VIII

The moonlight sagged low across the earth, bruising the sky in hues of rotting plum and olive. It poured dim and heavy through clouds knotted like old wounds, pooling in hollows between broken stones, caressing splintered bones.

Ash drifted softly through it all — slow, relentless — blanketing the ruined village like a shroud of dead. The wind did not howl. It whispered, low and secretive, as if afraid to wake what remained.

Crows wheeled overhead. Dozens, maybe more — their voices ragged, unmelodic mockery of screams that had echoed here not long ago. They circled as vultures might, but did not dare descend. The murder of crows was not the hungriest thing left here.

Beneath them wandered something that did not belong to the living or the dead — so sick with the in-between it attracted only the leechers and twisted.

The stormlight stretched over the crumbling battleground like a bruise blooming over dead skin.

Ash fell in soft, choking drifts, coating cracked stone and upturned bones with the dust of lost centuries.

Sani came humming.

Their movement was liminal, a gait somewhere between lurch and waltz. Blackened heels ground fragments of armor and bone underfoot. Bandages clung to flesh that had long since begun to rot, soaked through with filth and black ichor, wrapped tight around forearms and legs. The flesh under it, what remained of it, was run-through. Rusted spikes and jagged steel jammed through decaying sinew, as though pulling their undone body back together.

Defiant in the very face of entropy. Or perhaps they were ritualistic. An endeavor — pain sought and never found, a defacing of something faceless and unfeeling. All the more dangerous now, that the body is a weapon itself. Its very limbs, extensions of the curled, broken blade fastened to a back of coiled muscle.

Its head — if it could be called that — was no more than a skull, grinning wide and hollow. No lips, no tongue, no expression. Just the unbalanced image of an eyeless mask, of something picked clean by time or the black birds. The body something hulking and spindly all at once.

Crows trailed them in twos and threes, spiraling above the ghastly visage of bone, occasionally landing on their shoulders. They were never there for long.

The Dead's song was a tone-deaf thing, with the cheer of a madman on a merry stroll — louder, sharper, when the crows fled on high.

The corpse of a village stretched before them. Skeletal homes bowed inward, charred beams reaching toward the darkened sky like fingers clawing for the heavens. Hollow doorways. A spire split in half, cradling a bell that would never ring again. Blackened rubble hid treasures of broken bodies and sightless eyes.

A graveyard of homes so fresh it drew the Nightmare in — intrigued by the scent of new blood. A place of suffocating silence, save for the drip of something wet and the lazy buzzing of flies.

And — something else. A scent on the wind, familiar and red hot. A thrumming that stood out like black ink against canvas.

Something breathing. Shallow and fast, stirring the air of a place undisturbed for miles around. And drew in the monster like flies to carrion.

In the shadow of a shattered barn, there — at the very back of it., lay a soldier. Barely a soldier, anymore. Crusted in filth, pale with fever, body stretched awkwardly across stone and refuse. His leg was split from knee to hip, the wound a deep, wet crater.

He breathed in small, hitching gasps. One hand clutched a broken blade. The other pressed weakly to his ribs. Enough lucidity to see the end approach. But not just by the rattle of chains dragging through ash, or the carrion stink that clung to the abomination like a malaise. He felt it — like a second heartbeat pressed against his own, older and heavier, echoing from some place too deep to name. An audible thing, nearly tactical, shadowing his own rabbiting heart like a ghost behind his ribs. A presence that sent the crows scattering, enacted total stillness. Only to replace it with that unsettling, scratching hum of a thing that should have no voice with which to sing.

The soldier’s lips moved, cracked and bloodless as he looked upon the towering revenant, standing now before him — the red light of the moon like crystalized blood, stark against the long, deadly sharp curvature of Sani's vampiric teeth.

“Do it,” the soldier rasped, voice like rust being scraped from a sword. “Just... do it.”

His eyes slid shut, the muscles around them twitching like a man bracing for the axe.

But nothing came.

No bite. No claw. No twisted, nightmarish blade across his throat.

Just the sound of a step. Then another.

Click. Drag. Click. Drag.

The sound of bones, grinding together. Metal whispering across stone. When the broken soldier opened his eyes again, the corpse was kneeling above him.

Its skull tilted — a clean, leering face of death in off-white. There were no eyes to meet, but the soldier still felt watched. Measured. Studied. The way a butcher might eye an animal too thin to be worth the cut. Or like a carefree boy might examine some variation of bug, before crushing it underfoot.

