Ruhan's face was shoved so deep into the muck that a small, jagged pebble had wedged itself into the gap between his front teeth. It was a stupid, annoying sensation—sharper than the dull, wet ache in his chest.
He tried to lift his head, but his neck felt like a piece of overcooked meat. His left arm was somewhere beneath him, twisted at an angle that made his brain itch with confusion.
Move, he commanded. Just a little. Instead of a movement, there was a sound—a soft, wet pop from his shoulder, followed by a sudden, hot soup of blood rushing into his collarbone.
"Ah..." he gurgled. It wasn't a scream. He didn't have enough air for a scream. He just watched a single, fat earthworm struggle to drown in a puddle three inches from his nose.
A pair of boots stopped near the worm. They were cheap, the kind with thin soles that clerks wore in the city, now caked in grey, stinking clay.
The man holding the axe wasn't some epic villain. He had a slight cold; he kept sniffing, a wet, rattling sound that was louder than the rain. He wiped his nose with his sleeve before adjusting his grip on the ash-wood handle.
"I expected the Ahmeds to have... thicker skin," the man muttered. He sounded disappointed, like a butcher who had been sold a sick cow. "But you're just a bag of leaks, Ruhan. Look at this mess."
Ruhan didn't look.
He was trying to remember something. Something about a promise? No, that was too grand something he had once given to his childhood crush, Linara, about protecting everyone.
No, what he was really trying to remember was simpler. The taste of something his mother used to bring home on quiet Sunday afternoons.
Not from the বাজার—the old market near the central estate, never that—but from the old sweet shop that still served their family first.
He had called them tarts once, in a language that was not his own. But they had been নলেন গুড়ের সন্দেশ—date-palm jaggery sweets, delicate and fragrant, pressed into perfect shapes.
The outer layer would be just firm enough to hold, but the inside—soft, melting, laced with winter's sweetness.
He could almost remember it. Almost.
Whack.
It wasn't a flash of light. It was a heavy, blunt vibration that traveled from his shoulder through his spine and into his heels.
Ruhan blinked. His right arm was lying in the mud. It looked strange—pale, like a fish on a market stall. He watched the white end of the bone soak up the dirty rainwater.
That's mine, he thought with a bizarre, sluggish detachment. I should pick that up. Mother will be angry if I lose it.
Then the heat hit. It wasn't "pain" yet; it was a screaming, white-hot iron being pressed into his entire side. His vision didn't "tunnel"—it just broke, like a mirror hit by a stone.
"Stop squirming," the man with the cold said, his voice impatient. "You're making it hard to find the vertebrae."
Ruhan's cheek hit the muck again. His failing eyes locked onto a piece of bone sticking out of the dirt.
It was a skull, yellowed and pitted by insects. But it wasn't just sitting there. The rainwater was sliding around it, as if the water itself was disgusted to touch the thing. A low vibration started in Ruhan's jaw, a sound like a dry quill scratching on a very long piece of parchment.
"...Empty," the bone whispered. It didn't sound like a god. It sounded like a neighbor complaining through a thin wall. "Too much... clutter inside."
I'm dying, Ruhan thought. It was the only clear thing left. I'm dying in the rain because of a man with a cold.
"Surrender the weight," the skull scratched.
It wasn't a choice. It was a robbery.
He tried to think of Linara. He tried to remember her hair, but the image was suddenly blurred, as if someone had spilled ink on a drawing. He reached for the memory of her name, and his mind came back with... nothing. Just a hollow space.
He felt a physical, sharp pinch in the center of his brain, and then—snip—the memory of his mother's kitchen was gone.
The blue of the curtains. The smell of the সন্দেশ. Gone.
The way his father smelled of tobacco and old paper. Gone.
The feeling of his own feet. The sound of his own name.
He tried to scream "Who am I?" but he forgot the word for "I."
He wasn't a person anymore. He was a room being emptied for a new tenant. The furniture was being thrown out the window, one piece at a time, until there was only the cold, bare floor and the sound of the rain.
He was a vessel. A clean, white bowl waiting for a drop of poison.
The man with the axe finally found his rhythm. He stepped on Ruhan's back to steady him.
"There we go," the man grunted.
The axe fell.
Ruhan's world spun. He saw the grey sky, a glimpse of the man's muddy boots, and then a sudden, cold plunge into the canal. He didn't feel his head hit the water. He didn't feel his body stop existing.
He just felt a strange, terrifying lightness—like a balloon whose string had finally snapped.
Above the water, a silent, violet fire flared, turning the headless torso into a pile of black, greasy soot. But deep in the silt at the bottom of the canal, where the light didn't reach, something shifted in the mud.
A voice, neither human nor divine, echoed in the void where Ruhan's soul used to be.
"Two remain. The count... is still wrong."