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I do not scream.
This is important to me.
I hold to it the way a man holds to his pride when everything else has already failed him.
The chains are not cold. It makes it worse. They are disgustingly warm, almost intimate, as if they have learned the temperature of my skin and decided to meet it halfway. I note this, cataloguing sensation the way I was taught—distance first, meaning later. My wrists are held above my head, pulled back far enough that my shoulders burn with a slow, grinding insistence. Pain announces itself politely, asks to be acknowledged. I refuse it the courtesy.
Havik hates that I do not scream.
I can feel him before I hear him. He has a certain pressure in him, like a storm is building behind the eyes, never reaching its peak. He circles me without hurry, bare feet brushing the stone, humming something tuneless and pleased. The sound worms its way into my skull. I imagine snapping his neck. I imagine order returning to the world the moment his spine breaks.
I imagine many things.
“Beautiful,” Havik says at last, voice close to my ear. “You’re bleeding like an ice statue melting.”
I keep my eyes forward. The wall in front of me is cracked, a web of fractures spreading outward from a single point. I count them. Thirty-seven visible lines. Possibly more beneath the grime. This is how I survive: by choosing what deserves my attention.
Havik laughs softly, delighted. “Oh, don’t worry. I see where you’re looking.” He leans into my shoulder, presses his cheek there, mockingly tender. “You always pick something to worship. A rule. A line. A brother.”
My jaw tightens. But I say nothing.
He moves away, then returns abruptly, fingers digging into my ribs. I hate that my body reacts before my will can stop it, breath hitching, muscles pulling tight against the chains.
“There,” he murmurs. “That’s the sound. My favorite part.”
I spit at his feet. It takes effort. My mouth tastes of iron, new and old blood, thick and bitter, but I manage it. The glob lands on the stone between us, pathetic and small.
His eyes light up.
“Oh, yes,” he says reverently. “Anger. You guard it so good. Like a holy flame. Do you know why?”
I brace myself. Not for pain—pain is simple—but for variety of it.
He doesn’t strike me this time though.
“You cling to it, because it keeps you from wanting,” he continues, almost as if it's a heart-to-heart conversation. “Anger is so clean. So righteous. It keeps everything else nicely buried.”
I pull against the chains. The movement earns me nothing but a deeper burn in my shoulders. I welcome it. Pain has rules. It unswers. And does not ask questions.
“Don’t,” I growl. My voice sounds wrong to my own ears—raw, stripped of authority. “Speak. You Freak.”
He claps his hands together, delighted. “Ah! Command voice. There it is.” He tilts his head, studying me. “You seem to like giving orders. Even now. Especially now.”
He steps in front of me at last. I force myself to meet his gaze. That is another rule: do not look away.
His face is a map of delighted ruin, scars pulled into shapes that mock any symmetry. Repulsive. Would my face look like this when he finishes with me?
“Tell me,” he continues softly, “how many times did you imagine kneeling after you started ruling?”
I snarl, the sound torn from my throat before I can stop it. “Nonsense.”
“Oh no,” he says, almost gently. “Those come later.”
He reaches out and grips my chin, forcing my head back. His fingers are rough, careless, familiar in a way that makes my skin crawl. He studies my face with exaggerated seriousness.
“You tell yourself you know control,” he continues. “That you were born for it. That command is your natural state.” His thumb presses into the hinge of my jaw, just enough to hurt. “But what you really want is relief. You want someone else to decide where the knife goes.”
Rage floods me, hot and blinding. I twist against the chains, muscles screaming, vision narrowing to the red smear of his mouth. I would kill him with my teeth if I could. I would tear him apart with my bare hands.
And beneath it—shame, slick and poisonous.
Because a traitorous part of me recognizes the shape of the thought.
Havik feels it somehow. It's his world, so should I really be surprised? His breath catches, delighted.
“There it is,” he whispers. “That’s the contradiction. You hate yourself for it, don’t you?”
He releases my chin abruptly and steps back, spreading his arms as if presenting me to an audience. “You flay your own thoughts and call it discipline. You bury hunger and name it life. You bleed yourself dry and tell yourself it’s strength.”
