Chapter 4-Rix, the forgotten friend

Chapter 4: 4-Rix, the forgotten friend

For the first three weeks, Sol lived in a grave.

That was what the darkness felt like. Complete, suffocating, and absolute. The system had called it Stare into the Sun, but it felt more like being buried alive.

He couldn’t go back to the Harvest Houses.

A blind butcher was a dead butcher.

If the slum overseers realized he had survived the Somnium but returned defective, they would just chain him to a table and harvest him instead of the beasts.

So, he hid in the abandoned, half-collapsed cellar he shared with Rix, shivering in the endless dark.

His core was starving. Inside his chest, it beat like a hollow drum, demanding fuel.

Normal food didn’t work anymore. Stale bread and dirty water just made him more hungry. His body craved the heavy, violent energy of beast meat or Lunar Shards, but he was too weak to hunt.

He tried to keep his thermal vision active, pushing the heat from his chest into his eyes just to see the walls of the cellar.

But keeping the heat flowing constantly was a death sentence. Within ten seconds, the fluid in his eyes felt like it was literally boiling.

His brain would bake against his skull, and he would collapse, vomiting bile and gasping for air as his core threatened to incinerate him from the inside out.

He couldn’t keep his eyes open.

So, he learned to blink.

Sitting in the freezing dark, starving and feverish, Sol began to experiment.

Instead of a constant stream of heat, he forced his core to release a microscopic spark. A fraction of a second of warmth.

Thump.

A flash of fiery orange illuminated the cellar. He saw the cold blue walls.

Darkness.

He waited three seconds, letting his eyes cool.

Thump.

Another flash. He saw a rat scurrying across the floor, glowing yellow in the dark.

Darkness.

It was a rhythm. A heartbeat of thermal echolocation. Flash, dark, flash, dark.

It didn’t overheat his brain, and it kept the crippling terror of the void at bay. He called it the Strobe. It was disorienting, giving the world a choppy, stop-motion quality, but it was sight.

But seeing didn’t put food in his stomach.

That fell to Rix.

The nineteen-year-old scavenger had seen Sol’s smoking skin and glowing eyes on the night of the Awakening. He knew Sol was a Cultivator now, even a broken one.

Out of some desperate mix of loyalty, pity, and the hope that Sol would protect him when his own twentieth birthday came, Rix became his lifeline.

Every day, Rix went out into the twilight, scavenging the gutters, stealing whatever scraps he could find to keep Sol alive.

It took exactly twenty-two days for the slum’s hierarchy to catch up to them.

Sol was sitting in the corner of the cellar, meditating, his eyes closed.

His core was an agonizing, dull ache in his sternum. He was wasting away.

Suddenly, the rusted iron door of the cellar violently banged open, snapping off its hinges.

Sol flinched, instinctively pushing a pulse of heat to his eyes.

Flash.

In the strobe of fiery orange, he saw Rix stumble through the doorway.

Darkness.

A wet, heavy thud echoed in the pitch-black room, followed by the sickening sound of someone choking on their own blood.

The sharp, metallic stench of copper instantly flooded the small cellar.

Sol scrambled to his feet, his heart hammering. He pushed another pulse to his eyes, longer this time.

Flash.

Rix was on his hands and knees in the dirt. But his thermal signature was completely wrong. Normally, Rix was a bright, healthy yellow-orange.

Now, his signature was flickering.

Massive patches of deep, freezing blue and black coated his ribs and his face, the undeniable thermal map of severe internal bleeding and failing circulation.

Rix was freezing from the inside. He was dying.

Darkness.

"Rix!" Sol rasped, stumbling blindly forward until his hands caught the boy’s torn coat. He pulled him up, his fingers sliding through slick, warm blood.

"I’m... I’m sorry, Sol," Rix wheezed. His voice was a wet, broken gurgle. "I tried to run."

Flash.

Sol saw Rix’s trembling hand open.

A heavy object dropped onto the dirt floor with a wet smack.

Sol looked down. It was a chunk of raw, purple beast meat, radiating a fierce, ambient thermal heat.

Rix had tried to steal from a Harvest House processing cart.

"The Overseers..." Rix choked out, his fingers weakly gripping Sol’s shirt.

"They caught me..stealing.. behind the slaughter-line. Said... said I owed the House of Vane what they gave me."

Rix’s head slumped forward against Sol’s chest. His breathing stopped.

Flash.

In Sol’s thermal vision, the yellow warmth of Rix’s heart flickered, dimmed, and began to rapidly fade into the cold blue of death.

