The rustle of leaves came before the voices.
Low didn't move. He remained seated against the broken stump of an old statue, legs crossed, hands resting in his lap like a monk carved from ash. The shadows curled around him, and the dying light played gently off the Mark on his face — a faint flicker across cheekbone and jaw.
"Over here!" someone hissed.
Footsteps. Four, maybe five. Light armor. He heard the scrape of a blade being drawn, not in fear — but habit. These weren't soldiers. They were scavengers. Robbers.
"Shit... Is that a priest?"
"Looks more like a ghost."
Low lifted his eyes.
The first of them stepped forward. A wiry man with half a nose and twitchy hands, gripping a shortsword like he hoped it would answer for him. Behind him came the others — a woman with burn scars down her neck, two younger boys with hollow cheeks, and a brute with a hammer strapped to his back.
"Well?" the woman asked.
Low tilted his head.
"You should take me."
They blinked.
"I won't resist," he continued, calmly. "You need coins. I look... exotic. Someone will buy me."
The scarred woman frowned.
"You sick?"
"No."
"You bleeding? Cursed?"
"Not in ways you'd recognize."
The brute laughed, the sound thick and ugly.
"What kind of man asks to be chained?"
Low smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes.
"Not a man," he said.
The leader stepped forward again, uneasy.
"You talk like you're highborn. But you wear rags. You don't even have shoes."
"I have purpose," Low murmured.
The wind stirred faintly. And every crow in the trees watched in silence.
They circled him like dogs unsure if the meat was fresh.
Mud-slick boots, old blades, the stench of sweat and ale leaking off their clothes like smoke off a battlefield.
Low stood still.
Not because he wished to — but because movement would've been dishonest. This was not fear. Not surrender. It was something colder than either.
One of them — younger, gaunt-faced, knife in hand — stepped forward.
"You deaf, old shade?" he spat, voice cracked from thirst or too much shouting.
"Strip. Let's see what kind of coin your skin's worth."
Low didn't answer. He simply looked at the boy. Not long. Not sharp. Just looked — like a physician glancing at a body too far gone for remedy.
The boy hesitated.
Another man, heavier, scar running from lip to jaw, barked:
"Do it, Cren. You wanted to play hard. Strip him."
Cren moved in. Blade raised — not to strike, but to cut the fabric. Low's shirt was little more than ash anyway, barely clinging to his shoulders.
The boy reached out.
The Mark on Low's face flared — subtly, like a coal turned in the dark.
Cren froze.
Low didn't flinch. His voice, when it came, was quiet. But not kind.
"If you're hoping I'll beg," he said, "I won't. Not because I'm brave. But because I've forgotten how."
Cren's hand dropped.
The others grew tense. The older one — the one with the scar — stepped forward, gripping his axe.
"You'll walk, then," he said, "or we'll drag you."
Low nodded once.
"As you like."
The group didn't cheer their victory. There was no triumph in it. Just relief — that he hadn't resisted. Relief always feels like power, to the weak.
They bound his hands, loosely, with a rope meant for cattle. One of them muttered a prayer as he did so, eyes flicking to the Mark. Another spat and made a warding gesture, as if afraid Low might vanish mid-bind.
Low said nothing.
They walked him through the woods.
The path was narrow, choked with wet brush and roots like bones beneath the leaves. He moved without complaint, the cold leeching through every inch of him. But he did not stumble.
The robbers began to whisper among themselves.
"—he didn't bleed, did you see—"
"—eyes like something drowned—"
"—Revenant, maybe—?"
"No, Revenants howl. He was too quiet."
Low heard every word. It didn't bother him. Names meant nothing when you were already beyond them.
The older one, the leader — they called him Brae — finally snapped.
"Enough!"
They hushed.
Brae fell in beside Low, his axe slung across his shoulder. He studied him as one might a puzzle carved from warstone.
"You let us take you," Brae said.
Low kept walking.
"That means one of two things. Either you think you'll kill us later... or you think you deserve whatever's coming."
Low's voice came like flint struck once in the dark.
"Why not both?"
Brae laughed — humorlessly.
The woods thinned ahead. A broken watchtower loomed, half-eaten by ivy and time.
Brae gestured with his chin.
"We make camp there. You try anything... I'll cut you open and see if anything living still writhes inside."
Low almost smiled.
"That makes two of us."
***
Night had no warmth — and it curled around the camp like a closing fist.