My wrists are numb by now. I can’t feel my fingers. The loss terrifies me more than pain ever could.
“I am Lin Kuei,” I spit. The words are armor, polished smooth by repetition. “I am order. Your madness doesn't touch me.”
Havik tilts his head, considering. Then he laughs—full-bodied, delighted, echoing off the stone.
“No,” he says. “You are just a man who learned how to cut himself without leaving scars.”
He approaches again, slower this time. He traces a finger down my chest, precisely following the old wound there, the healed rupture, the map of battle survived.
“Every rule you cling to,” he murmurs, “every vow you choke yourself with—it’s a blade turned inward. So you don’t want peace. You want punishment.”
I feel sick then.
He knows.
Humiliation burns hotter than any wound. That he sees through me. That he names it. That part of me—small, starving, furious—leans toward the truth of it even as I fight it with everything I am.
“I will kill you,” I say. The words feel less like a promise and more like a plea.
Havik smiles, wide and brilliant and cruel. “Oh, I know,” he says. “But first—let me show you what you’ve been dying to become.”
He raises his hand, and I realize with sudden, terrible clarity that all this was not even the beginning of my torture.
I do not know how long I have been here.
Time implies rhythm, and Havik has ruined mine.
There is no day. No night. Only intervals where pain sharpens, recedes, then returns altered. The chains are not tight, but are enough to restrain me. He wants me upright. Presentable.
His voice is so wrong for this place. I can physically feel how it slides into my ear.
“I was expecting more drama.”
I say nothing. I can't form words.
He circles me. He knows exactly how much I can move, how far my body will go before it betrays me.
I clench my jaw. I try to focus on breathing. In. Out.
He laughs softly.
His hand presses suddenly, sharply, into a wound he made earlier. My breath stutters before I can stop it.
The pain blooms, bright and invasive. I swallow it.
“You think yourself strong,” Havik says. “But all I see is a boy too scared to scream.”
Rage flares—hot, immediate. I pull against the chains, just once, testing. They answer with a warning creak. He smiles wider.
“There it is,” he murmurs. “That interesting part.”
He steps in front of me. Close enough that I can smell blood—mine.
“You hate yourself,” he says simply.
I give him a look that holds all the hatred I have for him.
His laughter rings, delighted. “Oh, yes. That too. But not for the reasons you think.”
I want to snap his spine, freeze his blood, silence that voice forever—
“I know you envy your brother,” Havik interrupts, amused. “His ease. His softness. How he can bend without breaking while you lock yourself into shapes that hurt.”
My vision blurs. The thought of Kuai Liang echoes in my skull like a crack in ice. Or bone.
“And still,” Havik goes on, relentless, “that’s not the worst part.”
I go very still.
He feels it. Gods, he feels everything. I feel sick in my stomach and in my throat both. Shame floods me—thick, choking. I hate him. I hate myself. I hate that my body betrays me with tension, with heat, with a reaction I have spent a lifetime killing.
“You do make it fun for me, Bi-Han,” Havik says gently, almost kindly. “To compete with such a thorough self-mutilation.”
He steps back at last, giving me space only so I can feel how exposed I am in it.
I breathe hard now. I cannot stop it. My control is fraying, thread by careful thread.
“Don’t,” I growl.
“Fine.”
He turns away, leaving me suspended in my chains, my heart pounding, my thoughts in disarray.
I am alone.
But something listens.
Something waits.
Havik does not rush to come back.
Maybe it was an hour. Maybe more. Maybe way more. Or it could be mere minutes, pain stretching time like my sinews.
He circles me again, fingers drumming against his own ribs in a rhythm only he understands.
“Physical pain,” he muses aloud, “is so overrated. Everyone expects it. Everyone prepares for it.” He stops in front of me and grins. “You—oh, you’ve been preparing your whole life.”
He snaps his fingers.
The chains move.
They tighten, drawing my arms back another inch, then another, slowly, until something in my shoulder gives with a wet, internal sound I feel more than hear. White flashes behind my eyes. I bite down hard enough that I taste blood again, jaw locking as my body jerks despite my will.