Chains coiled like dead vines from the exposed bone at its hip, slack and sighing, their ends lost in the refuse. The crows above — once screaming — now watched in total silence, hunched and still in the charred rafters above. As if they, too, feared to interrupt the unbreathing thing.

Then Sani spoke. Or tried to. The sound started up like glass and gravel — breaking, doubling, finally: settling.

“Mm-mm-mm... look at you. Still kickin’? Kicking about.”

Their voice was wrong — it was sing-song, bright with something too alive, like rock and iron lodged in its throat. Melodic in the way a lullaby could be, had it been dredged up from the bottom of a grave. “Didn’t expect company! Poor little gutpile." Bright syllables, purred by a broken voice, but the words just barely adhered to reason. Just rhythm. Imitating shapes. Cheerful and wrong.

"Who took your leg? Hmmm? Half a leg’s not a leg at all, no — no, not a leg at all.”

The soldier tried to crawl backward, but his limbs betrayed him. All he could do was shake. And then the thing, it reached out. Blackened fingers descended, sharp talons — thick with dried blood, rot-caked beneath midnight tips. They pressed into the wound on his leg, sudden and deep, constricting around raw flesh with a sick, wet sound.

Maggots, pale and swollen, squished and burst between their marred knuckles like crushed fruit. The heat of the wound met the cold of death and infection in a union that made the soldier buck — scream.

“There it is!” Sani chirped. “Sound the bells, the meat still sings! Oh, I did love when they screamed the first time. Warmed the marrow.”

His voice tore from his throat like a ripped cloth.

Still, Sani hummed. That same dead lullaby, that same soft rhythm, as if this were no different from rocking a child to sleep.

The soldier sobbed as the bandage came next — a length of stained cloth, unspooled from Sani’s own wrist. It reeked of mold and iron, heavy with damp, its ends frayed and sticky. They wrapped it tight around the thigh — once, twice, again — jerking each knot into place with a strength far beyond the living. Rough and uncaring movements, jerking the wound underneath as blood bloomed in its wake. No gentleness. No true cruelty. Just a kind of dreadful function.

It was too tight. Way too tight. The pain was white-hot.

Sani sat back on their haunches. Looked at him. “Better! All better. See? You’re welcome.”

Something passed between them in the quiet that followed — like a... stillness. A flicker. As if something inside the thing had paused. Clicked. Recognized the moment. Then forgot it just as quickly. Without a word, the undead stood. Bones clacked. Chains whispered.

S

ani looked at him one last time — skull forever smiling — and said, a softer dirge, almost like there was a pout to its voice: “Don’t bleed out while I’m gone, little puddle. I liked you.”

They turned, then walked into the ash and dark. Humming. The crows waited until their silhouette had faded entirely, then took wing again. Screaming.

The soldier didn’t move. Couldn’t. He lay there, leg wrapped in a bandage of ichor, pulsing with rot, the stink of death bleeding up through his skin. And he knew — without knowing how — that the prowling shade would come back.

The next time they came, the sky had not changed. Twilight hung like rot upon the ribs of the world — sunless, starless, an unbroken dusk that painted everything in bruised tones. The air clung thick and wet, steeped in the iron tang of old blood. Somewhere distant, a crow cried once, then fell silent.The soldier lay on his back. Breathing. Barely. The fever was a fire now, stoked behind his eyes and between every tooth. His skin was soaked with cold sweat and grime, lips cracked to bleeding.

He didn’t look when he heard them. He just knew. Felt that — second heartbeat, like it was screaming at his senses.

The soft patter of bare bones over ash. The low jangle of chains. The hum — tuneless and wrong — like a lullaby caught in a child’s throat. It all came second to that feeling of dread, of sickness rolling in through the ruined door just ahead. The drawn breath of everything with a pulse, hiding. They arrived without ceremony, dancing over broken timber and brittle corpses. The clipped, ragged end of their cloak flared behind them like a torn flag. The crows parted in a lazy wheeling spiral, and the air bent around their presence. The soldier didn’t speak. So Sani did.

“Still here,” they cooed. “Still warm, too. That’s good. Dead things are boring until they start moving again. And then? So chatty. But not you. You're better this way.”

They paced, idly dragging their hand along the collapsed frame of a nearby hut. Rusted nails scraped the wood. Sparks snapped in the dim. They chuckled at something unheard.

