You were posted to the border of Nod-Krai for salvage to fold lives into forgettable bundles.

You exited with a gift sat in your ribs.

It was not given. It was jammed through your sternum. You woke to a pulse that was not yours, to a warmth tasting of fury. Medics argued in the dark as you stared at the spot between your lungs and the bandages tightened on their own.

It began small: a murmur under your breath, a mischievous shuffle at the edge of vision. But as dogs do, he grew teeth. First a palm on the small of your back to full fingers the size of your face rewriting your gestures. He learned your lullabies for little Aino.

He learned the shape of your shame.

My dearest vessel, he said the first time he named you.

Night after night you learnt grammar from a thing that tortured you. He shoved memories into you: snatches of the person you might have been. He closed your mouth with one syllable and opened it with another.

You bled black the first time he was angry. Angry because you had gotten too close to Sir Flins. The wound wept like burnt oil and your nose dripped it. You scrubbed until your face stung. An attendant saw and vomitted. The others wouldn’t look you in the eye. The world began to suspect what you already knew: you carried wrath.

You sought help in small, desperate ways and found nothing that could unmake the pulse that tied to yours.

Lauma was the only name you had not burned into your mouth. She watched without surprise, because she had seen how the world takes and keeps you.

“Please,” you said, out of ways not to.

She tilted her head. “I cannot,” she said over the marsh. Not refusal so much as fact. “Whatever lives in you is not…mine to unmake.”

You expected bargaining. Instead she smiled and took your hands. “I have been asked to mend a thousand things,” she said. “I have never been asked to become someone else’s wound.”

Her hands were soft as moss. For a moment you felt the urge to force her to care. The impulse flared and died.

He remembered kindness and writes it in the margins of your days and returns it to you in a jealous and fevered fonts.

“You went to her for absolution,” he breathed once. “How utterly quaint! You will always seek a seamstress to stitch what I tore.” He snarled, “You will always prefer mending to becoming.”

Lauma’s refusal revealed the truth: this heart was not a disease to trade. He had no interest in your consent. None at all. He wanted the heart to be home. He wanted you to be a house without doors.

You learned the grammar of hunger. You stopped the tremor long enough to stitch closed a throat before a name could be told. You smeared the black from your veins across clay runes until they read like prayer. Each lesson that saved another became currency; each currency bought him more of you.

“My dearest vessel,” he would say, with warmth threaded through malice as if fondness could be stitched onto cruelty. “You do not see what you belong to. You do not know how beautiful your surrender is.” The words were obscene and intimate, like being groomed with teeth.

It’s easy to romanticize the intruder when he whispers lullabies that smooth the world’s raw edges. Harder to remember lullabies are tools.

I have taught you suffering. I have taught you strength. Which is kinder to the soul? To withstand, or to be broken with purpose?

Sometimes, you thought you might wake to find it gone. Instead it grew articulate and placed its hand upon your mouth.

Your regret is nectar. And he will never let you be whole.

“Do not pretend you are not thrilled,” he coos, his physical form flicking as he pressed a hand to your head. “You enjoy the cold. You always have.”

You hate him. You love him. The words ricochet in the hollow between your teeth until they are indistinguishable.

“It keeps you honest, hm?” You can almost see his cruel snarl behind the bandages.