The girl stood barefoot on cracked concrete, her tiny frame shadowed beneath the skeletal arms of a broken streetlamp. Ash.
Dawn hadn't yet broken over the city. Fog drifted low, kissing the gutters like whispered secrets. She exhaled softly, the condensation puffing from her lips like smoke.
A man stood in front of her, tall, pale, shirtless beneath his coat. Scarred. Scar tissue coiled around his ribs like vines. His eyes, grey and ancient, studied her with the stillness of a grave.
Vale.
He tossed a paperback at her feet. The cover flapped in the wind before settling open. "Meditations," Marcus Aurelius.
"Read it," he said. "Mark the pages that confuse you. We'll talk."
Ash blinked up at him. Her eyes were the soft brown of coffee cooling in a chipped cup—too innocent for the cruelty nestled beneath.
Vale continued. "You don't need to understand it. Let the words rot inside you. One day they'll bloom."
She tilted her head. "You always talk like a dead man."
"I am."
By noon, the sun limped into the sky, casting colorless light over the cracked city. Abandoned buildings leaned like tired men. Dogs barked in the distance. There was no laughter here, just noise and the echo of boots.
Vale crouched by a makeshift training circle carved into a parking lot. Chalk, blood, and ash marked its edges.
"Your body is a tool," he said, demonstrating. "Not a weapon. Tools are precise. Weapons get dull."
He moved with sharp grace—short bursts of power, honed reflexes. Brutal economy. Ash mirrored him, slowly at first.
She slipped once. Fell.
He offered no hand. Just words: "The world won't help you up. Learn to rise alone."
By evening, her breath came ragged, her hair damp with sweat. But she stood straighter now.
The next day, Vale led her down an alley where the city kept its sins.
A man waited. Greasy. Damp with breath. The kind whose smile bent wrong at the sight of children.
He didn't see Ash. Not really.He saw what he wanted.
She walked toward him holding a single marigold.Soft voice. Honeyed tone."Do you want to play a game, mister?"
He smiled—already inside it.
She reached for his hand.
And drove the needle Vale had given her straight into his eye.
He dropped, shrieking. Scrabbling against concrete. His body a bag of pain.
Vale stood in the shadows, still as stone. Eyes narrowed, weighing her like a blade in the forge.
Ash didn't flinch. Not once.
She knelt beside the twitching man. Tilted her head as if studying an insect.
Blood pulsed in slow arcs. She didn't wipe it off when it splashed her cheek.
Silently, she unbuttoned his shirt.Two barcode tattoos—seared into the flesh near his ribs. Like livestock.
Ash rolled up her sleeve.The same marks. The same brand.And below them: scars that screamed.Lines. Whips. Stories without ink.
Her finger traced his tattoos.
Not in rage.Not in sorrow.Just... recognition.
Then she whispered—not to him, but to herself:
"Now you know what it's like to be a thing."
Vale stepped forward. "You understand now."
She nodded. "They deserve it."
"No," he replied. "No one deserves anything. That's the first lie they'll teach you. We don't kill because it's deserved. We kill because it's necessary."
Ash looked up at him. "Like pruning a tree."
He nodded. "Exactly."
Two weeks later, they stood before a gathering of low-level criminals—petty thieves, broken men, desperate addicts. Vale addressed them without a microphone. He didn't need one.
"Your world is dying," he said. "Rotting from the inside. You are parasites feeding on a corpse. But I have a cure. You will follow my laws, or you'll choke on your own teeth."
Someone laughed.
Ash walked to the man, stared up at him like a daughter might at a father. Then she stabbed him in the thigh and whispered, "He wasn't joking."
The silence that followed was holy.
That night, Vale found her sitting alone on a rooftop, legs swinging over the edge, book in her lap.
She didn't look at him. "Do you think monsters know they're monsters?"
He sat beside her. "Only the smart ones."
She opened Meditations, revealing a page with three red lines scratched into the margin.
"I didn't understand this one."
He read: "You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."
He smiled—faint, like a ghost remembering its name.
"You will. One day."
Down below, the city blinked. Somewhere, a dog barked once. Then silence.
Ash turned the page.
The car stopped on the edge of the dead forest—once green, now stripped of anything living. A path of gravel and cracked stone stretched beyond the trees, weaving toward what once was home.
Ash climbed out first. Her eyes scanned everything—the road, the branches, the birds that didn't chirp. She clutched her satchel of books like a shield. Vale stepped out slower, as if the air here was heavier.
