Chapter 14 #3
“Look.” His voice was steady, frighteningly calm. He turned his hand toward me, the orb gleaming in his palm like something sacred and obscene. His eyes locked onto mine. “I won’t do this alone. It’s vile, yes—but look around you.”
I didn’t want to. But I did.
Bodies. Dozens. Piled like offerings. Flesh collapsing into rot. Flies crawling in and out of mouths. Bones jutting through skin. The pit had become a grave that refused to close.
Salvatore’s voice cut through the buzzing.
“Do you see them?” he asked. “They died because they were too proud. Too human to do what it takes. And now they’re nothing. Meat for worms. Bones for flies. You want to join them? After everything we’ve suffered—after everything we’ve endured—you’d rather die pretending you’re better?”
He tossed the eyeball once, caught it, then closed his fist around it.
“I’ll make it easy.”
Before I could move, before I could speak, he shoved it between his teeth and bit down.
The crunch broke the silence. A soft shell giving way, fluids spurting. He chewed, his face twisting, but he didn’t spit it out.
I gagged until my ribs ached, bile burning my throat, yet my eyes—gods help me—my eyes wouldn’t turn away. They stayed on him as he swallowed what had once been a man.
Then it grew worse.
He groped for a jagged stone, set it against the corpse’s chest, and drove it down. Skin tore. Ribs cracked. The sound echoed through the pit like branches snapping under water.
Salvatore fell to his knees, digging into the body with both hands, tearing meat loose, gnawing like a starving animal. The noises—wet, ripping, sucking—scraped at my skull until I thought I’d go mad.
Blood streaked his face, smeared across his mouth. His eyes glinted red in the torchlight when he looked up at me, half man, half beast.
“This is survival!” he barked, spitting flecks of flesh. “We must do this!”
I pressed my back to the wall, shaking my head until my neck screamed. The others clung to the stone around me, battered shapes still breathing, their eyes tracking every movement.
“No…” My voice cracked. “I can’t, Salvatore. I can’t.”
He lifted a strip of flesh, sinew dangling, and shook it at me like a challenge. Blood ran down his wrist in slow ropes, pooling at his feet.
“You think I want this?” he rasped. “You think I enjoy this?” His breath came in shudders. “I’d rather rot here with you than become this—but I’m not ready to die. Are you?”
For a moment—just a heartbeat—I saw the boy he had been. The one who’d once fought beside me, shoulder to shoulder, bleeding for the same cause. That ember still lived inside him, faded but burning. But it was burning him away.
“We’re not monsters, Salvatore!” My voice splintered, desperate. I pressed my palms to my ears, as if I could shut out the sound of him devouring. “We’re still human. We don’t have to—”
His roar split the air.
“This is what they want!” Spit and blood sprayed from his lips. “This is how they win! Do you think they care whether we live or die? No!” He threw his fist into the dark, trembling with fury. “They feast on our suffering. But I refuse, do you hear me? I refuse to let them win!”
The pit echoed with his voice, raw and defiant, ringing off stone like a prayer turned inside out.
And I stared at him—my brother, my rival, my mirror—wondering if the gods were watching, or if they’d turned their faces away long ago.
I dragged the back of my hand across my chin, shaking.
“Not like this, Salvatore…” I croaked. “Not like this.”
He didn’t answer. He just shook his head, then reached for another corpse with a calm that was worse than fury. His fingers sank into its ribs. The sound—wet, tearing—echoed through the pit. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t hesitate.
If anything, he looked alive.
Every shred of flesh he tore free seemed to feed him, sharpen him, strip away the boy I once knew. The act should have broken him, shattered him into dust—but it honed him instead. It made him into something other. Something that could no longer die.
“We’re still human,” I whispered, though the violent roar of my stomach drowned my voice. Hunger clawed at me from the inside, tearing at my ribs like a caged beast.
Salvatore’s eyes hardened, as bright as hammered bronze.
“Not if we die here. Not if we let them turn us into bones for others to chew. That’s what happens, Lazarus. You refuse, and you’ll be nothing but scraps.”
He shoved a strip of flesh toward me. The stench hit first—thick, copper-sweet, alive. It filled my lungs, crawled down my throat until I could taste it.
“I can’t,” I whispered. But even as I said it, the lie burned through me.
Across the chamber, the others met my gaze—uncertainty flashing through their features, a mirror of my own.
“You must eat,” Salvatore said. His words didn’t just echo—they struck, bouncing off the stone like the pit itself agreed with him. “You must eat. You’re breaking, Lazarus. But we’ll finish this trial. We’ll live. Let me feed you—like I always have.”
I shook my head, voice splintering. “No! I can’t!”
Then Severen’s hiss curled through the dark, thin and poisonous, “He’ll eat you next.”
“Stop it!” I screamed, clutching my skull as if I could claw him out.
Salvatore gripped my shoulders, his hands iron and shaking. “Lazarus.” His voice cut through everything—the buzzing, the hunger, the whispers. “Look at me.”
