The battlefield had long gone silent, save for the wind whispering over the broken earth. All I could hear now was the ragged breathing of my dearest friend—shallow, frantic, and rapidly fading. The ground was soaked with blood, a grim shade of red too vivid to ignore. They lay there, body crushed, limbs torn open by jagged stone and steel. But that wasn’t what terrified me the most. It was the slow, creeping spread of stone beginning to consume their flesh, crawling from their open wounds like vines of death.

"No, no—don’t move, don’t move, please," I whispered, voice cracking as I pressed trembling hands against their chest. The transformation was cruel. It wasn’t just death—it was petrification, a cursed, eternal silence. I tried everything—I tore cloth from my own clothes to bandage the bleeding, I poured every ounce of my healing magic into their heart, but the stone didn’t stop. It climbed higher. Their breathing got weaker. Their fingers stiffened.

Desperate, I did the unthinkable. With shaking hands, I unsheathed my dagger and—after pleading for forgiveness—cut through their arm, hoping, praying that severing the infected limb would stop the curse. Blood poured. My vision blurred. My own hands were soaked. But it was too late. The stone spread anyway, curling up the neck, over the face, until all that remained was a silent statue frozen in agony.

I collapsed at their side, screaming—screaming like a wounded animal. I clutched the now-stone body and cried harder than I ever had in my life. "I should’ve caught you," I whispered, again and again. "I should’ve seen the evil coming. I should’ve been faster. You shouldn’t have died alone." No one answered me. No one ever would again.

TIME SKIP — A FEW MONTHS LATER

The days blurred. Time passed like molasses. As a Spawnel, I didn’t need to eat, didn’t need to sleep, but that didn’t make the agony any easier. It just meant I had more hours awake to endure the screaming silence in my mind. I no longer smiled, no longer laughed. The brightness I once carried—sunlight in the dark—had withered into dull gray. Most days I didn't talk to anyone. Other days I drowned myself in distractions. But the ache never left. I hadn’t even told Sonnet or Alan what truly happened. I couldn’t.

Until now.

Things didn’t go back to normal. Not even close. I wasn’t smiling anymore. The brightness that once made me easy to approach was gone—burned out quietly, without anyone noticing at first. The others kept talking to me like nothing happened, like my silence was just one of those phases. But every time I looked at myself in the mirror, all I saw was blood on my hands and stone where a heartbeat used to be.

I hadn't talked about it. Not once. Not even to Sonnet or Alan. The memory sat in my chest like a knife turned inward—too painful to pull out, too heavy to ignore. And honestly? I didn’t want to open that wound. But keeping it shut was rotting me from the inside.

So one night, I finally asked them to come by. Not because I had a plan. Not because I felt ready. Just... because it was getting harder to breathe with it all stuck in my throat.

Sonnet showed up first. He was still loud, still full of energy, but the second he stepped in and saw the state of the room—how dark it was, how everything felt like it hadn't moved in weeks—he quieted down. Alan arrived a moment later, hands in his pockets, brows slightly furrowed like he already knew something was wrong.

“I need to tell you what happened,” I said without looking at them. My voice was flat. “Back then. Why I’ve been like this.”

Neither of them said a word. That helped. I didn’t need sympathy. I just needed them to shut up and listen.

I took a breath, then another. “I couldn’t save them. They were already bleeding out by the time I got there, and something was turning them to stone. I tried everything. I even...” I hesitated. “I tried cutting their arm off, hoping it’d stop the spread. It didn’t.”

The silence after that was sharp, but not uncomfortable. Sonnet sat down at the foot of the bed, hands clasped, eyes serious for once. Alan leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed but watching carefully.

“I’ve been stuck,” I admitted. “Just watching that moment over and over in my head. I keep thinking I could’ve done something different. That if I had just been faster, or smarter, they’d still be alive.”

Sonnet finally spoke, voice low. “That shit’s not on you.”