“They called this place Hollowend. That’s funny, right? Hollow. End. What a stupid fucking name.” A pause. “I think I lived here for a while. Or I killed someone who did. Same thing.”

Sani stopped suddenly. Tilted their head as though listening to something deep in the earth. Then they crouched again, chains coiling at their feet like serpents. They reached forward.

Fingers like blunted talons traced the line of the soldier’s jaw. No pressure. No grip. Just a curious sweep, the way a blind man might map a face to stir memory.

Their voice dropped to a whisper. “Still soft.” Then brighter: “That’ll go. It always does. Not a bad thing — I think you’d look nice hollowed out.”

And then — the third visit.

It may have been hours later. Or days. The sky was no different. Nothing ever was.

This time, Sani brought something.

They approached from the dark, gait lurching, one foot dragging as if they’d forgotten how to walk. In their blood-crusted hand, they held something limp and feathered. It twitched once. Then didn’t.

A crow. Crushed in their grip, ribs flattened, impaled on the spikes driven through its hand. Gore dripped from inbetween long, flexing fingers. One wing dangling loose like torn parchment, barely attached to thin lines of sinew.

“Look what I found! Screamed the whole way here. Isn’t that sweet? Screaming means it cared.” They giggled, holding it up as if to show off a prize. The soldier didn’t move.

Sani stepped close. The stench hit first — rot and bile and something sweetly sick beneath it all. They dropped the corpse into the soldier’s lap with a wet slap.

“Eat up,” they sang, cheerful. “It’s fresh. Sort of. Still warm enough to pretend.”

The soldier stared. His eyes swam.

He didn’t eat.

Not until the humming stopped.

Not until Sani stilled — the kind of stillness that belonged to traps and hanging nooses. The kind that preceded something sharp. Painful.

Its head tilted. The grinning skull watched.

And kept watching.

When it spoke again, the voice was flat.

“Eat.” A pause, so long it made the silence ache. “Now.”

The soldier’s fingers twitched. He gagged — heaved — bit into it. Blood filled his mouth, not all of it the bird’s. Warm and distorted. He chewed twice, maybe three times, but the rubbery flesh didn’t give. Then he swallowed. Sani’s bones loosened. The tension snapped back into a crooked sort of joy.

“There we are! See? Friends feed each other. That’s how you know someone loves you.” They chattered then — bright and empty — about nothing. Everything. Rattling nonsense and old battlefield jokes, half-remembered stories they might’ve stolen from someone else’s life. Before they left, they reached into the wreck of feathers and pulled one free — long, black, clean.

“There was a woman once,” Sani said, voice jagged and quick, “her boy... he screamed. Screamed at night — said the shadows had teeth. She held him close, but eventually they took him anyway.” A harsh, dry laugh cracked the silence. “Or maybe it was me. Maybe I was the teeth.” They jerked their head. Jaw working. “I do get hungry.”

Another laugh — thinner this time, splintered around the edges. They fiddled absently with the feathers of the dead crow as they spoke, tugging one loose, then letting it fall.

“Oh — oh! And the man with the tooth collection! All strung up like pearls. Every one pulled fresh. Said it kept the voices away. Gave me one.” They tapped their own jaw, clacking bone against bone. “Didn’t work.”

They paused, as if expecting the soldier to chuckle. Or breathe. Or blink.

Nothing.

Sani’s voice dipped, went quiet and faraway. “I think it was funny. Wasn’t it funny?”

No reply.

Something in them stiffened. Their hand stilled.

“Man fixing fence — no, no — storm came. Rain like knives. He swore at the sky, said the world was bleeding. I said — nothing. Just stood there. Watching. Maybe he saw me. Maybe not.” Their grin never went, but the skull was angled up at the sky, a heavy blanket through the broken ceiling. “You ever watch someone die? Slowly? Like a broken machine? He did. Quiet, but loud. Like a windchime full of nails. Lovely sound.”

A pause. They giggled. Their fingers picked idly at the crow’s carcass as they talked, digging through gore like they were looking for a lost coin.

“Do you remember the river siege?” they asked suddenly, cocking their skull to one side. “No? Shame. Lots of screaming. One of the officers tried to swim across. Full armor. Sank like a sin.”

The soldier did not speak. Did not move.

Sani’s laughter trailed off into a brittle hum, like something unraveling.

They looked at him for a long while, empty sockets searching for a flicker of recognition, a spark, even a twitch of muscle. Nothing. Just the soft rasp of breath that might’ve been wind, might’ve been memory.

