The teeth crunched through his spine, severing him in two as the world became a blur of suffering.
Sharp canines tore through muscle and shattered bone, sending shocks of white-hot pain through his nervous system. Despite all his hard-earned resilience to physical agony, he hovered on the brink of consciousness. His strengthened body was reduced to nothing more than a particularly tough morsel.
In a flash, his left arm was severed at the shoulder. His lifeblood pumped out from what remained of his body. He heard a crack echo through his skull and desperately clung to lucidity, trying to find the thought that would send what little flame he had into some part of his body, any patch of skin that could change into a weapon, to hurt and kill even as he was dying.
A coarse tongue pressed him downward, and everything became dark. He was squeezed through something slippery as his thoughts turned stagnant. The pain kept him close, holding him in its thorned arms, keeping him awake.
Heal first, then kill.
The flame understood him, rushing out to expend every last shred of its power to make him whole again, to tear him away from the grip of death. The fire turned to blood and flesh, his severed vessels knotting closed, fat and tissue enveloping shredded organs in an effort to save his life.
It left his bones broken, his skull crushed, his lungs collapsed, and his intestines brutalized. The weak flame retreated into the depths of his mind, an inch from sputtering out. It had done what it could.
The grip of death loosened. He was alive, if only by the thinnest of threads.
Liquid surrounded him, and he felt his skin becoming smooth.
Blood? he thought sluggishly.
He tried to move his only remaining arm. It was broken in a dozen places, but he found the nerves, the sensation of closing his hand. His most trusted weapon, the Blinking Blade, was already charged with flame, and he recalled it with a thought.
He did not see it, but he felt the distant, familiar sensation of a grooved grip. He pushed it with pathetic strength against the walls of the space that smothered him.
Then he noticed it, creeping into his mind already steeped in torment. His fingers were slippery, and his skin itched. It was not blood or water surrounding him, but acid, and he was melting.
There was no air, and he fought both the instinct to scream and to draw breath. The space shuddered, and a cramp wrenched the blade out of his grip. He was in no state to retrieve it, he had to find another way.
He dragged his only claw against the thick stomach wall. It quivered in another shudder. The convulsion pressed the burning liquid into his ears and nostrils.
He kept moving his fingers, scratching without strength. In the dark space, his skin blistered and his scalp grew tight over his skull. Still, he scratched, refusing to inhale.
With a sudden loss of pressure, the broken arm plunged through something, and a wave of warm liquid washed over him.
He was fading. The pain dulled, and a distant part of him realized why. He no longer had skin.
Thump.
Thump thump.
Something was beating close to his hand, a heart. All he had to do was grasp it and he would kill the beast. A mere Fireling taking a Blaze with him in death.
He tried to move the shattered arm, but it did not answer. It might as well have been someone else’s. The pain was not enough to fuel him any further.
He comforted himself with the thought that at least he had hurt it badly. Maybe Elenya would have a chance. That thought spiraled into the next.
If I reach it, she will live. She would tell his story.
There was a hunger there, and it was not as fickle as pain. It was crude and unyielding.
He needed his enemies to suffer. He needed to murder the Gulschaks, hear the professors scream, tear those he hated apart. But even stronger than that, if he reached that thumping cord of muscle and saved her, the Richters would look back on him as someone worthy, someone deserving of a name. He realized he desired it more than he desired to live. His greed for a place in life was more visceral than the burn of gastric juices.
So why could he not reach that beating cord of muscle? His teeth snapped from gritting them together, and with a quiver, the arm moved, caressing the beating heart.
Pain. Hunger. Greed.
Those had always been his sharpest weapons.
The muscles of his arm contracted, moving despite shattered bones and ravaged tissue. It was enough to send the splintered bones piercing through his flesh, and the claw finally ripped into the heart of the beast.
Then everything faded.
_______________________________________________________________________
Elenya hurled herself aside as the creature made a slow, clumsy swipe.
She tumbled to the ground, struggling to her feet without grace. She pushed the black cross Wretch had dropped into the earth. It was now the size of a halberd, and she leaned on it for support.
The creature could have killed her, had it been as fast as before. Instead, Vishnii gave a shudder, taking a stumbling step forward, its eyes rolling wildly in its sockets. Then it collapsed, unceremoniously tumbling to the ground in a heap of bloodied fur and limbs.
Before it had even drawn its last breath, Elenya was by its side, its hair reaching weakly for her. She jammed the bone pipes of her severed foot into the ground, and with red shades on her skin, she tried to turn the beast with her only arm. Her bones clicked, and blood streamed down her nose.
With a final push, the creature slumped onto its back. She crawled up on its chest, the cross shrinking in her hand to the size of a dagger. She plunged it deep into its stomach, using every ounce of force she had to sever the thick hide.
She tore open a hole the size of a plate and reached inside the warm body. In the chest cavity, there was resistance, barely out of reach.
Without a moment of hesitation, she threw herself into the carcass, diving into the warm blood like she had dived from the cliffs of her childhood.
Her only hand touched something slippery, suspended in blood and gore. A wrist.
She gripped it and pulled with all her might. He came free, or what remained of him.
She slid down from the creature, laying Wretch in front of her knees. She was drenched in blood. Yet at the sight of him, she paled.
He was only a torso. His skin hung from his body like wax-drenched cloth, and his eyes were melted shut. The mouth was reduced to a lipless cavity. The chest was uneven, and several ribs poked out through the acid-burned skin.
Worst of all, he was not moving.
She reached down to his chest with a trembling hand. Flame flew from her chest to his by the power of the Flame-linked medallion.
“Come on. Come on,” she whispered under her breath.
She gasped in utter terror as a faint light began to glow from his chest.
“NO!” she shouted.
She reached down, holding what was left of his nose shut, and blew air down his throat in two quick breaths. A fizz came from one side of his chest as she reached up, placing her only hand on his sternum. She began pushing in quick succession as Astrid had taught them. She blew air into him once, but as she moved back to compress the chest, she froze.
The glow had receded.
A wheeze escaped his throat, wet with death and torment.
Quickly, she pressed her mouth to a melted ear and drew in a long breath. She screamed at the top of her lungs, her words echoing over the forest basking in the morning light.
“HEAL!”
She snapped her gaze to his chest and then back to his face. “Come on. Wretchy, please. Please. I apologize for everything. All of it.”
It was quiet. Then a rib cracked into place. His skin shuddered, roiling as if a thousand worms crawled beneath it, squirming as if alive.
A cacophony of cracks came from his neck, chest, and head. A thin layer of skin grew over some of his exposed muscles, and his breathing went from a dying wheeze to a raspy inhale.
“Yes. YES!” she said, stroking her only hand over his hairless skull.
Organs visibly regenerated beneath his ribcage, liver, spleen, and kidneys blooming from the twisting flesh before becoming encased in a thin membrane. The change stopped, his eyes still fused shut.
At least now he looked freshly killed instead of like a corpse left to rot for a night.
“I’m sorry. I don’t have any more.”
With utmost care, she picked up the small body. He was terribly light.
She turned away from the corpse of the hound, from the glow in its chest, from the cleaver she had dragged through the wilderness, and from the cross.
Cradling Wretch to her chest with only one arm, she limped along the tracks on her severed foot.