A metal head rusts away in a field of darkness.

  More heads appear before the boy.

  The child is on fire.

  Thousands are calling out to him as a violin pys softly in the distance.

  Something moves within the child’s stomach.

  Something wretched and vile and horrible.

  Something that needs to be let out.

  The boy on fire grips his mouth.

  Blood pours from his lips and into his hands.

  The blood covers the field of darkness in crimson light.

  The blood becomes metal as the metal heads turn to dust.

  A blue light appears before him.

  The child is grown now.

  “What do you want?” He asks, “You can’t even let me sleep?”

  The light says nothing.

  The metal folds away to reveal a temple.

  Adamus stands in the center of it.

  A tree is over his head.

  No, it is his head that is the tree.

  The violin’s music is overpowering now.

  The tree is consuming him.

  The light has become a head.

  It whispers to him, “One zero one.”

  Adamus opens his eyes and finds himself in a dreary, rotting cell covered in darkness.

  As his eyes adjust to the minimal light, he sees Marqus pacing back and forth in front of him.

  “Ow,” Adamus says in response to the pain that’s taken his entire body.

  Marqus stops pacing. He pnts his feet on the stained floor. “You’re awake?”

  “Sure seems that way,” Adamus grunts, “Though from the looks of things, I certainly wish that I stayed asleep.”

  “You can bme this on the Warden,” Marqus tells him, “He put us both in solitary even though that muscle head attacked you first.”

  Adamus presses his palm against the throbbing pain in his head. The wound Nesson left is still bleeding. “Nuh,” Adamus groans with pain, “No. This is on me. It’s my fault, just like every other terrible thing that’s happened to me. You shouldn’t have dragged yourself into this.”

  Marqus lurches forward, almost kneeling, “They were going to kill you. I have to serve you, my lord.”

  That word again. That wretched word. Adamus can’t take it anymore.

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” Adamus sits upright, pressing his back against the wall as he huffs, “I’m no lord.”

  He smiles, holding back ughter, “I mean, just look at me. Fucking bruised and bloodied and imprisoned. Surrounded by all the garbage of the universe… Agh…” His hands tighten against his ribs. Something is definitely broken.

  “You may have lost everything,” Marqus begins, “The Republic may have burned Rome and killed your Father, but—”

  “I burned Rome.”

  The statement takes Marqus aback.

  Adamus tilts his head against the wall and gazes up at the damp ceiling. Filthy water gently leaks from above, slowly soiling the floor. A single droplet falls on his face.

  “The beast within me did anyway,” Adamus chuckles, “As for my Father, wanna know what the st thing I said to him was?”

  Marqus simply stares at him in the dark.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Adamus gives the dark a strained smile, “That’s the kind of lord I am, Marqus. One that burns his people and tells his own Father to fuck himself…”

  The droplet of warm liquid falls down his face, mixing with the blood.

  Marqus lowers his head and takes a seat in the corner of the room, where a small crack of light shines through the wall.

  “What did you do after that?”

  Adamus shrugs at the question. His gaze shifts to his hands cradled against his chest. “After that… I…”

  It's as if he can still see the look on her face as she falls dead onto the ground covered in ash, her blood all over his hands and spilling into the dust.

  “I killed my Mother,” Adamus says.

  “I saw her arrow in my dead Father’s chest, and I let out the terrible thing inside me that had already killed hundreds, and then I killed her with it. As she died by the bde of bone twisting out of me, she told someone else that she loved them…Then I… Then I… I cried.”

  Adamus can already feel the tears building in his battered face and bruised body.

  A knot works its way into his throat as he tries to speak, “I didn’t even bury her. That was the least I could have done, but… I barely even remembered her… It was my Father who raised me, it was Davon who raised me! But… I… I was told how horrible the Scorched Archer was my whole life, but told how beautiful and gentle my Mother was, and they were the same. Somehow they were the same…”

  He swallows the knot in his throat as the tears spill out, “I have her blood in me, Marqus. Not the blood of the Division. Not the blood of some noble and heroic lord. I have the blood of a murderer and the blood of an Emperor who unleashed something deadly and terrible into the universe, and that thing is me. I am the Rusting…”

  Adamus wipes his face with his dirtied palms and repeats it, “I am the Rusting. My Father should have let me die instead of… of… of bringing me back to life with something he didn’t understand!”

  He digs his hands into the floor and presses against it, forcing himself to stand.

  He stumbles instead. “I deserve this prison,” He grunts before steadying himself.

  “I deserve this!” He procims with his arms spread wide.

  “I deserve all of this,” He sighs with spittle dripping from his lips.

  Adamus drops back to the floor, leaning his back full of burns he’s had since he was a child against the rough wall.