The robbers lit a fire beneath the ruined watchtower, flame sputtering against damp wood. The smoke didn't rise so much as coil, uncertain whether the heavens still accepted offerings from men like them.
Low sat apart, his hands still loosely bound, back to a stone wall. No one had tightened the rope. No one dared touch him twice.
The youngest of the group — barely more than a boy, jittery with half-earned confidence — edged near with a hunk of bread and dried meat.
"I brought food," he said, holding it out like an offering to a god he wasn't sure was real. "We figured... you might still eat."
Low looked at it, then at the boy.
"You figured wrong."
He didn't say it cruelly. Just plainly. Like reading the weather aloud.
The boy lingered.
"You're not... angry?"
Low's head tilted slightly.
"Should I be?"
"You're a prisoner."
Low shook his head, slowly.
"Prison implies I want to leave."
The boy blinked.
"You don't?"
Low leaned back, his face half-lit by the fire.
"Let me ask you something."
The boy nodded.
"Have you ever stood before a mountain and asked it to move?"
"...No."
Low's eyes caught the firelight like glass.
"That's what vengeance would be. Loud. Pointless. Beautiful, maybe — but only to the one doing screaming"
A silence stretched. The boy didn't quite understand, but felt he shouldn't press.
One of the older men barked:
"Back away, Renn."
The boy retreated.
Low stayed where he was. Listening. Breathing like a man who'd forgotten the difference between waiting and watching.
The man who approached next did so with none of the boy's uncertainty. He was older — maybe forty, maybe fifty — with the kind of age that couldn't be measured in years so much as scars. His face was a collapsed battlefield, and his eyes were the last two soldiers still fighting.
He crouched just far enough away that Low would have to raise his voice to strike.
"Name's Bren," he said.
"You don't need to tell me yours. Not like you'll be needing it where you're going."
Low said nothing.
Bren studied him for a moment. Then he offered a dry chuckle.
"See, here's what I don't get. You let us bind you. You let us drag you for two days. And now you're just... sitting here. Like we're the ones doing you a favor."
Low tilted his head.
"You assume you understand the terms of the favor."
Bren frowned.
"I know what I see. And I've seen men like you. The quiet kind. The ones who smile when they bleed, and pray without gods."
He leaned in slightly.
"But even those men flinch when you raise a blade to them. You didn't. Not once. Not even when Caster broke your ribs."
"I don't have ribs," Low replied softly.
Bren stilled.
"...Right." He scratched at his beard. "That's the thing, isn't it? You're not a man."
Low met his gaze, unblinking.
"Not anymore."
Bren's voice lowered, careful.
"So what are you?"
Low looked past him, into the fire. His voice came hollow, but not empty. Like someone repeating a memory they never lived.
"I am what remains when the self is subtracted. I am the weight that still exists after the world lets go."
Bren exhaled slowly, stood, and muttered something Low didn't quite catch. However, as the older man walked away, he didn't turn his back. Not once.
***
That night, Bren didn't sleep.
The others did — sprawled in cloaks and scattered dreams around the dying fire, content in their fatigue. Even Caster, who'd broken Low's ribs, lay snoring with one arm over his satchel like it might bite if left alone.
But Bren sat, a half-smoked pipe between his fingers, watching Low from across the camp.
The prisoner didn't sleep either.
He sat upright, motionless, the rope still tight around his wrists. Not straining. Not resting. Just... there. Like a sculpture abandoned mid-chisel.
Every so often, the wind would shift, and the fire's glow would cast long shadows over Low's face. Bren didn't like what it showed.
Not the features — those were unsettling, yes, with the Mark like a brand of fallen judgment crawling down his cheek — but it was something deeper. Something behind the stillness. Like silence that had teeth.
Bren muttered under his breath, more to the smoke than to himself.
"Men bleed when they break. Even saints scream when they fall. But this one..."
He rubbed the ache in his knuckles, remembering how it had felt — touching Low's skin. Not flesh. Not quite stone. Something in between, like a lie wrapped in skin's memory.
He kept turning it over in his head. The lack of fear. The lack of complaint.
And the words:
"I dont have ribs."
It hadn't been bravado nor madness, but rather, It had been truth.
Bren rose slowly and stepped toward the edge of the camp, pretending to piss while his eyes swept the woods beyond. Nothing stirred. Not an animal. Not a breeze.
Even the forest was holding its breath.
He turned back. Low hadn't moved.
And for the first time in years, Bren felt it — the ghost of something old and buried deep in the marrow of men who've lived through too much:
Dread.
Not of death, but of something that precedes it.