Chapter Text
Anders POV
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I remember the taste of blood before I remember anything else. Warm, metallic, bitter on my tongue. My hands shook so badly I couldn’t hold my knife straight. The forest had turned into a trap I didn’t see coming—one bite from the prey, one cursed moment, and my family was gone before I could even scream.
I don’t know how long I ran. Hours? Days? Time lost meaning after the fever hit. My skin burned like fire under my own hands. My throat closed up, my lungs screamed, but the forest didn’t care. The wind whispered nothing but death. And then—
He found me.
Dr. James. Tierney’s father. A man I didn’t know I owed my life to until much later. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t ask questions about what I’d done, what I was, or what I had lost. He only saw a boy who was dying. A boy whose family had already been stolen from him.
I can still feel his hands on me. Not gentle—he was precise. A scalpel here, herbs crushed into a poultice there. His eyes, sharp as knives themselves, measured every reaction. I wanted to flinch, to fight, to run, but my body refused. It obeyed him, and in that surrender, I learned something I hadn’t yet understood: survival often means bending, not breaking.
“You’re going to live,” he said, his voice steady like stone. I wanted to argue, to tell him it was too late, that my family would never forgive me for failing them, but the words stuck in my throat. He didn’t need them. He just worked, quietly, as if the act of saving me was as normal as breathing.
He wrapped the wound with a linen strip, and I felt my fever start to ebb. My body relaxed in ways I hadn’t known it could, though my mind spun in chaos. “Why are you doing this?” I whispered, barely able to croak the words.
“Because someone has to,” he replied. “Because it’s the right thing, and sometimes… the right thing is enough.”
I wanted to hate him. I wanted to claw back at the fairness of it all. But I couldn’t. The fever left me weak, trembling, but alive. And in that weakness, I saw something I hadn’t yet dared to hope for: a future. A slim, impossible future.
I lived. And in surviving, I carried a debt I’d never be able to repay.
Later, I learned the truth about his family, about Tierney, about the world I thought I understood. But in that moment, as he pressed the poultice to my skin, as I tasted the last remnants of fear and the first spark of hope, I knew one thing with absolute certainty: he saved me. And I would never forget it.