The rain never slowed. It pounded the rooftops like fists on a coffin lid, turning every gutter into a black mirror that reflected nothing worth seeing.
Lonir walked without hurry. His boots left deep prints in the mud that filled almost as soon as he lifted his foot. The robes were heavier now, soaked through, but the weight felt right—like punishment he had earned. The pact anchor at his waist swayed gently with each step, the horned figure on its surface still wearing that quiet, satisfied tilt to its head. He didn't look down at it. He didn't need to. He could feel its attention like damp breath on the back of his neck.
His face ached in a dull, distant way. The skin that had regrown was too new, too thin—every raindrop stung like a needle. Black veins threaded beneath the surface like cracks in porcelain. He could still taste copper and ash on his tongue. His eyes felt wrong—too large, too heavy, as though they remembered dangling outside their sockets and resented being forced back in.
He needed to see.
He turned down a side alley narrower than the last, one he remembered from nights when he had pawned the last of his mother's things for a handful of coins. Halfway along the wall stood a shattered shop window—glass long gone, frame warped by years of neglect. Behind it, a cracked mirror still hung, tilted at a drunken angle. The shop had sold cheap trinkets once. Now it sold nothing but reflections.
Lonir stopped in front of it.
The rain ran in rivulets down the broken glass, distorting the image like heat haze over a corpse. He stepped closer until his breath fogged the surface.
What stared back wasn't him.
Not exactly.
The eyes were gray again, but clouded—irises flecked with black specks that hadn't been there before. The whites were shot through with thin red lines, as though the burst vessels had never fully healed. His cheeks looked sunken, skin stretched too tight over bone. Faint scars traced where the cracks had been—pale lines that shimmered wetly under the rain. Lips thinner, almost colorless. Jaw sharper, as though the melting had carved away softness he never knew he had.
He raised a hand slowly.
Fingers touched glass.
The reflection did the same.
But the reflection's hand trembled—just a little—while his did not.
He stared for a long time.
No horror rose in his chest. No revulsion. Just a slow, gray recognition.
This was him now.
Or what was left after the first offering.
He lowered his hand.
The reflection lingered a second longer before mirroring him.
He turned away.
Further down the alley, a low overhang gave partial shelter. He stepped beneath it, rain drumming on tin above his head like impatient fingers. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.
The knowledge was still there—implanted, unasked for, impossible to forget.
He had activated.
He had endured.
He had reflected.
And each time he did it again, the price would be the same: his body torn open, melted, exposed. Each time he held on longer, he could force more of that ruin onto someone else.
But the card didn't care about fairness.
It only cared that he kept offering.
He opened his eyes.
A shape moved at the mouth of the alley—small, hunched, wrapped in rags. A boy, no older than twelve, staring at him from the rain. Eyes wide. Not with fear. With hunger.
The boy took one step forward.
Lonir didn't move.
The boy hesitated, then spoke—voice thin, cracked from cold.
"You… you got food? Or coin?"
Lonir looked at him.
The boy's face was smeared with dirt, cheeks hollow, lips split from the weather. Clothes hung off him like wet sacks. He was shivering so hard his teeth chattered.
Lonir felt nothing.
No pity.
No anger.
No urge to help or hurt.
Just the same bleak grayness that had settled in his chest like sediment.
He reached into the folds of his robe—old habit from when he still carried crumbs—and found nothing. The god hadn't given him coin. Only this body that could be broken and remade.
The boy waited.
Lonir met his gaze.
The boy's eyes flicked to the pact anchor at Lonir's waist—then back to his face. Something in the boy's expression shifted. Not recognition. Not quite fear. Just… understanding.
He took a step back.
Then another.
Then he turned and ran into the rain.
Lonir watched him disappear around the corner.
He stayed where he was a long time.
The rain kept falling.
Eventually he pushed off the wall and started walking again.
Deeper into the city.
He didn't know where he was going.
He only knew that the next time he called The Bleak, he would try to endure longer.
Because somewhere inside—buried under the gray, under the scars, under the memory of his own flesh melting—he felt the faintest pull.
Not hope.
Not revenge.
Just the bleak certainty that if he kept offering, kept breaking, kept reflecting…
Eventually something might change.
Or nothing would.
And either way, it no longer mattered.