Pain, clean and sharp, blooming exactly where anatomy predicts it should.
I cling to that predictability like a lifeline.
The chains pull again, just enough to remind me they can break more.
Sweat slicks my spine. My hands—no, not my hands, my wrists—are burning now, skin rubbed raw where metal meets flesh. I refuse to look. I refuse to acknowledge the damage as mine.
He steps closer and presses two fingers into the hollow just below my collarbone.
I gasp.
The sound betrays me. It slips out sharp and ugly, unguarded.
Havik freezes, eyes widening like a child’s at a magic trick. “There!” he laughs. “That one came straight from the chest.”
He presses again. Harder this time. Not striking, not tearing—probing. Mapping. Finding places where nerve sings to nerve, where breath and fear live close together.
“You’re so carefully constructed,” he continues, fascinated. “Every inch of you arranged.” His fingers dig in mercilessly.
I growl and jerk against the chains, vision blurring at the edges. “You know nothing,” I hiss. “You are filth. You are—”
He backhands me mid-sentence.
Hard enough to rattle my teeth, snap my head to the side, leave a hot, ringing void where words were supposed to be. My mouth gets overflown with copper. A thin lines of spit and blood trail down my chin.
Havik beams.
He grabs my hair and yanks my head upright, forcing my gaze back to him. His face is inches from mine now. I can smell him—wrong.
“You know what I love most about this?” he asks. “You think humiliation weakens you. You truly think it doesn't make sense.”
His thumb drags slowly across my lower lip, smearing blood. I shudder despite myself, the reaction instant and traitorous.
His eyes flare. “Oh, don’t look so shocked. Your body doesn’t lie.”
Shame coils in my gut, hotter than pain. I twist violently, rage surging, but the chains hold.
“You hate this,” he continues, voice lilting. “Being watched. Being touched without permission. And yet—”
He leans in, breath brushing my ear.
“—you ache for someone to finally take you apart.”
I scream then.
Not from the chains tightening suddenly, wrenching my damaged shoulder further out of place. Not from the lightning strike of pain that tears down my spine and explodes behind my eyes.
I scream because something inside me recognizes the truth of his words and recoils in horror.
The sound rips out of me raw and uncontrolled, echoing off the stone walls. My throat burns. My vision swims. For a heartbeat, there is nothing but noise and agony and the unbearable weight.
Havik throws his head back and laughs.
“Oh my,” he says, “That one you’ve been holding in for years!”
He lets go of my hair. I sag against the chains, trembling now, breath coming in ragged pulls I can’t regulate. My arms feel distant, unreal, like they belong to someone else. Pain pulses in slow, nauseating waves, no longer clean, no longer manageable.
He crouches in front of me, eyes level with mine. “Tell me,” he says quietly, suddenly intent. “What was first? Did you learn that wanting was something to be punished so you longed for punishment itself, or the other way around?"
I squeeze my eyes shut.
Images flash unbidden—Kuai Liang’s back as he walks away, Tomas’s wide, trusting gaze, the weight of command settling on my shoulders like a sentence passed at birth.
“I don’t want,” I rasp, “Anythig but to smash your damn head.”
Havik hums thoughtfully. “Mm.”
He stands and gestures casually. I choke, body convulsing, dignity shattering piece by piece as pain floods past every wall I’ve built.
There is a sound then. A wet, thoughtful click. I don’t look, but I know the noise of another bone being coaxed out of its sheath.
I brace.
The blade kisses my side, beneath the ribs. It does not plunge. It does not slice. It presses, slow and certain, until the skin yields with a soft, obscene give. I feel the warmth spill, feel it track downward, sticky.
Havik hums.
He draws the blade sideways, shallow but long.
“You’re measuring it, aren’t you?” he observes, amused. “Depth. Length. How much damage versus how much you can endure.”
The blade lifts. Relief flashes—brief, humiliating.
Then he presses two fingers into the open cut.
The sound I make tears out of me before I can stop it. Not even a scream—something uglier. Raw. Animal.