Finally, they sighed — not with sadness, but something like impatience. “You’re a dreadful audience,” they muttered. “Not even a chuckle.”

Before they left, they reached into the wreck of feathers and pulled one free — long, black, clean. It caught the light like oil, iridescent and too perfect for this place.

“Always need a token,” they murmured. “A memory. A piece. So you don’t forget what you did. Or who you were.”

Then, almost kindly, they leaned down and pressed it to the soldier’s chest — the one spot not yet covered in grime or blood. Where his heart might’ve once beat loud enough to count. They pressed it to the soldier like a medal.

“For bravery,” they whispered. “Or maybe obedience. Hard to tell the difference anymore.”

Then they rose, humming something disjointed and soft — the kind of tune a mother might sing if her child had been born wrong — and vanished into the dark.

Time had ceased to function. To matter, at all.

The sky hung heavy with a color that wasn’t really a color — a smear of bruise-dark ash and ember, suspended, stuck somewhere between dusk and dying. The only light was that of a moon as crimson red as the lifeblood spilled around these parts — aged, caked into the mud and dirty.

He couldn’t tell if it had been hours. Days. Maybe longer. At some point, a bitter drizzle had fallen — water like spit squeezed from a dying animal. It had touched his lips, and then vanished again, like a dream.

The wound in his leg had turned slick and humming. Fat with rot. Fever lapped at the edges of him, strange and flickering. Hunger chewed its teeth against his ribs, but it was thirst that ruled him — that had his tongue thick and heavy in his mouth, lips cracked down to meat, throat tight as an open wound. The world spun behind dancing stars. He dreamed of ice. Of snow. Of the cool kiss of river water.

He heard the chains first, this time. Dragging. Whispering. The sound of something shackled to eternity, coming closer. The soldier didn’t lift his head. Couldn’t. His head was a rock. His neck a rusted hinge. But his breath shortened. Ribs stuttered beneath the thin leather of his cuirass.

Then a laugh, sudden and slicing, cut through the still air. High. Childish. Terribly close.

“Guess who’s back?” A pause. Then, with sudden, bright venom: “No, not a God. Not your mama either — those don’t exist, dummy. Just me. Just me just me just me—” Sani sang. The voice spun and broke and spun again, as if echoing through cracked glass.

Sani shambled into view like a nightmare stepping out of fog. Their ragged red cloak flared briefly in the dead wind, catching on a nail jutting from a fallen beam like skin on a hook. They didn’t seem to notice. Or care.

Their gait was different today. Less dance, more drunken twitch — a puppet tangled in invisible strings. One leg jerked, then dragged. The chain wrapped around their ankle trailed behind like a snake too tired to hiss. A crow sat on their shoulder, feathers bent and glistening with rot. Another clung to the jut of exposed ribs beneath one arm, peck peck pecking absently. Greedily.

The soldier swallowed. Or tried to. In their clawed hand, they held something. A water-skin. If you could call it that. The leather was stained black — either with blood, or something worse — a split at the seam threatening to give. The contents sloshed, thin and sludgy, like something dead still dreaming of being drinkable.

They crouched. Close. Too close. The air around them stank of wet rust and rot.

The soldier tried to roll away, but his muscles buckled — not out of fear, but something duller. The walking dead placed the waterskin at his lips.

“Open up!” The undead cooed, pressing the skin against the man’s lips. “You’ll like it. You’ll like it more than screaming.” A pause. Their skull tilted. “Probably.”

The soldier blinked. Eyes dull with fever, but not empty. Not yet.

He parted his lips, slow, mechanical. What pride remained died quietly between cracked teeth. He was too tired to spit. Too tired to refuse.

Sani’s other hand moved quick, too quick — slid beneath his jaw with a press like aged iron. Their fingers dug in where flesh met bone — angling, directing, but the touch was entirely too harsh. The grotesque caricature of fingers, overlong, bony and clawed in black ichor, held him in an impermissible vice. Metal sharpness and cruel spikes breaking the skin. They forced the waterskin against his mouth like a mask. Water poured, fast, failing against a choked passage, more down his cheeks than down his throat.

He gasped. Coughing. Drowning in inches. Chest rattling like a bag of nails, tearing his insides. He tried to swallow but the flow didn’t stop, didn’t adjust. Black hair glued to his forehead as water surged in rivulets past his ears, loud like the erratic heartbeat behind the cage of his ribcage.

