The Girl Who Laughed In The Dark

Cassin's first memory was the taste of blood in his mouth.

He was five years old, maybe six—time blurred in the pits. A rusted knife had grazed his lip during a scrap over half-rotten bread. He hadn't even flinched. Pain was as familiar as the stench of sweat and sewage that clung to the air.

The pits of Otharyn were not a place for children. They were a place for things that had forgotten they were human.

Orphaned, abandoned, or sold—it didn't matter how you got there. All that mattered was whether you could claw your way through another day. Cassin learned early that weakness meant death. He fought for scraps, slept with one eye open, and trusted no one.

Until her.

Eira was thrown into the pits when Cassin was twelve.

She was small, even for a child, with wild dark hair and eyes too bright for the shadows. Most newcomers broke within days—either from hunger, fear, or the cruelty of the older boys. But Eira?

She laughed.

The first time Cassin heard it, he thought she was insane.

A gang of pit-rats had cornered her, demanding whatever meager rations she'd been given. Instead of cowering, she grinned, tossed a moldy crust of bread into the dirt, and stomped on it.

"Now none of us get it," she said, shrugging.

One of the boys swung at her. She dodged, kicked him between the legs, and bolted. Cassin watched, stunned, as she scrambled up a pile of broken crates and perched there like some ragged bird, grinning down at them.

"You're all terrible at this," she announced.

Cassin didn't know why he spoke. He never did. But something about her—the defiance, the stupid, reckless light in her—made him step forward.

"They'll kill you for that," he said.

She tilted her head. "Then I'll die laughing."

He didn't understand her. But that night, when the others came for revenge, Cassin found himself standing between her and the knives.

He didn't know why.

(He would spend years pretending he didn't.)

For months, they survived side by side. Eira was reckless where Cassin was cautious, hopeful where he was bitter. She talked about the world beyond the pits like it was something they could reach, not just a cruel dream.

"There's a city past the slums," she whispered one night, curled up beside him under a rotting awning. "They say the streets are clean, and the markets have fruit so sweet it makes your teeth ache."

Cassin scoffed. "And how do you plan to get there? Ask nicely?"

She elbowed him. "No. We steal our way out."

And somehow—impossibly—they did.

It took two years of planning, of hoarding stolen coins and bribing the right guards. Two years of near-death escapes and nights spent huddled together, whispering plans like prayers.

The night they ran, Cassin's hands shook. Not from fear—from something worse. Hope.

They crawled through sewage tunnels, scaled a wall slick with rain, and ran until their lungs burned. When they finally collapsed in the woods beyond Otharyn's borders, Eira whooped, throwing her arms around him.

"We're free, Cassin!"

He didn't hug her back. (He wanted to. He didn't know how.)

But for the first time in his life, he let himself believe her.

For two years, they lived like ghosts.

They traveled from town to town, taking odd jobs, stealing when they had to. Eira taught Cassin how to laugh. How to trade insults without meaning them. How to sit by a fire and not expect a knife in his back.

She was the first person who looked at him and didn't see something broken.

(He loved her for it. He never said it.)

And then—

The man in black came.

The knife. The blood. The last flicker of light in his life, snuffed out in seconds.

When Cassin woke in the ravine, his body shattered but his soul screaming, he knew one thing:

He would burn the world to ashes before he let her death go unanswered.

As a tear dropped down from his eye, he woke up after the fight with just a feeling of emptiness and sorrow.

Remembering the girl, who once laughed at him in the dark.