Havik laughs, delighted, a high, ringing sound that echoes off the walls. He digs in deeper, twisting slightly, exploring.
When he takes his fingers out he wipes his hand on my chest.
Havik moves to my right arm. I faintly feel his grip close around my wrist, fingers strong, merciless. He tests the joint, bending it back.
“No,” I snarl. Panic flares, sharp and immediate. Not this. Not my hands—my hands are—
“Oh?” Havik tilts his head.
That was a mistake. Damn!
He wrenches.
Instantly the world narrows to a single, screaming point of agony as something gives way inside the joint. Not a clean break. A tearing. Ligaments screaming as they part. I scream with them full-throated and furious, the sound ripping out of me.
He keeps the pressure, holds the joint at the edge of ruin, lets the pain settle in and spread, lets it become something deep and nauseating rather than sharp. I shake, muscles spasming uselessly.
“Do you know why this hurts so much?” he asks, conversational. “Of course you do. Because you need your hands.”
He twists again, just a fraction.
My vision blurs. I taste bile.
He releases my wrist abruptly. The sudden absence of pain is worse than its presence, a hollow shock that leaves me gasping. My arm hangs wrong now, numb and screaming all at once.
Havik steps in close again. He presses his forehead briefly to my shoulder, intimate and mocking. I can feel him smiling.
“You don’t really want order,” he whispers. “Just a permission. Permission to stop pretending you've been hurt for a reason.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, breath shuddering. My body feels ruined. Open. Exposed in ways I was never trained to defend against.
“And when we’re done,” Havik adds, voice bright with anticipation, “you’re going to thank me.”
I cling to one last fragment of myself, sharp and stubborn and burning.
I will not thank you.
That madman goes quiet.
That is how I know something worse is coming.
The blade is still in his hand. And there is no flourish, no theatrical pause meant to savor anticipation this time. He simply steps behind me again, close enough that his breath warms the shell of my ear.
“You know,” he says lightly, “I’ve been wondering which piece of you matters most.”
He takes my dead wrist gently, almost respectfully. Cradles it like something precious. The sudden care is worse than brutality; it turns my stomach, makes my skin crawl.
“This one,” he says. “This signed orders. Closed around your brother’s shoulder when you needed him to stand where you put him.” His thumb strokes the inside of my wrist, probably feeling my pulse jump.
“No,” I snarl, the word tearing out of me. I yank against the chains, useless, desperate. “Don’t—”
Havik sighs, almost fondly. “You still think this is about hurting you.”
The pressure comes without warning.
He does not hack. He does not rush. He cuts with deliberate patience, blade biting deep, sawing through flesh with a wet, intimate sound that obliterates thought. Pain explodes up my arm, incandescent, total. I scream—there is no stopping it now, no dignity left to preserve. The sound rips my throat raw, shreds what little order I have left inside me.
I feel it when the bone gives.
The sensation is wrong in a way I have no language for—resistance, then absence, like stepping off solid ground into nothing. The blade completes its work with a final, sickening jerk.
My hand is gone.
Gone.
For a heartbeat, there is no pain. Just disbelief. A hollow, floating silence where something essential used to be.
Then agony crashes in, roaring, overwhelming, so vast it blots out the room. I thrash against the chains, body convulsing, vision tunneling until all I can see is red and black and Havik’s delighted grin swimming in and out of focus.
He holds my severed hand up between us.
Blood drips steadily from the torn wrist, pattering against the stone. My fingers—my fingers—are still curled, frozen in the last useless clench.
Havik turns it slowly, admiring. “Still trying to hold on,” he observes. “That’s adorable.”
“Look,” he says softly.
I shake my head weakly. The chains bite into my wrists as my body trembles.
“Look,” he repeats, firmer now.
My hand hangs limp in his grip, fingers slack, blood dripping from the torn wrist in thick, lazy drops. It looks smaller like this. Harmless. Ridiculous.
Havik smiles at my expression with open delight.
He brings it closer to my face. I flinch, a pathetic, instinctive recoil that earns him a delighted laugh.