And I did. I kept my eyes from the others and fixed them on Salvatore alone.
For an instant, I saw him—the boy who once smuggled bread under the fine linen of a rich man’s son to feed me in secret; the boy who never called me less; the one who stood beside me against the world.
But the image fractured.
Now I saw him drenched in blood, teeth tearing flesh, eyes bright with something not human. A murderer. A monster.
“I don’t know what’s real anymore,” I whispered. The words didn’t sound like mine. “Were we ever friends? Were we ever real?”
For a moment, he only stared at me—eyes hollow, rimmed with exhaustion. Then his voice cracked through the silence, rough and human.
“Of course, we’re friends,” Salvatore said. “Of course, we’re real. The hunger’s twisting your mind. It’s showing you ghosts that aren’t there.” He leaned closer, his shadow blending with mine. “Don’t fight it, Lazarus. Not the hunger. Not me. It’ll kill you.”
The hunger answered before I could—a roar inside my ribs—ripping, clawing, begging. My body spasmed; every nerve screamed for food, for anything to stop the burning emptiness. My will splintered.
“You’ll die if you don’t,” Salvatore said again, pressing the strip of flesh to my lips. “I can’t do this alone, Lazarus. You’re all I have left. Please.”
My vision blurred. I saw my mother’s smile—soft, tired—Amara’s laughter—as bright as bells. But the faces melted, smeared into shadow.
“I’m sorry,” I choked, as my shaking hands reached for the meat.
I bit down.
The taste was rotten and iron. Blood filled my mouth, thick and hot. My stomach heaved; I gagged, vomiting bile onto the stone. But even as I retched, something in me stirred—a hunger deeper than the sickness.
Salvatore pushed another strip into my palm. I didn’t refuse.
I ate.
One piece. Then another. Each bite was torment, each swallow less impossible than the last. My body betrayed me, devouring what my mind rejected.
I chewed and sobbed, the sounds of the dead echoing in every bite, until pain and hunger blurred into one.
Around me, I heard—more than saw—the others giving in to their own hunger.
When it was done, I collapsed. My stomach knotted, twisting with agony as my body tried to hold the filth I had taken in.
Across from me, Salvatore sat with blood smeared across his mouth, his teeth red as if he’d been born from the pit itself. He grinned—unnaturally wide, disturbingly calm—and licked his fingers clean like a man at a feast.
“We did what we had to do, Lazarus,” he muttered. “We had to live.”
I said nothing. Because he was wrong. We hadn’t survived—we’d surrendered. We hadn’t fought—we’d fed. We’d let them leech the last scraps of humanity out of us and call it life.
The iron door groaned above, metal shrieking against stone, and light spilled into the pit like a blade. It cut through the dark, exposing everything we’d done.
I flinched, raising my hands to shield my eyes.
They were coated in blood.
The dried gore cracked as my fingers curled into fists, but the stench was still fresh—fetid, metallic, clinging. It smelled of shame. Of degradation. Now, I’d eaten what should have been buried.
“Lazarus?” Salvatore’s voice came thin and hoarse now, no longer triumphant but pleading. “Say something. Talk to me.”
But what was there to say? That we’d “won” but lost the right to be called men? That this pit wasn’t behind us but inside us now—lodged deep, gnawing from within?
I dragged myself toward the wall, clawing at the rubble. My fingernails split against the stone, leaving streaks of red—mine, theirs, I didn’t know anymore.
Salvatore climbed after me, quick, steady. He caught up in a heartbeat.
“They expected us to die,” he rasped, chest heaving. “But we didn’t.”
His hand reached for my shoulder. And in that breath between us, I didn’t know whether to recoil in disgust… or fall into him because he was all I had left. The confusion gutted me. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
I was emptied.
Less than a man.
A shell staggering on borrowed breath.
We stumbled out into the light together, blinking. Our shadows stretched long and crooked behind us—two figures drained of everything they had once been. Two ghosts walking free from a tomb that had unmade them. Behind us, the others crawled into the light.
But as the air struck my face, I almost wished we’d stayed behind.
Freedom didn’t feel like salvation. It felt like a mockery.
I wanted to feel something—anything—other than this vast emptiness chewing through me.
“Another trial is over,” Salvatore said, his voice steadier now, his chest lifting with something close to pride. He stood tall, victorious, like a man who thought he’d won.
But me? I felt small. Shriveled. Like an insect curling in on itself, waiting for the heel to fall.
We stood before the guards. Their faces were lost in the light above, the world beyond us burning too bright to see. To me, they blurred together—one monstrous sneer carved from the same cruel mold.
“Look!” one of them barked, jabbing a finger toward us before laughter broke through his teeth. “We have survivors! The fucking freaks survived.”
The laughter spread—cold, echoing down the stone hall like a blade drawn slow.
But I knew better.
We weren’t survivors.
Survivors came back whole.
We were something else—things born of hunger and madness.
And somewhere deep in my gut, I knew the truth.
The worst was still ahead.