The mont Iris fell into the circle, the light swallowed her.
It was more than the darkness of night or shadow — it was thicker, heavier, like plunging into a sea where light had never been born. Her body vanished, her breath vanished, and yet she could still feel.
That was the first cruelty: to feel without flesh.
And then the first voice ca.
It was a woman’s scream. High, desperate, and then suddenly cut short by a sound like wet cloth tearing. The sensation hit her spine like a hamr — she could feel the ribs breaking, lungs collapsing, air burning in her chest until nothing was left but silence. It wasn’t a vision. It was her. She was that woman. She felt her knees buckle, the dirt in her fingernails as she clawed at the ground, the heat of blood as it bubbled from her lips.
She was dead.
But she was still there.
Before she could gather her breath — if breath even existed here — another life tore through her. This ti a soldier’s. The ache of hunger gnawed at her belly for weeks, the stench of unwashed armor clinging to her skin. Then the stabbing ca — not in the stomach, but deep in the knee, a spear thrust that tore through muscle and bone. She felt his scream rip her throat raw. And then — the cold, slow fade as flies landed on her lips before she stopped twitching.
She gasped.
No, they gasped — every soul she beca gasped. Iris realized there was no barrier between them. She was not watching their deaths. She was living them, one by one.
A child’s death ca next — too young to understand what the red river around her ant, too weak to fight the current pulling her under. Water filled her tiny lungs; the panic was so pure it clawed at the edges of Iris’s mind. She kicked, thrashed, but the child’s limbs were too small, too slow. The cold crushed her heart until it stopped.
Iris scread and scread — but the sound was never hers.
Ti was gone. Each life lasted forever in its own final monts. There was no before or after, only dying.
A thousand lives passed. A man bleeding out in the mud while his friends trampled over him to escape. A woman starved until she clawed at her own face. A mother clutching her newborn as fire ate them both alive. A boy who never saw the blade that split his spine.
Each death painted over the last, until Iris could not rember what she looked like. Was she even Iris anymore? Or was she only a vessel, a cup into which all suffering was poured?
At so point, the pain changed.
It wasn’t just physical anymore. mories ca with the deaths — the joy of holding a child for the first ti, stolen in an instant.
The taste of bread after a long famine, never to be tasted again. The promise of love whispered on a rainy night, shattered by betrayal and steel.
Iris didn’t just die — she lived, fully, for monts before the end. And then she lost it, over and over, until hope itself felt like a lie designed only to make the fall worse.
The weight of grief pressed down on her mind until thought beca a struggle. Her own na began to slip through her fingers like water.
I am... who?
The tide did not stop.
At first, Iris tried to fight it. She shouted her na, clawed at the air, bit her own lip to rember herself. But the voices drowned her. Their pain was too vast. She wasn’t swimming in their blood anymore — she was part of the sea itself.
Sowhere in that flood, she realized the cruelty of the ritual’s design. Death was not the punishnt. It was survival — being forced to take another breath just to feel the next agony.
She began to wonder if madness would be rcy.
A man in a tower, his skin being flayed strip by strip while soldiers laughed. A girl chained to a cart, whipped until the skin on her back hung in ribbons. A grandfather crushed beneath the hooves of his own panicked livestock. And the slls — the rot, the smoke, the iron-sweet blood — they burned into her mind so deeply she knew she would never forget them.
At so point, years had passed. Not in the real world — she had no sense of that anymore — but in here, she had lived and died for decades.
Her mind sagged under the weight, but still the flood ca.
And then sothing worse.
She began to feel their hatred.
Not just the pain of their endings, but the venom that boiled in their last thoughts. Rage at their killers, at their gods, at the world itself. That rage had nowhere to go — so it poured into her.
It itched under her skin. It whispered that rcy was a lie. It whispered that if she survived, she must take and take until the world was as empty as they had been left. The more deaths she endured, the more those whispers began to sound like her own thoughts.
Once, she saw herself in a reflection of blood — but it wasn’t her. Her eyes glowed faintly red, the pupils thin as a predator’s. Her lips curved in a smile she didn’t recognize. She blinked, and the image was gone, replaced by another death — this ti a boy whose heart burst from a single blow.
The cycle continued.
There were tis she begged for it to stop — scread until her throat tore. Other tis she found herself waiting for the next one, eager for the pain, hungry for the rage. It terrified her more than the dying itself. She was changing, and not by choice.
She thought of Lanard. His calm voice. His warning: The weak die screaming. The strong beg for death.
Which was she becoming?
Her mind fractured into shards. In one shard, she was Iris, fighting to hold on. In another, she was already gone, a shadow feeding on agony. The shards spun, cut into each other, ground together until she could no longer count them.
And still, the tide ca.
At so point — an eternity later — she realized she was standing. Not in the void, not in the lives she died in, but in the circle itself. The pillars rose around her, glowing brighter now, their light sinking into her skin.
The voices hadn’t stopped — they never stopped — but now they were inside her bones, part of her breath. She no longer knew if she was enduring them or carrying them.
Sowhere far away, she thought she heard the sound of wind.
Then it all begun again. The suffering.
---
Outside the circle, Lanard stood with his arms folded.
The black-red light of the ritual bled into the dark of his spiritual space, staining the horizon. The thirteen pillars continued a low, bone-deep vibration. From within, faint shadows twisted and clawed against the walls of light — shapes that were not Iris, yet moved with her heartbeat.
His expression didn’t change. He watched, unblinking.
From his perspective, the mont had barely begun. The space still trembled from the eruption of the pillars. The echo of the ritual’s ignition still lingered in the air. He could still taste the first wave of copper-sweet energy as it rolled off her.
Not even one minute had passed. And yet she had endured thousands of years of suffering.
There was a long road ahead.
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