“You spent your whole life believing these made you powerful,” Havik continues, guiding my own severed fingers up toward my throat, forcing the grotesque intimacy. “That action defined you. That command justified everything.” My blood smears across my cheek, my mouth, my eyes. The skin is already cooling. I can feel it. I can smell it.
Then he presses the severed hand against my chest, smearing blood across my skin, over my heart. The contact makes me gag, horror and fury twisting together until I can’t tell them apart.
“This,” Havik says, tapping the lifeless fingers, “is what you really are now.”
He lets the hand fall.
It hits the floor with a dull, final sound.
I sob then—not from pain alone, but from the humiliation of it, the obscene intimacy of being reduced so completely. My breath comes in ragged, broken pulls. I feel emptied out, flayed down to something raw and unrecognizable.
Havik steps back.
The blade moves again.
Pain becomes everything. I lose track of what is still attached and what isn’t, lose track of time, of sequence, of self. I keep looking at the piece of meat on the floor. At the piece of me.
Reduced to an object.
The world tilts. The pain, the blood loss, the humiliation—it all folds inward, compressing into a single unbearable point somewhere behind my eyes. My thoughts begin to fragment, slipping through my grasp like water through broken fingers.
The pain lets go. Not because it is finished. Because it has done everything it can to you.
Because there is nothing left for it to consume.
That is when I fall.
Not onto stone. Into something softer.Weightless, quiet, the bliss of a second after you faint from exhaustion.
I am nowhere.
I am not bleeding anymore. And there is something with me. Not a voice. Not a shape, just…A presence.
Warm.
Unreasonably warm, in a place where nothing should have temperature. It wraps around what remains of me like a blanket pulled over a shivering child. It does nothing, it simply stays with me as parts of me disappear. As my body becomes a list of absences.
This is how dying is supposed to feel? The slipping. The loosening. The quiet. I am relieved.
So this is it, I think distantly, this is where it ends. Not in fire, how I always subconsciously feared. Not in glory. Not in my brother’s arms.
Just in gentleness.
In rest.
I remember Fire God’s voice. Serious. Careful. As if speaking to someone already halfway gone.
“The Netherrealm is not sleep. It is not peace, but hunger and rot and endless torment, you must understand that.”
He had looked at me when he said it. Not at Kuai or Father, or even Tomas.
At me.
As if he knew something and decided I was not worthy of being told. As if he was afraid for me. I think of that now and I want to laugh, because this is not that at all. This is no screaming souls, no burning chains, no eternal punishment. Just a scary tale to keep fools like Father in obedience.
This is… Comfort. Maybe there is mercy after all. Maybe—
What happens, happens without warning. No transition. No preparation. One moment I am drifting in warmth. The next—I am ripped open. Thrown. Condensed. Dragged back into something that has weight and edges and direction.
It is so violent.
Brutal.
Like being forced awake from the most wonderful dream, the deepest sleep, by cold water and knives. Existence slams into me. No breath, no heartbeat. But something else. Like a surge. A flood of dark pressure rushing. I convulse in silence. My awareness snaps back into shape around a body that does not feel like a body, but a form that is suggestion more than matter. Shadows pour through me. Not around.
Through.
Like blood being forced into new veins. Like ink injected into paper. Like night learning my outline. I know.
Before I see or move or think. I know.
Something is wrong.
I am back. And the presence is still with me, just not outside now. Threaded through my awareness. It no longer holds me, but still, it feels like a scaffolding around a broken tower or like roots in collapsing stone.
I feel it where organs used to be.
Where cold used to gather before I pushed it out in the world through my hands. Where breath once was too. Now there is only shadow and it moves. It circulates, pulses. This is my blood now, this warm darkness. This is my heartbeat — weightless absence. And yet—I am alive.
No.
Not alive.
I am—I am continuing.
For a second I try to find the thread of elemental power. Stop myself. Not because it’s not there, I just do not need it.
