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Your lungs heave painfully as you clutch at loose gravel in the fight to catch your breath. Half of the battle comes from the burning pain that rockets through your veins, begs you to collapse, to lay down and die. The other half comes from crawling on hands and knees up the rocky side of the mountain.
Your fingers are bleeding. All of you is bleeding. Where the blood stops and your skin begins is a mystery.
Grime sticks to your bloody hand as you turn it over. Your nails have been filed to nothing; down to the quick and beyond. The plate scales that once trailed up your arm were removed by any means necessary. Knives, brute force - whatever it took. Tossed into the crowd of onlookers like souvenirs to your suffering.
The plating on your face hurt the most. Exposed muscle as it was imprecisely removed. It would most likely get infected from the dust and rock. You'd much rather die up here than in front of those monsters.
"Well, well, well."
You jolt back to rest on your knees, glaring up at the imposing figure before you even as your vision swims with the motion. His armor and red eyes give him away: he's a fiend.
Just like you.
"This is my territory," he bites. If cruelty had a voice, he is not the owner, but he mimics it well enough. He smirks dangerously. "I don't like to share."
Your legs shake with effort as you shove yourself to your feet. Fire ignites along every nerve in your body. Your back is a raging inferno. Spots prick at the edges of your sight.
He tsks. "You're brave, aren't you? Standing up to me in that state."
Blood drips to the ground. It is already stained where you were hunched over before, but now it puddles on top of the saturated dirt, beading up like delicate gems. You can't tell where it's coming from any more.
Your fingers are cold. Your toes are cold. It's blazing hot up here, in the fiend's territory, but you're so cold.
The world tilts on its axis. You don't catch yourself. Your exposed jaw skids into the little pebbles and rocks. They stick into the sinewy muscle, jabbing through, down to the bone. You paw weakly at the ground. You have to get up.
"They've really done a number on you." You can hear his boots as they scrape along the dirt, but it's distant, echoey. You have to close your eyes to hear it better, too distracted by your swirling vision to focus. Your palm scrapes the dirt again as you try to push yourself up. "And yet you still fight. Are you that desperate to live?"
A shadow covers your face. You blink your eyes open, but they don't focus. They can't focus.
The silhouette of the fiend kneels down beside you. His head tilts. Sun bolts into your eye. You hiss and turn into the remaining shadows.
"You want to live so badly, but you haven't even asked to make a deal," he hums. "I could save you, you know. But what would you give me in return?"
Gods, it hurts.
It hurts.
He grabs one of your horns, what little is left of it, and lifts your head harshly from the dirt. "Do you speak?" he growls, patience wearing thin.
You're dying.
You're dying, you're dying, you're dying and-
And you can't.
Gods, you can't die.
Not at their hands.
Not of their doing.
Dirt clings to your dry lips. "Help..." It's barely a whimper. Barely coherent. You see the shadow of his head lean forward to listen even closer. "I'll..... I'm......"
He lowers your head back to the ground, softer this time. "We'll discuss payment when you wake up."
What feels like streams of cool sand glide up your body as unconsciousness claims you.