cell, spit, chuckle low like thunder, and call him "little snack." The others would laugh too, eager for the attention and desperate to be seen laughing. But now, Brusk didn't go near. He stayed away.

That boy, that animal, that ghost, did not die.

And something even worse than the boy, something far more troubling, was Garrik.

Something had changed in that brute.

Brusk clenched his jaw as he thought of him, the man who had once been his right hand, his bone twin, his hammer in flesh. Garrik had followed with lowered eyes, carried silent strength, and held fists like piled meat. He had been loyal and useful.

But now, Garrik stared. He glared. He growled. He acted like a beast haunted by the scent of its own blood.

And it all started with the claymore.

Ever since that damned, bent, gold-etched, oversized blade had entered his hands, Garrik had not been the same. He never let it go. He slept with it gripped tight, sat with it resting across his legs like a child cradling a dead pet. His eyes remained narrow, always watching, especially when anyone got too close.

After Hask died—Hask, that slippery rat, all whisper and no roar—Brusk had tried to speak with Garrik. He tried to talk about power, about balance, about the bleeding wound left in their crumbling gang. It had been the right moment for an alliance.

But Garrik only curled his arms around the blade and sneered. He told Brusk to screw himself and accused him of wanting to steal it.

Brusk blinked, stunned. Steal it?

Why would he want that thing? Brusk had an axe, a real weapon, one that had been carved into skulls and shoulder bones alike. His axe had history, and it had meat.

But Garrik looked at that claymore as if it were a crown.

None of it made sense. Not any of it.

Brusk groaned and pressed a palm to his temple. The past three months had splintered his patience.

So many of his thugs were gone, all slaughtered by that boy with the silent sword. They whispered now about the Seren blade, a weapon like myth, wielded by a man who had no voice and no fear.

And now, Garrik refused to bow.

Brusk turned his glare across the chamber to Valkira and her pack of pups. Her group had grown in numbers. She trained them, beat them, and molded them with her own blade like a smith shaping steel. She had won her ninety-fifth match.

Ninety-five.

That whore.

Brusk could barely stand to watch her fight. She was too fast, too clever. He hated her most of all because she actually deserved some of the things people said about her. She was going to the next colosseum before him.

Brusk scratched at the burn on his chest. It always itched when his blood ran hot. The mark—twisted and cruel, a snake curled around a sword—didn't need interpretation. He already knew what it meant.

I am a marked one.

Valkira had her mark too, carved into her skin like she had been born for it. Some golden thing, a dragon choking a tree.

Things had changed, and Brusk felt it deep in his gut. He was getting better straw now. The guards no longer looked at him like he was scum. That meant something. Valkira too received the same treatment, possibly even better. Brusk didn't like that.

He fought. He crushed bones. That should be what mattered, not names and whispers. Yet more and more people were talking about her instead of him. That burned him. Bad. Like rot festering in his stomach.

He spat hard onto the ground. The phlegm sizzled in the dust.

He didn't want to think about Garrik, or Valkira, or that boy with his eerie silence and growing legend. He didn't want to think about the shadows whispering of his fading reign.

He was just muscles. He didn't need to think.

But flies still found a way into ears, into blood, into nerves.

And Brusk's nerves now felt like snapped bowstrings.

His knuckles twitched. He wanted to crush something, a bone, skull, teeth, anything.

Instead, he growled, rolled onto his back in the sour-smelling corner of the dark, and let sleep take him like a chokehold.