Sol dropped to his knees, clutching the boy. The heavy chunk of stolen beast meat rested in the dirt beside them, radiating the exact energy Sol’s defective core was screaming for.

He remembered his grandmother, not blood related, but his love for her was something he thought to be more important than blood.

She had teached him the trade of butchering, then he remembered her death, the house of Vane, how the overseer beat her to death for accidentally killing a valuable beast when harvesting its flesh.

And now Rix, his only friend after his grandmother’s death was now with her, on the other side.

The cold blue of Rix’s thermal signature settled into absolute stillness.

His heart stopped beating.

Instantly, the ambient temperature in the cellar dropped.

The air grew heavy, thick with the suffocating gravity of the Silver Eye.

Sol didn’t need to see the sky to know what was happening; he had seen it a hundred times in the slums.

Under Sol’s trembling hands, Rix’s physical body began to disintegrate.

Flesh, blood, and bone rapidly dissolved into a pale, glowing silver mist.

The mist was ripped violently upward, defying gravity, phasing right through the rusted ceiling of the cellar as the starving sky claimed its meal.

In a matter of seconds, Rix was entirely gone.

All that was left in the freezing mud were his torn coat, the chunk of stolen purple beast meat, and a single, jagged, glowing silver shard, the leftover dregs of a human soul.

Sol stared at the piecs of crystal.

He didn’t weep.

The furnace in his chest was burning too hot for tears; they would have evaporated before they ever reached his cheeks.

The paralyzing fear of the last three weeks was completely gone, incinerated in a single, violently expanding wave of pure, suffocating rage.

The House of Vane.

It was always the House of Vane.

They had taken his grandmother’s life over a mistake on the slaughter-line, and now they had taken the only kid in the slums foolish enough to care if Sol lived or died.

Sol reached out into the pitch-black void. His trembling fingers brushed against the heavy, purple chunk of beast meat.

To Sol’s thermal senses, it felt like a glowing ember. He picked up the lunar shard with his other hand and shoved it deep into his pocket, he wouldn’t let the Overseers take that, too.

He didn’t look for a fire to cook the meat. He didn’t hesitate.

Sol lifted the raw, dripping flesh to his mouth and took a massive, tearing bite.

The taste was foul. But the moment the flesh slid down his throat, the starving core inside his sternum violently reacted.

It was like throwing a bucket of gasoline into a dying fire.

Thump-THUMP.

Sol gasped, dropping the rest of the meat as his back arched in agony.

A shockwave of pure, blistering thermal energy exploded outward from his heart.

The violent lunar energy inside the beast meat tried to mutate his flesh, but his Sun’s Believer core caught it instantly, trapping the parasite and mercilessly incinerating it into pure, raw fuel.

His veins bulged, glowing a faint, terrifying orange beneath his pale skin.

A new frosted panel violently shattered the darkness in his mind.

[ALERT: MEAT WITH ENERGY CONSUMED.]

[INCINERATING LUNAR TAINT... SUCCESS.]

[CORE REFUELED.]

[STATUS: Level 1 (Low) - Stabilized. WARNING: Excess thermal energy detected. Channel immediately or risk internal combustion.]

Sol screamed, a sound that resonated more like the roar of an open furnace than a human voice.

He didn’t pulse his vision this time. He didn’t need to blink. He shoved the overflowing, violently burning energy straight up into his optic nerves.

The dark cellar exploded into blinding, continuous thermal light.

He could see everything. He saw the cold blue stains where Rix had bled.

He saw the fading yellow footprints where the boy had stumbled in.

He saw the rusted hinges of the broken door, glowing faint purple from the friction of being kicked open.

He could hold his eyes open. It still hurt, a deep, throbbing ache behind his retinas, but the boiling sensation was gone.

He finally had enough fuel to power his Curse.

Sol stood up. His joints popped, the malnutrition of the last three weeks momentarily banished by the violent influx of Level 1 energy. He picked up his rusted, chipped meat cleaver from the corner of the room.

The iron handle was freezing, but as his fingers wrapped around it, his boiling blood began to heat the metal.

He looked down at the empty, blood-stained coat one last time.

"I’m keeping my boots," Sol whispered to the empty air. "But I’ll make sure they pay you back for the meat."

Sol turned and walked out of the cellar, stepping into the slums after a long wait.

Through his glowing, heat-filled eyes, the world wasn’t a dark, terrifying labyrinth anymore.

And somewhere in the center of the slums, an Overseer was sitting in the Harvest House, completely unaware that a missing butcher had just stabilized his core.