They didn't speak as they walked.
Branches creaked like bones above them. The house was gone—burnt out years ago, blackened timber bones now devoured by vines. But beyond it, untouched by nature or flame, lay the small graveyard.
A wrought iron fence half-consumed by rust surrounded it. Inside: five gravestones.
Vale stopped. The wind moved, but he didn't. Ash stood a few paces behind, unsure whether she should follow. He said nothing, so she did nothing.
He stepped into the graveyard.
The names on the stones were faded, but he didn't need them.
He remembered how they sounded when whispered through gritted teeth in court.
Mother.Brother.Sister.Grandmother.Uncle.
Each stone felt colder than the last. But one grave made him stop.
It wasn't just the chill in the stone—it was something new.
There was a flower on the grave.
A single black lily.
Fresh.
Planted in the soil like a marker, or a message.
"This wasn't left by nature," Vale murmured. "Someone's been here."
He crouched. His fingers touched the base of the lily. The soil was disturbed. Not from wind. Not from time. From presence.
He stood.
Ash stepped beside him, finally.
"Someone you know?" she asked, gently.
"No," Vale said. "Someone I will."
There was no anger in his voice—only calculation.
The wind shifted again. But this time, it wasn't just cold—it was intelligent. Watching.
And Vale felt it.
That something older than memory was standing just beyond his vision.
Not a ghost.
A man.
A mind.
Something—or someone—who had stood over these graves before him and smiled.
His thoughts spiraled.
No scent. No tracks. No signature.
Yet every sense screamed: He was here.
And he wanted Vale to know.
A trap? A test? A signature in silence?
Ash whispered, "Why leave a flower?"
Vale's voice was stone:
"To let me know he remembers what I forgot."
She blinked. "Forgot?"
He closed his eyes. Behind them, fragments.
A glass shattering. His mother's scream. Laughter in the flames.
And a silhouette—tall, calm, waiting at the top of the stairs.
He'd always assumed that memory was blurred by trauma.
But maybe it had been edited.
On purpose.
He opened his eyes.
"This wasn't random," he said. "The murders. The trial. My sentence. Someone wanted me in that cell."
Ash's lips parted. "Who?"
Vale didn't answer.
Instead, he walked to the last gravestone. One with no name. Just a carved sigil: a vertical eye with barbed lashes. Fresh. Not original.
He traced it.
The eye symbol wasn't in the carving before.
Not from any grave marker.
It was added recently—etched with a blade.
A message again.
A watcher's eye.
"I thought my enemies were the ones in prison," he whispered. "But the real monster never touched the bars. He made them."
Ash's face was pale. "Do you think he's still watching?"
Vale looked up.
High above, the clouds churned gray and slow. A bird circled once, then vanished.
"Always."
Silence stretched.
Then Ash asked something she never had before:
"Why did they blame you?"
Vale didn't answer right away.
He crouched again, ran his hand along the base of the gravestone, then spoke as if the words were ancient.
"There was blood. All over me. My prints on the knife. My voice screaming. No memory of how it started. But I remember… the feeling."
She tilted her head. "What feeling?"
"…That I had already lost everything. Even before I picked up the blade."
They stood for a long moment.
The world was silent. The dead were listening.
Then Vale rose.
He placed something at the base of the unnamed grave — a page torn clean from a book.
The Prince by Machiavelli.
A single quote circled in red ink:
"Men forget more easily the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony."
Ash knelt beside it, reading. "Why this one?"
Vale didn't answer.
But something in his jaw tightened.Not confusion. Not recognition.Something colder.
He turned away, but his eyes lingered on the gravestone.The quote. The placement. The ink.Someone left that page here. And they knew exactly what it would mean to him.
His fingers twitched — the first crack in his calm all day.
Ash watched him.
He said nothing. But inside, a splinter twisted.
"This wasn't random," he thought. "This was for me."
As they turned to leave, the sky darkened, thunder folding into cloud.
Far across the city, in a penthouse carved from silence and wealth,a man in a black suit sipped his tea.
A single black lily rested in his palm.
Another wilted on the glass table.
He watched grainy footage flicker on a wall screen:A boy kneeling before gravestones. A girl at his side. A page left behind.
A whisper behind him:
"He's starting to remember."
The man said nothing.
But in the quiet, something ancient smiled.
Adolf was alive.
And he was still watching.