Three YEARS LATER
NNT -- 13:09PM — The Lake of Broken Promises — Land of Birds
Raghoul trudged through the waste of half-buried tents and shattered water barrels, each step sinking into mud thick with congealed blood and piss. The lake—once a trickle of silver promise—was now a black pool of oily sludge that reeked of rotting meat and bile. Bloated corpses bobbed in its shallow depths, their bellies distended and split, leaking viscera that attracted swarms of iridescent flies. He kicked through one corpse, a merchant with fingers broken backwards at impossible angles, throat carved open so deep the head dangled by stringy tendons, vertebrae gleaming white in the cruel sun.
A voice slithered through the air behind him, low and ragged.
"You breathe too damn easy."
He snapped his head back, Musashi leaned against a splintered post, lantern flickering in one trembling hand, a hideous scar gouging across his cheek like a worm had burrowed beneath the skin. He wore the saffron robes of a Samaritan healer, now crusted with rust-brown stains and yellow pus. His eyes—pale as winter ice—simmered with guilt that seemed to eat him from inside.
"Go choke on your piss-soaked pity," Raghoul spat, his throat raw and burning. He turned to leave, but a wet, gurgling gasp stopped him dead.
## NNT -- 13:59PM-- The Healer's Shack
Inside a half-collapsed shack that stank of gangrene and despair, the healer guided a trembling woman's bloodless hand to an oozing wound where maggots had already begun to feast. "Steady, woman... count to three with me... one... two... three..." He pressed a bandage soaked in cooling herbs against meat that had once been flesh, the woman's scream twisting into a guttural animal noise that scraped the inside of Raghoul's skull. The healer's free hand darted for a jagged bone shard that jutted from her thigh like a broken tooth—blood spurted in rhythmic jets, painting his face with crimson droplets.
Raghoul watched from the doorway, fists unclenching. The memory of crackling fire and melting skin echoed in his hollow ribs. He remembered the merchant, remembered the stench of piss-soaked cellars where orphans died crying for mothers who'd sold them for a handful of copper.
The healer glanced up, blood dripping from his chin. "You kill well, boy. But you don't know what the fuck you fight for."
"I fight to live," Raghoul ground out through clenched teeth. "And to burn to ash the world that tried to gut me like a fish."
The healer's laugh was bitter as poisoned wine. "Typical—a spark without a vessel. As I've always told you, You'll burn yourself to nothing, boy." He turned back to the woman whose eyes had begun to roll back in her skull. "Stay with me. Don't let the fever crack your mind open."
The woman's whisper slithered over the moans of the wounded: "...my baby..."
The healer's hands froze for a heartbeat. "You have a child?"
She nodded, tears carving muddy tracks in filth. "He... he waits in a cart outside. Just milk and bread..."
Raghoul's vision blurred with ash-filled memories. He thought of the three scouts, children whose skulls he'd burned beneath his boot, dreams spilling out like brain matter,letters of dreams and hope—but that had hardened him, shaped him. Three years of nightmares had taught him to swallow the guilt, to let it fester and fuel the flames that kept him breathing. Brooding in his despair he met his good friend two years ago. The healer Masashi.
## NNT 8:30AM –West Eagle Gate, Land of Birds
A girl of ten, hair matted with shit and blood, huddled under the rotting carcass of her father's donkey. Maggots writhed in the animal's exposed intestines, the stench making her retch bile onto her bare feet. She bit her knuckles until they bled raw, trying desperately to remember the smell of her mother's spices instead of putrefaction. A jingle of coins had been her lullaby—now the pouch lay empty, slashed by the same blade that had opened her father from throat to navel. She watched Raghoul pass with hollow, sunken eyes, his crimson flame trailing behind him like a comet of slaughter.
He paused. For a heartbeat, the child saw not a monster but a man crushed beneath the weight of too many ghosts. He reached... and turned away, nostrils flaring at her stench.
"Give her water," the healer ordered, tossing a chipped bowl crusted with someone else's dried blood.
Raghoul obeyed. He knelt, scooped murky sludge that squirmed with insect larvae, and held it to the girl's cracked, bleeding lips. She drank greedily, throat working like a desperate animal's.
"Thank you... My lords..." she whispered, blue veins bulging beneath skin stretched tight as a drum.
He dropped the bowl with a hollow grunt and stalked out, refusing to look back as she licked the filthy remnants.
---
He found the healer at dawn, sitting on a cracked stone slab, circling a trench where bodies were buried in hasty mass graves, limbs jutting from the earth at twisted angles. Each corpse bore the traitor's mark—three dots burned into flesh so deep the fat beneath had melted like wax.
"They come at night," the healer said without looking up, voice thick with exhaustion. "Dragging the wounded out by their hair, burying them screaming and alive." He pressed a filthy cloth to his weeping scar. "I tried to stop the fuckers. They sliced open my hand—said mercy was a weakness for cunts and children."
Raghoul's fist clenched till blood trickled between his fingers. "Show me their graves."
They walked a mile of dead grass until Raghoul knelt at a pit where the earth still moved. Fresh blood seeped between lips of soil, a whispered plea bubbling up through mud. He plunged his hand into the wet earth, feeling splintered bone and strips of flesh caught beneath his nails. Soil and remembrance mingled in his veins like poison.
"You kill better than those pigs," the healer said, spitting a glob of phlegm that landed red. "Yet they fear you. Fear your flame that burns hot enough to melt steel."
Raghoul's voice scraped like rusted metal. "I fear nothing."
"Fear is what keeps you fucking breathing," the healer replied, eyes reflecting nothing. "But hate will burn you stone-cold from the inside out."
Raghoul stood, eyes flicking to the corpse-strewn horizon. "What do you know of living when you're surrounded by the dead?"