“Greedy,” Sani mused. “Should’ve brought a bucket. Or a river. Maybe the ocean. You’d sink so nicely...” Then, abruptly, snarling: “Drink!”

He blinked through it. Through the sudden blur of water, tears, blood, something else. Saw the crow still pecking at Sani’s ribs. Saw the curl of their fingers tightening.

The soldier wheezed. His vision greyed at the edges. He wasn’t sure if it was from thirst or drowning or just being near this thing for too long.

Then — just as suddenly — Sani let go.

The waterskin dropped to the ash with a wet thud. The soldier slumped sideways, coughing in wet, jerking heaves, the water clinging to his lips in strands of cruel denial. His hands scrabbled at the ground, weak as a baby bird. One finger bent wrong, swollen and black beneath the nail.

The abomination crouched close, ribs creaking — leaning in with a voice that came low. Fast. Like a secret.

“Sorry. Sorry-sorry-sorry. Not your fault. Just—your face. Looked like someone else’s. Just for a tick. Just for a flicker.” They giggled, then stopped. Head tilting. Voice softening again, almost warm, something loosened inside it. “Don’t be sore about it...I brought you a thing. See? Gift time. Gift for the good little dying man.”

Their hands rummaged somewhere at their gnarled hip, hand in a pocket — too deep, too long — until they pulled free a shape wrapped in grimy linen. Sani cradled it like a baby, or a bomb.

They held it out reverently. Undressed it slowly. Revealing a spoon.

Battered. Bent. Blackened with some soot too old to identify. One side of the bowl was chipped. It was far too small for anything practical. And yet they offered it with a trembling devotion, as though it were a crown.

Then: “Did you know spoons used to feed people? Not just eyes and tongues and beetles. Actual people.” They laughed, sudden and shrill. “Oops. I’m getting ahead of myself again. I forget sometimes. Who I’m talking to. Who I am. Who you are. That’s a fun game, huh?”

The last word came sudden — a whipcrack. Their whole body jerked, the spoon flinging from their hand and landing point-down in the ash with a soft thomp.

The soldier flinched, flared with a pulse of old adrenaline — not strength, just memory. His voice found him, crawling up from whatever pit it had been buried in.

“…why…?”

Sani stilled. The crows quieted.

The question hit like a bell in a drowned cathedral — something deep and cold that echoed off the bones of the world. They stared at him. Or past him. Through him.

“Because…” They rocked back on their haunches. Chains sang low against the stones. “I used to like people. I think. Or maybe I liked their noises. Screams and kisses sound so much alike, when you’re far away.”

They leaned in again, whispering now, nose-to-nose with the dying man. “Don’t ask again.”

Silence followed. Not the tense kind — not the pause before violence. Just...nothing. The rustling of leaves. The distant howl of some animal. Sani didn’t move. Didn’t hum. Didn’t cock its head or reach out. Just stared — empty sockets fixed on something that was him and not.

The man’s eyes were wet. With fever, or tears, or the black exhaustion that comes when the body starts to let go. His fingers twitched at his sides. Then curled.

And in that lull, the soldier’s thoughts cracked open. Not defiance. Not courage. Not anything of the sort.

Just grief and memory. Thoughts of a dead man, spilling into the dark like a child talking to themselves.

“…I had a family,” he breathed. His throat cracked on the word. A thin, watery sound. “Two daughters. And a wife… I still remember their faces. I—”

SNAP.

A burst of movement. Like lightning made flesh. The revenant’s hand locked around his forearm — not firm, not stern — cruel. Instant.

The soldier's mouth tore open in a scream. It hit the air in one long, wailing crack. A howl of bone and nerve and something wet that should never make sound. It cracked and splintered within the second.

“No no no no no no no—” Sani muttered, voice a rising hiss, climbing into mania. “Stop that. Stop that talk. Don’t say things like that. You’ll spoil the quiet. The quiet was nice.”

Their fingers tightened. Bone shifted beneath skin — grinding, cracking, as though trying to be something else. The soldier arched, tried to twist away, but there was no strength left in him. No anger. Only the sound — his own screaming, scraping his throat raw until he tasted copper.

It didn’t blink. Couldn’t. Holding him down with that frozen, lipless grin — like joy flayed down to enamel. And yet something behind it trembled. Flickered. Not mercy. Not regret.

Just… wrongness. Like a song played backward.

