In his dream, the iron boy still has his name.

He burns through the familiar fields like a storm's eye; his calves alight with the dry desperation heaving and clawing at the skin of his throat. His lips twist with rawness on his tongue, flushed red-raw and cracked from heat. He is barefoot within the grass. Weathered soles upon fresh cultivation, breathing with him — in, out, in, out — as he shrieks a laugh. His monster is caged, no longer able to chase him.

        He can find no taste akin to the land of home.

        His arms arc wide as if to take flight. The wind catches the skin of his arms and the fabric of his roughspun shirt, but seek no resolution to take him from the ground. He is damned to prevail alone in his plight. It is not for them to decide.

        The dream fluctuates.

A woman stands before him; her smile wicked sharp and rigged in steel artillery. She exhales the enochian language of barbarity — inhales curling, mephitic smoke. A vice. An inclination. Withered on muscles and tendons, war-bred and brutalised. 

        The skin of her face is placid, roseate by the meridian sun; it is twisted by pretension, the same way her talon blade dances about her fingers like a fluency, words bent to her prerogative. He had yet to master such a thing. Envy was a child's lawful companion, and yet, it was subdued, bitten back by his idolatry of a woman who was as corporal as himself.

She stands tall and unmoving, rooted to the earth, rooted to him. A pillar, an allegory.

        Head to toe, she contemplates him — gaunt and wide-eyed, adolescence streaming from teeth gaps in inlets. Eyes as amber as the tips of a phoenix, a bird-a-wing, not quite ready for flight. A hidden boy, timidity lost in the vastness of expression. A child. A soldier yet.

        Her eyes ambled still, searching for something only an eagle eye could root from his flesh. They held a blackness about them, her eyes. Hermetic and morose, a regalia of history. She was always so far from reach when he was as child. Seraphic. A ghost without familiarity, only sacramental reverence. A soldier before a mother that had never took to tender benevolence as she did a sword.

        What sparse affection she could devote was within her teaching of survival, intrinsic upon her bones. For hours, their blades clashed and seared and sparked in the setting sun, copper inclining throughout steel, arcing the light's direction, tearing through the very fabrics of the world at their hand. A mother's love within her son's survival.

        It was their way.

His arms ache along with his tender heart does as his weapon subsides to the soil once more, sweat accumulated atop his brow. But she has no words of anger for him. No, never for him.

"Your expectations exceed your body." She chided, mirth set alight and flaming in her scarce grin. Atrophied knuckles pressed through her skin, soothing his cheek as the sun steeped below the mountaintops. "A day will achieve nothing but aches, do you understand? It is the continuation that enforces the learning. We learn through our pain, or we succumb to it."

        The boy grasped her wrist, his thumb drifting across her pulse point with a gentleness she had never possessed. Looked at her that keen amber stare warmed by veneration, and for a moment, he saw her face crack. A flash of something across her features he had not seen, and so could not name.

        Then, she smiled, as if she was coveting the sun itself. Something tender burned bright within his chest.

        His curse had clutched at the seams of kinship. Plucked each pretty blue thread and abandoned them to drape across the surmise.

        She had grasped him, he could remember, hard and quick, and shook him until his teeth clamoured like the malediction within his chest cavity. Curling gnarled joints around his ribs, tugging in dissent.

"Stop it. Stop it. Stop it, boy!" Her nails were rooted to his flesh, picking and plucking, blossoming indigo lunes, puncturing repulsion along his spine. She tore as if she might make him anew; take away this thing she did not understand. Grasp it by the throat and rip it from the frail body of the boy she held.

        Her jaw hardened. The boy flinched at the maddened fissure within her eye. An interstice lining despair.

        Then, she collapsed. No longer a soldier, no longer a divine creature — just a mother. A mother would could no longer protect her son from himself.

The girl, he could remember.

In fragments, she rooted in his psyche like shards of bloodstained glass — pivoting across her father's land like a orchid wisteria in the wind's feathered brace, keeping her from fall and flight. Stygian locks honoured her felicitous movement, abetted by the billows of her skirts at her ankles, twining and curving until their colour was minute against her luminescence.

