"In a silence only death could hold, Ashen woke to a screech that sounded like the universe itself weeping."
The light was dead.
No day, no night, no time.
Only a circular grinding sound that swallowed every other noise… then the pain began.
When he opened his eyes, he saw nothing but two massive stones slowly turning above his body, crushing him as if he were a grain of ash dragged by the wind of rage.
He did not scream. He couldn't.
His jaw was trapped between the surfaces, and blood burst from every pore of his skin like hellish springs.
Each rotation of the mill crushed a bone, tore a muscle, and broke something inside him.
Then, from the womb of spilled blood, his body slowly regenerated—only to be crushed again.
The mill was not a machine. It was something that felt, as if the stone had eyes staring at him from within, mocking every tear of his flesh.
He heard whispers coming from its depths:
"You are the flour, and we are the will."
"Every scream you make… feeds us."
He tried to resist, but time was not on his side.
Centuries poured over him like red dust, every second a pain repeated thousands of times.
His bones lost their meaning. His muscles lost their form.
Only one thing remained: consciousness, suspended between rotation and blood.
---
Fifty years of grinding passed.
Fifty years of watching his body turn into chewed flesh, rebuilt from the ashes of pain.
He no longer screamed, for he realized even sound itself shattered before leaving his throat.
He heard the grinding even in his sleep, even when he died, even when the blood brought him back from his ashes.
The mill had become the world.
And the world had become the mill.
He began to think that everything he saw was an illusion, but something inside the mill changed.
The stone surface began to pulse.
It breathed.
And with every pulse, Ashen felt it absorbing something unseen from him—his will.
The more he resisted, the faster it spun.
The more he yielded, the slower it became.
It was testing him.
Crushing him, then whispering:
"If you don't turn with us… we will turn over you forever."
"Surrender, Ashen. We are your salvation."
Ashen started to laugh.
His laughter was a mix of pain and madness, like a bloody echo flooding the void.
He whispered to himself:
"Even the mill… has intent."
"Everything in this hell has intent."
---
By the sixty-ninth year, his body began to change.
He was no longer human.
His skin disappeared, turning into a red membrane pulsing with hot blood.
His bones shattered beyond form, becoming like fangs stretching from inside out.
Every time he was crushed, his body rebuilt itself—but differently, more distorted, more bloody.
The mill laughed.
He could hear it clearly now, like the sound of a thousand hearts beating within his chest.
"You asked for power…"
"Did you think power is given without grinding?"
He could no longer tell pain from pleasure.
Every scream he made awakened something new in him, a fragment of a darker will.
At one point, after being reformed from a long cycle of death, he raised his left hand—and saw it moving in the same rhythm as the mill.
The mill turned—and his hand turned with it.
He smiled. A tilted, strange, mad smile.
"I understand now…"
"You are not my enemy… you are my reflection."
And as the mill turned, Ashen began to turn it slowly himself.
For the first time in a hundred years, the mill was not grinding him.
He was grinding his weakness.
---
The mill stopped.
There was no grinding sound anymore—only a heavy silence, as if time itself had choked.
Ashen stood at its center, his body no longer human—a mass of hardened blood and pulsing bone.
His eyes burned with deep crimson, and the savage intent swirled around him like living smoke devouring the air.
He placed his hand on the surface of the mill, now like a mirror of blood, and said in a voice cold as death:
"You've ground me enough…"
"Now… it's my turn."
In an instant, the mill began to spin again—but this time, it wasn't grinding him.
It was grinding everything around him.
The walls, the shadows, even the time that imprisoned him.
The place turned into a vortex of spilled blood, every drop carrying pieces of the old Ashen, crushed and reshaped into a new form—his true form.
In that moment, there was no longer a human called Ashen.
An intent was born from the mill itself.
An intent that cannot be crushed—but crushes.
He lifted his head, blood streaming from his eyes like time itself bleeding.
He spoke calmly, in dark clarity:
"The mill was a womb… and I was the embryo."
"Now I am born from the flour—not to live, but to grind every weakness before me."
Then came the scream.
A scream not of pain, but of birth—
The birth of the butcher who grinds himself… and the world after him.