The Shape Beneath the Skin

Morning came not with light,but with fog thick as breath caught in a dying throat.

The North Gate stood silent at first — still, pale in a ghost-white veil.Then came the scream.A hoarse, shattering thing,as if someone's throat broke trying to escape it.

Rin opened his eyes.

He didn't flinch. Not anymore.

He stepped off the stone ledge where he'd slept,the cold having kissed his bones all night like an old sorrow.He moved slowly through the haze,his hand trailing the broken walls like he needed something to hold onto —but he didn't.

It was habit, not hesitation.

Then he saw it. Or rather — what remained.

A body. Older than him.Torn at the midsection, ribs cracked open like a grin.Blood long dried, turned black and crusted.A wound so cruel it seemed personal.

Whoever had done this hadn't just killed.

They had sent a message.

The others gathered.Some stumbled back, retching bile into the cold.One collapsed, sobbing and screaming as if grief would make them invisible.

But Rin…Rin didn't speak.He didn't weep.He stared.

Not at the corpse.But at the others.At how they stared too long, or looked away too quickly.

How fear gripped their jaws like puppets pulled by invisible hands.Some looked at each other now not as allies.But as suspects.

The paranoia had begun.

The count was at 22 now.

Rin whispered it like a prayer.Not in mourning.In preparation.

Each death meant fewer blades between him and the end.That was the cruel arithmetic of survival.

Far above the gate, on a rust-colored balcony carved from duskstone,The Red Advocate stood with a trembling wine glass in his hand.

The tremble wasn't fear.It was anticipation.Pleasure.

"Ah," he whispered, sipping,"Boy of brittle mercy… how beautifully you crack."

He remembered their conversation beneath the ashfall,the night Rin had killed someone for the first time.

A boy who begged.

And Rin had hesitated.

Only for a moment.

But in this place — a moment is a grave.

The Advocate had whispered, back then, in his voice of soft knives:

"A blade that pauses has already broken.This is not a world of fairness.It is a stage of knives.Bleed — or make them bleed."

Now, as Rin stood in front of the newest corpse,he no longer looked paused.He looked calculating.

And something in the Advocate — some old broken thing — smiled.

Later, the fog began to lift.

The body vanished — gone, cleaned by Wardens in armor dark as bruised steel.

Even they walked slowly.Cautiously.Casting sideways glances at the North Gate — as if even they feared what walked here now.

Because someone had butchered that boy.

Without a sound.Without a trace.

Some whispered it was a test.Others, a punishment.

But someone whispered something else.

A name.

"The Butcher of the North."

It passed like a secret between trembling lips.No one said it twice.No one said it loud.Because if the Butcher heard you…

You might be next.

Some swore they saw something crawl across the ceiling last night —like a man on all fours with joints bent the wrong way.

Some said they saw two silhouettes near the boundary wall,one cloaked in black with a long katana, the other hunched and still —watching something only they could see.

Rin didn't believe any of it.

Or maybe he did.

Maybe part of him wondered if this place was no longer testing them…but consuming them.

That night, he sat alone again.

The others had begun forming small circles now.Desperate alliances. Whispers of plans.Whispers of targets.

No one came to Rin.He didn't ask.

He stared at his blade.The blood on it still hadn't come off.It had dried into the grooves.Stained into the steel like memory.He hadn't tried to clean it.He didn't know if he could.

"Was this what I'm becoming?""Is the boy who once wept still in there?""Or did I bury him beneath the first kill?"

A sound behind him.

He turned — nothing.

Just the fire crackling in a distant brazier.

But then…

A whisper.

So soft, it could've been the wind.But it wasn't.

It was rhyme.Measured.Beautiful.Like a funeral spoken by flowers.

"You fear the shape you will become.But I see the shape beneath your skin.And oh, sweet child — it's beautiful.So perfectly designed… to kill."

No one stood behind him.But Rin knew.The Advocate was still watching.Still whispering.

Or perhaps something else was too.

He slept that night with the blade in his lap.Not in fear of others.

But of what he would do if he woke up hungry for violence again.

Far above, across the towers bathed in fog,a shadow stood.

Cloaked in black.Face half-masked.A white eye glowing faintly like a dying moon.

The Man in the Black.

Some said he was a myth.Some said he was a Warden who broke free.Some believed nothing at all.

But one kneeling Warden whispered under his breath:

"He returns…"

The figure turned away.His black cape vanished with the fog.

He said nothing.Only a warning burned behind him,