The forest no longer breathed... it waited. The bonfire's ghostly glow lingered across Veythor's face, soft as deceit. Dasha still knelt before him, clutching the medallion like a dying heart. Around them, the night seemed to lean closer, listening. Veythor tilted his head, voice a velvet whisper through the dark.

"So, Dasha... shall we discuss the price of survival?"

Her breath hitched. The question slithered through her bones, cold and heavy, wrapping around the last fragile pieces of her resolve. She looked up at him.... this child, this strange creature wearing sorrow like a mask... and she could not even tell whether she was staring at a savior or a serpent.

"What... do you mean by price?" she asked, her voice barely more than air.

Veythor's eyes shimmered beneath the dying moonlight, neither kind nor cruel, merely knowing. He swung closer, the faint swing of his chain making a hollow sound, metal whispering against wood.

"Every salvation," he murmured, "is built on someone's ruin. In order to gain something, one must sacrifice something."

He said this while chuckling to Dasha, and in that moment of despair, his laughter felt like the devil's own.... low, unholy, echoing through the bones of the earth. Dasha's body trembled violently; her nails dug deep into the soil. Hopelessness rooted itself within her heart.

She had never once felt this kind of emotion since the beginning of her life... a life lived under special privilege, where others were sacrificed so she could thrive in wealth and power.

"Well..." Veythor's tone softened into cruel amusement. "Life is unfair. While someone bathes in fulfilled desires, others rot with unfulfilled necessities."

His eyes gleamed with mockery, as though mocking fate itself. The cold night's stars were falling down; the moon was vanishing. The day would soon come, and the sun would say its merciless hello.

I have to end this shit before morning arrives, he thought, calculating with quiet precision.

Five to ten minutes... within this time I gotta get out of this chain. My head feels like it's gonna explode from hanging upside down too long.

So let's—

Before he could finish his words, everything blacked out.

The darkness pressed in from every side, a velvet black that swallowed sight. But the night had a voice. Somewhere far off, the distant, hollow whistle of a train cut through the silence, sharp and lonely, bending and fading like a lament.

Closer now, the metal wheels clattered on uneven tracks, an irregular rhythm, sometimes a gentle click-click, sometimes a jagged, grinding clack that vibrated through the earth beneath her feet. The sound rose and fell in waves, echoing against invisible platforms, slums, and muddy fields.

Even without light, the sound painted a moving landscape: the constant rumble of iron, the sigh of cables, the staccato chatter of couplings, all layered into a rhythm both hypnotic and unsettling. It was a lullaby and a warning at once—life moving relentlessly forward, indifferent to those caught in the dark.

Slowly, everything started to clear. Light returned to his eyes, but this time, Veythor was no longer human. He was a little bird—a magpie robin, black and white, just like life itself. He perched on a Bangladeshi train's window, the glass cold beneath his tiny claws. Dawn pierced the hollow darkness, scattering the remnants of night. Below, rice fields stretched endlessly, green and golden, swaying in the morning breeze. Life's simplest sustenance... the most regular food of the Bengali... spread like a quilt across the earth.

A nocturnal bird doesn't understand the dawn, huh?

He muttered to nobody, perhaps to himself. And then it began again. The world lagged, stuttering, as if trapped in some cruel simulation. Darkness returned, swallowing sound and light, and then slowly, reluctantly, the light came back. He was still a magpie robin, but the location had shifted.

Now he was at an orphanage, the air thick with the raw smell of dust and children's sweat. Laughter and cries mingled, chaotic, human, alive. Amid it all, a familiar cry pierced his heart. He searched, feathers ruffling against the windless air. And finally, he saw… himself.

A frail frame, a twisted, ugly little face, hair in wild disarray, eleven, maybe twelve years old. A living corpse masquerading as a boy. He was pressed into a corner, being beaten by older children. His screams tore through the silence like shards of glass, unnoticed, perhaps heard but unheard, fading into the dull hum of the orphanage. Adults were present... watching or busy—but no one intervened.

The magpie robin perched silently, wings trembling, heart straining against the impossible weight of memory and witness.

Yes.... this is what it felt like… to be unseen, unheard… abandoned.

The sun rose higher, spilling gold and warmth across the orphanage courtyard, but the boy's suffering cast a shadow too deep for light to reach. Veythor's black-and-white feathers ruffled, his tiny heart pounding with the bitter, sharp taste of something he could never unsee.

Life has always been like this... unceasing, relentless, a storm of blows and countless unheard cries. While others basked in laughter, I was carried away by my own tears, lost in a flood no one noticed.

I still cannot grasp heaven's cruelty. Why am I punished for sins I never committed, while those who swim in sins escape unscathed? Is this what they call justice? If so, then my suffering was divine punishment—but for what? I have always been kind, always gentle. If this is justice, then perhaps justice does not exist at all.

He thought, a nostalgic grief settling deep into his tiny, trembling heart. As everything blacked out again, his fragile consciousness returned to the tribe. He saw Dasha staring, frozen, as if time itself had paused for a heartbeat. Some tears welled in his eyes. The kind of tears that would never fall.

"Then let's get started, Dasha… Release me, and this tribe is safe."

Her body froze. His simple, calm words struck her like a thunderclap, stealing the ground beneath her feet. Her heart hammered, teeth grit against rising panic.

So this was his plan all along… blackmailing me into releasing him… this cunning bastard.

Veythor smirked, watching the cold wind sweep in from the west, carrying the whisper of a new twist, unfolding like the silent strike of an old, knowing fox.

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