The healer's gaze followed a flock of vultures that descended to feast on exposed intestines. "I've watched my wife starve till her eyes sank into her skull, my daughter scream for milk I didn't have till her throat bled. I healed strangers while my family embraced death. So I left them to the worms. Now I mend what I can, till the desert picks my bones clean."
Raghoul's jaw worked, teeth grinding. "Why tell me this shit?"
The healer smiled at last, revealing teeth worn to yellow nubs. "Because you need to remember you're human beneath that flame. Or else every drop of blood you spill will drown you in a sea of your own making."
---
Out in the midday haze that shimmered like a fever dream, a cart lay abandoned, crates split open—flour spilled like crushed bones on ground stained dark with piss and blood. A man's broken body was impaled on a jagged shaft of splintered wood—a merchant caught in the crossfire, his guts spooled around the stake like obscene rope. His throat bore the signature of the golden-eyed man's blade: a clean, precise slash that nearly decapitated him, tongue lolling purple and swollen. A scroll pinned to his chest with a rusted nail read: "Filthy rats must learn fear."
A child peered from behind a battered wall, trembling like a cornered animal. Her ribbon—once bright red—hung shredded and soaked with brain matter that had once held dreams. A single tear carved a path through filth on her sunken cheek.
"They killed Papa," she sobbed, voice cracking. "Papa who told stories of rainbows and faraway towns... papa..."
She reached out with stick-thin fingers, but vultures flocked, their wings blotting out the sun as they descended to tear strips of flesh from the man who once sang her to sleep.
---
That evening, Raghoul found the unaffiliated Nin squad—four men dragging the merchant's daughter by her scalp, strands of hair and skin coming away in bloody chunks. The healer stalked beside him, lantern raised like a beacon in hell.
"Release her," Raghoul growled, a sound like rocks grinding together. His heartbeat thundered like war drums pounding for blood.
The squad leader—a brute in bone-white armor stained with shit and rust—laughed, revealing blackened gums. "Look what we caught. The whore's daughter. Want to bargain, My lord? She's tight as a fist, this one."
Raghoul's flame flickered at his palms, hungry for flesh. "Set her free or burn."
"Or what? You'll burn us to ash?" the leader taunted, gesturing to his men who smelled of rancid sweat and rotten meat.
The healer stepped forward, voice echoing across the killing field. "He'll burn the plains with you screaming in it." He spat a glob of blood. "He's no monster—he's the reckoning you've earned."
The leader drew his blade—short, gleaming with freshly applied poison. "I've heard of him, hehe. Then let him come and taste steel."
Raghoul advanced through the stench of fear-piss. Dust clung to his charred boots like dead skin. His flame surged—not white like mercy, but bloody red-hot at the core like a festering wound. He moved like lightning unleashed from a storm god's fist, each strike a vow etched in splitting flesh. Ribs splintered with wet cracks. Throats gurgled as they filled with blood. Gore painted the grass in violent, twisted arabesques.
The squad fell, one by one, until silence reigned over their twitching corpses.
He lowered his fists, skin smoking. The girl stared, mouth hanging open, horror and sick awe mingling in eyes too young to witness such slaughter.
"You... you saved me?" she asked, voice thin as a dying breath.
"Go," Raghoul said quietly, his own voice strange to his ears. "Stay alive. That's all any of us can do."
She turned, stumbling into the distance, leaving bloody footprints behind.
---
Back at the healer's shack, the wounded lay in ragged rows—broken limbs twisted at impossible angles, wounds festering with pus and crawling with worms—each labored breath a rattle that promised death. The healer knelt by a woman whose eyes flickered in delirium, foam bubbling at the corners of her cracked lips.
"She won't last the night," he whispered, hands sticky with congealed blood. "No strength left in her meat."
Raghoul stood in the doorway, watching. The moon glinted off scars that mapped his history of pain.
"You could heal them," the healer said without looking up, hands wringing a cloth that dripped crimson.
Raghoul shook his head, throat tight. "Haha, I'm a butcher, not a savior. I break things, I don't fix them."
The healer reached out, his good hand resting on Raghoul's arm—warm and pulsing with life that refused to surrender. " Has all this year's with me not taught you any-fucking-thing, You choose what you are. Or they die screaming."
Raghoul inhaled the stench of blood and bile until it filled his lungs. He knelt, placing his hands over the woman's chest where her heart struggled to beat. The wind moaned through broken windows like the souls of the damned. His flame flickered in his veins—he closed his eyes and let it pour into her wounds, searing out rot, knitting flesh with the heat that had destroyed so many.
She gasped, eyes clearing like clouds parting. "Wh—what...?"
"Survive," he whispered, voice rough as gravel churned with broken glass. "It's the only victory we get."
Above them, vultures circled in silent witness, waiting for failure.
---
That night, Raghoul and the healer sat beneath a shattered roof that let in starlight like eyes watching from the void. Lantern light trembled against cracked beams stained with old blood.
"I've been meaning to ask, Why help a monster like me?" Raghoul asked, voice small as the child he once was.
The healer lit his pipe, smoke curling like ghosts. "I saw a spark, once. It burned too fierce, and I thought it would destroy everything—including me. But sometimes the coldest flames give the best warmth to those who've known nothing but ice."
Raghoul stared at his hands—charred, bloodstained, instruments of death that had somehow preserved life. "I don't know how to be warm without burning everything to ash."
The healer smiled, smoke curling from between teeth stained yellow with age and suffering. "Then learn, you fuck. I'll teach you. If you let me."
Raghoul closed his eyes, the ghost of a boy's promise stirring deep inside like a wounded animal waking from hibernation.
"I'll try," he whispered to the darkness.
And somewhere, beneath the hush of condescending stars, an ember of conscience glowed—flickering against the dark, refusing to be snuffed out by the winds of a world that fed on pain.