        Her smile was armed and blinding. Deadly, even, sharpened in conviction. She was swaddled silk skin and garnet cheeks — the first blossom of spring.

        Her hands felt tangible within each phantasm; the coarse wicker basket left on the doorstep, ripened with fruit of claret red and verdurous green. The fleeting wave of her hand as she mounted the picket fence axing the field, hilarity devouring the clamour of her parents at her back. The cadence of her laughter during the games in the marketplace, trailing it past each garish stall dripping in fabrics and novelties, hoping to glimpse her before she disappeared once more.

        She existed only in interims, and then she was gone.

The girl who returned was not her. Not whole. Wherever she had wandered to, wherever she had returned from, it had made something of her skin — a chassis, now brittle and cracked, ravaged. Wrong. To the village and their whispers, she was suuder — shadow. No longer did she dance in the fields. No longer did she trail the fences.

Her eyes trailed. They followed him, relentless in their iron grasp. They held firm against the warmth of his when he withheld his nerve — the vacancy of hers whittling at the composure of his own.

        Shadows are callous. This, he would learn well.

        The night was not kind on their village. The heat was vast, vaster than their fields, and the boy could not idleness in his bed as his cover persisted and clung to his feverish skin. He removed himself from his room, knowing the grinds of the floorboards like a second skin, bounding to avoid detection and trailed the stairs down to the kitchen.

        He breathed — in, out, in, out, but his breath was laboured with his exhaustion, his back discoloured and contused from crumpling once more to his mother's blade. He was determined next time to best her. To prove his strength to the only person it truly mattered to.

        It was then he noticed the suuder in the field behind the house. A gnarled shape, trembling in a nightdress, unmoving where it stood.

        His mother had warned him of curses. He had not listened.

        The door opened without force, only a creak battling the stifling breeze to be heard. He closed it just as silently, twisting to face the land.

        He had not fully turned before he was struck — a triune of prongs driven into his abdomen, tormenting and buried with his mangled viscera. White hot heat ruptured upon the openings, the searing of the metal as it was torn from his innards pulling a scream so guttural he could feel it's memory, caustic on his ribs, alive in his throat.

It caught there with the air and suddenly his panic was wider, faster than the fields and had he been heard? And he couldn't breathe he couldn't breathe he couldn't—

        He found himself no longer able to stand upright, and his body fell to the soil.

        Her face had sent his mind blank for a drawn moment. Features distorted from his pain, he could scarcely recall the girl he had known. No words could push through the burn of his chest. Eyes of the setting sun now resembled the night above; black, cold, abandoned. She was something different entirely. Her humanity stripped to its barest bones and made to impale itself upon the marrow shards.

        Her name died on the crimson of his lips, identity shredded mercilessly by the edges of his teeth.

He was not made for this. Had his mother not shown him that?

        It did not matter anymore. His eyes had fallen closed.

        The remaining, he recalled the most.

        Antiseptic burned his nose, and his retinas were anchored, as if threaded closed. The metal beneath him was chilled, like the snow that gathered among the northern skurzoi. It was not his village. He was home no longer.

        Hands — he felt hands, the warmth of flesh, the leather of gloves. Too thin for the winter, too quick along his skin. The uncertainty of something else that trailed his flesh in adept precision. A cold point; keen and edged.

        "It's damaged, this one." A voice murmured above him. Stony, rough with smoke intake and residual doubt. "Not the best subject if results are to be optimal. Maybe—"

        "No." Another chastised. This one was stronger, paramount. A superior. "There is no time for this, Urvakh. We have our orders. The wound will heal, now open it up."

        Dread gripped him to the table, trembling within his body while his epidermis stayed soundless. His mother had warned him, she had warned him of what they would do if they found out, what they did to children like him —

        The scalpel pierced his chest. He could do nothing but allow his bones to shriek.

———————

AUTHORS NOTE!

I really couldn't resist another grishaverse fic.

As much as I want to make sure I stick with this one, I refuse to make promises (bc I'm unreliable) and therefore can't promise continuous updates. I will say, however, that I no longer have exams and so my devotion is entirely focused on this and other projects. Do with that what you will.