Darkness.

  The first thing he remembers is dirt.

  Then pain.

  Then teeth.

  WEEK 1 – Shackled Silence

  He woke tied by the wrists, hanging from a crude wooden scaffold — legs barely touching the ground.

  Arms numb. Lips cracked. His bladder had given out days ago. The goblins didn’t speak his language, but they knew how to punish silence.

  They threw bones at him when he wouldn’t scream.

  Laughed when he puked from the moldy meat they tried to force-feed him.

  By the third day, they stopped feeding him altogether.

  They just watched.

  Every time he nodded off, a red-hot spike jabbed into the dirt near his foot — waking him with the hiss of boiling air.

  [THOUGHTS]

  Not training. Not jungle.

  This prison.

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  [SPEAKS]

  “…Let me go…”

  No one listened.

  They never did.

  WEEK 2 – Bleed for Sport

  The games started on day eight.

  He was tossed into a pit with another prisoner — a bony, blindfolded human missing half a leg.

  No weapons. Just fists.

  The goblins cheered for blood.

  Beat drums on hollow skulls.

  When Rell refused to fight, they beat the other prisoner in front of him.

  Screamed until the man’s face turned into mush and silence.

  The next time, they put a dagger in his hand.

  And dropped him in with a starved beast — rib-thin, four-eyed, frothing.

  Jarrell won.

  Barely.

  With a shard of jawbone and pure panic.

  [THOUGHTS]

  Not a fighter anymore.

  Not a survivor.

  Just meat with teeth.

  He didn’t sleep that night.

  WEEK 3 – Burn the Voice

  They hated his silence more than his screams.

  So they broke his voice.

  He was gagged with a vine soaked in pepper oil and bite-root acid.

  Left like that for two days.

  When they pulled it out, his throat was raw, his tongue blistered.

  His first scream was silent — just a broken hiss.

  They laughed harder than ever.

  He tried to cast.

  [SPEAKS]

  “Ve… vela…”

  Nothing.

  Magic didn’t work.

  It didn’t answer him.

  Not here.

  [THOUGHTS]

  Not broken yet.

  But breaking.

  He tried to hum a song from Earth.

  He forgot the words.

  WEEK 4 – Taught to Crawl

  By week four, they stopped shackling him.

  He didn’t need restraints.

  They’d broken his left leg.

  Slashed the tendon.

  He crawled everywhere.

  Was forced to lick water off stone if he wanted to drink.

  They pissed around his food bowl and forced him to fight for scraps with rats.

  One of them took to riding him — like a mount — yanking his dreadlocks like reins.

  Every time he fell, they kicked him until he moved again.

  But that last night?

  That last night — when they all laughed in their language, drunk on fermented sap…

  Rell looked at the moon through the bars.

  His mouth bloody.

  His eyes gold.

  And for the first time in weeks—

  [SPEAKS]

  “…Still not dead.”

  His voice cracked through the pain.

  The jungle listened.

  And the wind shifted.