Their grip was a vice of undead muscle, thin cords of flesh snapping in protest beneath the skin. The soldier whimpered, barely a shape now — more sob than man.

Then — release. Just like that. Sani stood. Hummed. Shook the blood from their hands with an absent flap, like water flung from feathers.

The soldier curled inward, cradling the shattered limb to his chest. He didn’t speak again. Didn’t cry. Only stared ahead, eyes glassy, mouth twitching like he wanted to form words but had forgotten how.

Sani turned. “You’ll feel better soon,” they chirped to the air. “The rot helps. It eats the hurting parts. Leaves behind the good bits. You’ll see.” Voice like a creaking inside the foorboards. “Chemistry is rare.”

And then, as if the moment had never happened — as if nothing ever happened — they disappeared into the ash. Chains hissing, skull glinting in the half-light, canines sharper than any elf’s ever had been, should be, and their hum trailed after them like a fever dream that refused to end.

His chest rose, but barely — more twitch than breath. His fingers curled around an old gift. Maybe the spoon. Maybe the bone of a gored bird. Hard to tell now, through the crust and grime, through the swelling in his knuckles. It was a reflexive thing, holding on because there was nothing else to hold on to.

His leg was black and yellow, a ripe, stinking bloom of rot that had crept like ivy up his side, past his hip. The bandage Sani had once forced around it hung limp, as though even it had given up on continuing this cruel joke. The waterskin lay beside him. Still empty. Crusted, sticky with dried blood that was not his.

And Sani came, as always. Chains clinked — a merry, uneven rhythm like a lullaby gone crooked. Their hum was bright this time. Tuneless, but almost sweet. There was a skip to their gait, a fractured puppet’s waltz. One crow clung to their shoulder, another flapped lazily just behind them, as though dragged by some forgotten string.

They didn’t notice at first.

"Today’s the day, little limb,”Sani chirped, plopping something beside the soldier’s body. It hit the ground with a sodden flap. Could’ve been a dead crow. Could’ve been a flower. Could’ve been both. “Got you a prize! Pulled it from a throat all the way back east. Smells like laughter, if you sniff it.”

They waited. Hummed. Rocked on their heels.

The soldier did not move.

Sani tilted their skull. The sockets in their face did not blink. But something behind them blinked. Something... tried. They crouched.

Prodded the man’s chest. Once. Twice.

“Hey,” they said brightly. “I brought you something.”

Still nothing.

“Hey.” Again, quieter. “Don’t be rude. I dragged it here. I don’t even know what it is.” A pause. “Could be a friend. Could be a mistake.”

They leaned in. Put their ear to his chest.

Waited.

Nothing.

The smile on their skull did not change. But everything else did.

The chains stopped clinking. The crows stopped cawing. The clouds above split open with a sound like something tearing. The blood moon swelled above them, red and full and watching. The air itself coiled.

And Sani shrieked.

Not words. Not even pain. Just noise — a jagged, ear-warping thing, sharp enough to split the sky.

Crows scattered like thrown ash. Chains snapped and writhed. They spun, tore, ripped through the ruins like a beast unmade, tearing through the world that had dared go quiet. Stone burst into splinters. Wood shattered like bones.

And in that chaos, their attention turned on the soldier’s body. Lifted. Twisted. Pulled apart.

A clawed hand caught his spine mid-air — crack — broke it in half like kindling. One half flung into the dirt. The other dragged through a wall.

And then — it was over. Sani stood above what remained. Breathing. Though their lungs had long since rotted.

Its head hung low. “You weren’t supposed to go,” they whispered. The crows had not returned. “I wasn’t done.”

Silence pressed down.

The thing knelt again, in the rubble of the ruin, and reached out with a twitching hand. Touched the curled, unrecognizable mess of flesh. Their claw brushed something gooey, scalp, a piece of skull. Cloth just beneath it. Perhaps once a sleeve. A crow landed, silent, on Sani’s shoulder.

They looked at it. Lifted one skeletal finger. Tapped it once, almost fondly.

It died.

Dropped like a stone.

Sani exhaled a breath that didn’t exist. Sat there for a long time. Head cocked as if listening to some distant, unreachable sound. Then, they stood. Their humming began again — slow, broken, like a nursery rhyme with half the notes missing. Chains dragged behind them, carving scars in the ash, each link wet with a fresh coat of blood. The blood moon followed, red and low and hungry.

And in their wake, the battlefield fell quiet again.