  “I mean, just look at what’s happened to you,” He ughs again, “I ruin the lives of everyone I meet. I’m like a bck hole for suffering… Ha! You know that’s probably the reason that I didn’t immediately track down Vanessa Soryu or procimed myself as the new Division Emperor. I thought that if I ran away… If I just disappeared… Then nothing bad would happen because… because…”

  “Because you would be gone?”

  Adamus points to Marqus with a grin stained in blood, sweat, and tears, “Exactly.”

  Marqus nods in the darkness.

  Adamus clutches his broken ribs again. He can feel his heart beating beneath his skin. But the beast is silent. Still even.

  Adamus welcomes the peace.

  “Well,” Marqus seems to decide that it is his turn to pintively state something, “Zamizer is a good pnet to disappear on. I thought so too…”

  Adamus sets his knees against his chest just to have something pressed against his aching ribs. His arms rex at his sides. The relief allows him to ask, “Why would you want to disappear? You seem like a typical noble soldier.”

  “Noble?” Marqus chuckles, “All I did was serve the Division. That makes me no different from your Father or even your Mother.”

  “So what’s your big secret then? Or am I the only one in this hole with more sins than the Gods care to count?”

  “Gods,” Marqus sneers, “You hit the mark right there. I just wanted to live a normal life. I’m no holy man. Always thought the best way to paradise was through my own will.”

  Adamus can’t help but smile, “The Gods are the ones who install our wills in us. Their forces. Although I will admit that everything they’ve installed in me has been awfully shitty tely.”

  Marqus smiles, “My wife used to say the same thing. Now she was a holy woman. She would go on and on about how the Gods have installed all these things into us, your ‘forces’ and whatnot, but also things like love, happiness, sorrow, and hate. I would tell her that if that were true, the Gods should remove hate from everyone’s hearts.”

  “Funny,” Adamus rests his chin atop his knees, “My Father said something like that once.”

  Marqus peers through the sliver of light beside him to squint at Adamus sitting in the dark. “What was it he said?”

  Adamus shrugs, “Just that the whole Gods thing never made sense to him. He’d talk about it quite a lot, actually. I never felt offended when he said stuff like that, but still I…” He tries to find the words. Marqus uncovers them for him, “You wish he understood?”

  Adamus lifts his chin from his knees at Marqus’s remark and nods.

  Marqus stretches his legs in his corner of light and holds his hands out before him into the dark.

  “I wish that I had understood my wife better, and I wish that she understood me. That’s probably my biggest regret in life.”

  His face grows somber within the light. “Her name was Catlien. She died in the first year of the Rusting,” his deep voice echoes in the cell, seeming faint as it trails off, “Medical supplies were hard to come by then.”

  Another life lost to the Rusting, Adamus thinks, another life lost to the curse that let me live. How can Marqus still want to serve the Division after all that’s happened?

  Adamus looks at his dirtied hands again. These hands that have so much blood on them.

  How much blood did Gelmidas have on his hands?

  How many lives was he willing to give to the Division?

  Before Adamus can snap at Marqus, tell him how much of a fool he is for still wanting to defend the boy whose Father is responsible for the Rusting, and how sorry he is for ruining his life, Marqus begins to speak again.

  Only he’s sterner this time. Almost scolding him.

  “I don’t bme Gelmidas for what happened to Catlien. I don’t even bme you, or the Rusting. The reason I want to serve you is because I believe in the Division. I believe in a better life for my daughter, Kiren. As a matter of fact, I believe in a better life for all humans in this broken universe. I said that we crave our own way to paradise, and I meant it.”

  Marqus rises, standing up tall with the light shining on him.

  “I grew up under Magnus Ohavim’s reign, fought as a soldier, and married the woman I loved under Gelmidas Atheneum’s reign. I have raised my daughter in fear of the Republic that I spent most of my life fighting against. You aren’t your Father, but you aren’t Magnus Ohavim either. I could care less about what you’ve done, Adamus, but the fact is that your name means something.”

  “I had my name taken from me.”

  Marqus lurches over Adamus in the dark, towering over him as he holds out his hand.

  “Then take it back.”

  Adamus stares at Marqus’s palm before him. It is stained yet not as ruined with dirt and filth as Adamus’s own hands are and will continue to be.

  “You aren’t the Emperor I wanted,” Marqus states, “But you're the one I got. And as long as I breathe, I will follow you into blood and fire, no matter what.”

  Adamus reaches out.

  “You’re crazy, old man.”

  He grasps Marqus’s hand and is pulled into the light.

  The old man pats his back as he stumbles and ughs, “I doubt that anyone else here is going to follow me, though.”

  Something knocks on the cracked wall.

  Adamus and Marqus turn their heads at the sound.