I try to breathe though. And I do not. And do not suffocate either. I try to feel pain. But there is none. Instead there is a dense, humming awareness under my skinless skin, like standing in the center of a storm and realizing it obeys you. I stretch— And shadows stretch with me. I curl—And darkness folds. My every movement is echoed, amplified, perfected. This body does not resist, does not complain or not hesitate. It is not a prison, but an optional extension. A weapon that thinks it is me.
Or maybe—
I remember my name.
Bi-Han.
It fits.
Still there.
Sub-Zero.
A spike of something sharp pierces through the dark. I remember the anger. The pride. My hunger. My failures. They are all here. Preserved untouched. But no longer able to touch me.
I dismiss a name that became my because before it belonged to a dead man that was supposed to have a meaning for me. I toss it aside and let it lay on the ground.
Just beside—
I lower my gaze and I stare. Stare because it is wrong.
I look at my hands. Look and look and look, endless. It is there.
I am standing in the same chaotic ruins where my body was opened and rearranged into something that wasn’t supposed to exist. No. That is a lie.
I lift my right arm.
My hand is there. Five fingers, blackened, veined with shadow, half-solid, half-darkness. It moves when I command it to. It obeys. It is mine.
And yet—
There it is. My other hand. White skin, already dulling, fingers curved inward, as if still trying to hold a sword. For a moment, my mind refuses to connect the two images. The hand on my arm. The hand on the ground.
They cannot both be me.
I stare at it now. A strange pressure builds behind my eyes. Maybe where tears used to live. Nothing comes.
I flex my new fingers and step closer to the severed hand. Each movement is soundless even though I do not aim for it, simply as if the world has learned to hold its breath around me.
Up close, it looks worse. I recognize every mark, every scar. The faint line across the knuckle from my first real mission. The small burn from Kuai I never admitted to him. The callus at the base of my thumb from years of gripping steel.
This hand held my brother when he was afraid. This hand fed Tomas when he wouldn’t eat. It saluted my father’s memory. Closed my mother’s eyes. This hand prayed.
And now it just lies here.
I was taught that the body is not just flesh, but inheritance. A continuity. We are buried intact so our ancestors recognize us, our spirits may rise whole. The body is the bridge between the living and the dead. Now that is funny.
To cut a body is to insult not an enemy, but a heaven. To scatter it is to curse a bloodline – these words were carved into me long before I learned how to kill. I know all of this.
And yet—I feel nothing. No shame or fear. Only… fascination. I laugh. Easily, freely. The way I haven’t in years.
I reach down with my new hand. It passes halfway through the flesh before solidifying, adjusting itself to touch something. How considerate. My fingers close around my severed wrist. The sensation is faint, distorted, like touching something through water. I lift it, letting it hang limply, obscene in its obedience.
This was me. Was it?
They wanted me whole. They wanted me obedient. They wanted me returned to them, so they could strangle me forever with their greed and stupidity. All of them. Even her. Especially her. She held this hand as much as she could, as long as she could. Every time she felt unsure herself, every time I still could let myself be unsure. Before I turned nine and she had felt like it was time for me to start becoming a version of a first-born she could be content with.
Instead of him, I am this.
Well. Bad for her.
I look at the hook on my belt. An idea forms — slow, clear, deliberate. Blasphemous. Good.
I thread the sharp steel and cord through dead flesh and it does not resist. Nothing does. When I secure it to my armor, the hand rests against my hip, pale against black, impossible to ignore. A wound I refuse to close. A sin I choose to display. An answer to every ancestor who ever watched me from behind incense smoke. Look. The sin is yours. This is what your rules made. This is what my loyalty earned. This is what obedience bought.
I straighten and the severed hand swings lightly as I move — a grotesque pendulum. My trophy. I touch it with my new fingers again, alive in ways flesh never was. It taps softly against my armor as I walk. A blasphemy. A crown. And the first thing I have ever chosen entirely for myself.
“I am still here,” I whisper. Not to the hand. Not to the ruined realm or a madman that killed me. To myself, to whatever part of Bi-Han may still float inside the discarded meat-shell, “And I am more than you ever allowed me to be.”
I turn away. Ahead of me—as inside me—darkness. And I walk into it willingly. I am home.