"I'm DONE playing!" Veyne screamed, magic blazing like a bonfire around him. "You want fear? I'll show you what a real monster looks like!"
The spell began to form—one he had sworn never to cast again.
The one that had once scorched an entire dueling square in the pits.
The one that took three healers to stabilize afterward.
The sand began to swirl.
The heat warped the air.
And Ian…
Ian smiled.
========
Once—before the arenas and the nobility, before the heat of cheers and the silence of shame—there was only the pit.
Dark.
Choking.
The stench of blood and oil and unwashed men pressed against iron walls. Veyne had been sixteen when they threw him into the Maw.
A name that wasn't a name.
Just a hole.
No audience.
No honor.
Only teeth, and fists, and knives made from rusted scraps.
He remembered the first night.
The way they laughed when he cried.
How the older pit-borns circled him like hounds, tapping their blades together like a slow drumbeat of inevitability.