  A burst of light erupts from the wall as it’s opened by a guard.

  The Warden steps forward with a torch. “Good,” he snorts. “You can both stand.”

  He uses his right arm that’s holding the torch to motion for the guard to grab Adamus and Marqus. His left arm remains folded into the white coat pocket on his chest.

  The four march through the cold, bck hall made of rotting stone and damp moss beneath the prison. Together, they make their way to a set of winding steps that give way to more light.

  Although even that light is overshadowed by storm clouds in a gray sky.

  “I caught some of your conversation,” The Warden states as he drops his torch into an already burning pit and folds his right arm against his chest to join his left.

  “Just as you serve the Division, I serve the Republic. The difference is that the Division is dead and the Republic is very much alive. Alive right here, in this prison.”

  Behind the Warden, the field workers pnt their shovels into the dirt.

  Adamus doesn’t recognize any of them. And from the looks of it, neither does Marqus.

  “Who are these prisoners? They’ve never joined us for dinner, and I didn’t see them when we were brought here.”

  The Warden’s face is still as stone at Adamus’s question. He marches along the field. The guard forces Adamus and Marqus to follow him.

  Adamus had seen that there were other buildings that made up the prison. He wonders if these other prisoners are from those other buildings. What are they digging, though?

  Just as he thinks to gnce into the pits of dirt, the Warden rips his hands from his pockets and seizes him by the chin.

  “You really do have every bit of her in you save for the eyes,” The Warden scoffs. Spping Adamus aside, he moves to a rack housing an assortment of torches.

  “Your Mother was just a child when she served under me on Tolka. Back then, she was simply called ‘Eden’ and was about as tall as your leg,” The Warden seizes a pair of torches.

  The fire on them bzes far brighter and far fiercer than the one he carried through the hall.

  He hands one of the torches to Adamus.

  “That little girl did not care for the politics of things. She felt no remorse for what she did. She had nothing on her mind but the simple thought of survival. I have found that the drive to survive, the need to fight through the pain and see another day and another meal, is what motivates all living things. Because if they just gave up and died, they would stop being living things, wouldn’t they?”

  A Qrow calls out in the distance as the Warden tosses his torch into a pit of dirt.

  The Prisoner drops his shovel and steps away as the fmes spread beneath him.

  “Harus, if you would,” The Warden lifts a finger. The guard pushes the Prisoner into the hole he’s dug.

  He falls in with the other burning bodies.

  Adamus’s heart drops as he sees the mounds of smoldering Prison uniforms and burnt flesh.

  The man who was pushed into the hole cries out in agony as he burns.

  Suddenly, Adamus can feel the scorches on his back.

  He’s a boy on fire again.

  And a woman cast in shadow is watching him burn.

  “The st three hundred,” The Warden says, “You should be honored. Even President Soryu has yet to realize what I’m doing here.” His rigid, unblinking eyes shine red as he gazes into the fire. “We don’t have enough funds to keep you alive for long, so keep working,” He clenches his teeth, his jaw turns as rigid as his eyes.

  “Work until you burn.”

  He snatches the torch from Adamus and adds it to the pile of burning dead.

  A flock of Qrows circle the prison as Adamus stares into the fmes.

  He stares and stares. Watching as helpless now as he was back then.

  “I thought they would never let you out,” Samend tells Adamus that night over dinner.

  Nesson gres at them from the next table over. He sips a gss of water as Adamus chews on something he doesn’t care to know the name of.

  Leo sits just a table away, eating the same meal and wearing the same clothes as everyone in this terrible pce.

  Marqus is sitting at the end of the hall.

  Adamus is right in the middle of it all with Samend.

  Everyone seems to be watching him now, as his body aches and the beast stirs inside of him.

  “Where did they take you?” Samend asks.

  Adamus ignores him and asks a question of his own, “You want to get out of here?”

  Samend shrugs, “Yes, but—”

  Adamus stands before Samend can finish speaking. He goes to Marqus and asks the same question, then he asks it to everyone at that table, then everyone at the next, and the next, and the next.

  Some of the guards gre at him, a few debate beating him down again, but the debates yield little result, so the guards stick to their food.

  Eventually, Adamus comes to Nesson, and after a brief staredown, he answers, “Yes,” to the question.

  Everyone has said yes. They may have been confused or happy or even scared when he asked them, but they all said yes.

  All two hundred and ninety-eight of them.

  Once he has his results, he finally sits with Leo.

  “About your pn,” Adamus says, more serious than he has ever been in his entire life, “You said you wanted to get everyone in this prison on our side?”

  Leo nods.

  “Well, I didn’t do that, but I at least got them all to agree on something,” Adamus states before asking, “So now what?”