Pain.
Not the sharp kind.
The dull kind that had been there so long it stopped being pain.
It became weather. Something you checked when you woke. Like rain.
It was raining.
It was always raining.
'Three liters today.'
I knew before the door opened.
My body knew the schedule better than I did. Like a dog that feels feeding time in its bones. My body had stopped being mine long ago.
It kept its own records now.
The room was the same.
Stone walls. One torch on the left. It flickered when the air shifted wrong. The drain in the floor. I no longer looked at it.
The smell iron, and something chemical with no name.
Only a feeling. The feeling of being taken apart cell by cell and reassembled slightly wrong.
The stick pressed into my spine.
It always pressed into my spine.
It had never moved.
Never chosen another spot.
More reliable than people. More reliable than memory.
Not that I remembered many people anymore.
'Don't.'
I let the thought fade.
Thinking too hard about the gaps only made new gaps.
I counted the cracks in the ceiling instead.
Eleven.
Same as yesterday. Same as the day before. The big one in the upper left started strong, then simply stopped.
Halfway to nowhere.
Like it had lost the will.
I understood that crack.
We had an understanding, that crack and I.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
The sound came from my left.
Steady.
Patient.
It had all the time in the world. I didn't look. I knew every sound here the way you know the sounds of your own breathing.
Not by choice. By necessity.
Silence in this place was only the pause between things you had already memorized.
The door opened.
Clank—!
Right wheel skipping twice today.
'Interesting.'
I didn't look at him.
I knew his hands.
Broad fingers.
The slow exhale before the needle.
Like he was preparing himself. I had wondered once what it cost him. Then I stopped. Then I wondered again. Then I stopped for good.
It didn't matter what it cost him.
It mattered what it cost me.
The cart stopped beside me.
He checked my arms. My chest. Made that sound in his throat. The one that meant acceptable. Still functional. Still worth the three liters.
'Glad to hear it,' I thought. 'Very reassuring.'
He reached for the needle.
I watched the ceiling.
Eleven cracks.
SSHK—
'Ah.'
There it was.
The burn began the way it always did.
A small, polite point of heat at the vein.
Then it spread. Slow.
Deliberate.
Like it had done this enough times to stop hurrying.
Up the arm.
Into the shoulder.
Across the chest.
Down into the stomach, where it settled.
Like something that had always lived there.
Thirty-six centiliters was enough to push an F-rank to C+ in one hour.
He gave me three liters.
Every day.
I had done the math once. Back when my mind still worked in straight lines. The number hadn't felt real. Some quantities were too large. Like trying to count a million years in seconds.
At some point it was just... a lot.
'I am a lot,' I thought.
'Medically speaking.'
He wrote something in his notebook.
Neat lines. Organized. The notes of a man who believed what he was doing mattered. Who believed the thing on the stick was a subject, not a person.
I had stopped being angry about that.
Anger took energy I no longer had.
He capped the needle. Pushed the cart back.
The wheel skipped once.
Twice.
Clank.
Gone.
The silence returned.
It always returned.
The burn peaked around the twentieth minute.
That was when thinking became difficult. Not impossible. I had learned to hold one thread even as everything else dissolved. But the thoughts moved slower.
Thick.
Like the air inside my skull had turned to something resistant.
I used that time for inventory.
A habit from when I still had things worth counting.
Now it was just checking what was left. Like poking holes in an old coat. Not expecting much.
My name.
Julien.
I turned it over slowly.
It sounded like it belonged to someone else.
Someone who lived in a house.
Ate at a table. Walked upright.
Not glued to a stick. I knew it was mine.
I felt almost nothing for the person it described.
Almost.
My obsession.
Still there.
Everything else had worn away around it. Two years of being chemically dissolved from the inside, and the part of me that cared — deeply, unreasonably — about ancient extinct creatures had not moved an inch.
I had stopped questioning it.
It was the last thing that still felt like mine.
My face.
I assumed it was still there. No mirrors in this room. I had lost the habit of caring how it looked. The jaw had changed. I knew from the way the man in the coat tilted his head lately when he checked me. Like noting a new development.
'Very exciting for him,' I thought.
The burn settled into background noise.
Part of the weather again.
Thoughts returned. Slower. Cleaner.
I stared at the ceiling.
Eleven cracks.
The big one that stopped halfway.
'Why did you stop?' I asked it silently. Not for the first time.
It never answered.
I breathed out.
Today felt different.
I didn't know why. Something in the silence after he left. The torch burning lower than usual. The wheel skipping twice instead of once.
Small things.
When everything large is taken, small things become the entire language of the world.
Something was different today.
My mind drifted.
It did that now. Started somewhere. Ended somewhere else. No memory of the path. A smell. A weight in my hands I couldn't name. Fragments that rose and usually dissolved.
I had stopped chasing them.
Today one surfaced and stayed.
The weight of a book.
Old paper. That specific smell.
Something that felt like—
'Don't.'
Gone.
I watched it vanish.
The burn pulsed. Once. Strangely. Deeper than usual. Below the place where the liquid settled. Below the place where I kept my name and my obsession and the small list of what remained.
Something moved.
'Hm.'
I waited.
It didn't move again.
The torch flickered. The drain dripped.
And then, from somewhere I could no longer locate — from whatever part of me was still a researcher, still cataloging, still asking questions because asking was the last reflex left —
A question rose.
Small. Specific.
'What is the most dangerous creature ever recorded?'
I blinked.
'...Where did that come from?'
I didn't know.
But it was there now. Patient.
I asked it again.
'What is the most dangerous creature ever recorded?'
The burn pulsed twice.
Deeper.
Strange.
Again.
'What is the most dangerous creature ever recorded?'
Something stirred in my chest. Below the burn. Below everything. Like something ancient that had been sleeping for a very long time had just heard its name.
One more time.
'What is the most dangerous creature ever recorded?'
The answer came.
Not from memory.
From somewhere older.
Drake.
Armored. Territorial. Built for altitude and aggression. The kind that didn't wait for threats. It decided everything in its reach was already a threat. Stone-dense scales. Jaw strength that could crack enchanted steel. Patient. Until it wasn't.
Drake.
I held the word.
And then my hand changed.
Not all at once. The fingers. The proportions shifted. Skin thickened at the knuckles. Something moved underneath. Slow. Tectonic.
I stared.
'...Hm.'
Then the other hand.
Then my arms.
I stopped thinking after that.
_________________________________________________________________
after A coupel of houres
I stopped thinking after that.
The first thing I noticed was the smell.
Iron.
A lot of it.
The second was the floor against my cheek.
Cold stone.
I was horizontal.
I was never horizontal.
I pushed up.
My arms obeyed. No pull from the stick.
The restraints were gone.
Everything designed to hold me had been removed.
Without permission.
I stood.
My legs held.
I looked at the room.
Or what remained of it.
The cart was in pieces.
Not broken — dismantled with strange precision.
The notebook lay open on the floor, pages dark.
Instruments scattered.
The torch still burned, casting unsteady light over walls that looked personally offended by existence.
The drain did its job.
Drip.
Drip.
I looked at my hands.
They were mine again.
Normal.
Whatever had happened was gone.
Or gone enough.
They were not clean.
'So,' I thought. 'That happened.'
I didn't know what "that" was.
I suspected understanding it would take up most of whatever came next.
I looked at what was left of the man who had come every day for two years.
He was no longer acceptable.
He was no longer anything.
I stood with that fact for a moment.
'Hm.'
I turned.
There was someone in the doorway.
Not the man in the coat.
Not the red goggles.
Someone who looked like they had also been attached to something they never chose.
Clothes hanging loose on a body that had forgotten how to fill them. The specific stillness of someone who had learned sudden movement was dangerous.
A mirror I hadn't asked for.
We stared at each other across the ruined room.
Neither spoke.
The torch flickered.
The drain dripped.
And in that silence, only one question remained. The one that had survived everything they did to me. The one that stayed when the name felt foreign and the memories were holes and the body no longer felt like mine.
"Who am I."
Not to them.
To myself.
The question hung there.
Neither of us had an answer.
But I was still asking.