Page 8 of Chained to the Horned God

VALOA

T he stench hits before I even push through the infirmary doors. Rotting blood, sweat-soaked linens, and the sour tang of infection—the kind that clings to the walls like mold. The air’s thick, wet with breath and agony, the sound of coughing layered over low groans and fever-slick murmurs.

I know what this is.

I’ve seen it before, in backwater villages where bandages were rinsed in river sludge and knives were never cleaned between amputations. This is no different. Just a grander cage. A bloodier one.

I push past a moaning human whose eyes roll white in their sockets, pressing the back of my hand to his brow.

Boiling. His skin burns like hot stones under thin parchment.

Another man has black streaks crawling up his thigh, the wound beneath crusted with old pus.

I curse low under my breath, snatch the blade from the table—still wet from someone else’s blood—and hurl it across the room.

It clatters against the stone wall, then drops to the floor with a sick slap.

“You filthy bastards!” I scream, turning toward the guards lounging near the door, their armor barely buckled, lazy smirks tugging at their mouths. “You rewrap bandages and reuse blades like they’re toys—do you want everyone in this pit dead?”

One of them shrugs. “Not everyone.”

I stalk toward him, fists clenched, heart thudding like a war drum behind my ribs.

The taller one steps in front of me. “Mind your tone, healer.”

I don’t.

I slap him hard enough to snap his head sideways.

The other one laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s seen all day. I don’t see the hand coming until it crashes into my jaw, spinning me sideways into a stack of stained linens. My head rings, mouth full of blood and spit. I spit both at his feet, red streaking down my chin.

He’s still laughing when he leaves, locking the door behind him with a cheerful, “Sweet dreams.”

I sit there a moment, stunned and trembling, the left side of my face throbbing like a plucked drum.

Then I get up.

Because there’s work to do. Always work.

The oil lamps hiss in the corners, sputtering shadows across rows of broken bodies.

I clean the wounds myself this time—properly.

Boiled water. Fresh cloth. My fingers move on instinct, even as my shoulders sag and my eyes blur.

I whisper to the unconscious. I murmur to the dying.

I hum old songs to keep my hands steady.

I hold pressure on a bleeder with one knee while stitching with the other.

I strip off my outer tunic and rip it into clean strips.

I don’t sleep.

By dawn, the room smells a little less like death. A little more like something salvageable.

The door creaks open again just as the light begins to slip through the slotted stone. I expect more mockery. Maybe another slap.

Instead, it’s Durk.

He’s soaked in sweat, one eye already starting to swell shut, and across his back hangs another orc—half-conscious, gut wrapped in a torn blanket, blood seeping through like a sunrise.

“Wake up, healer,” Durk grunts. “We got another one.”

“I’m awake,” I rasp.

He lays the wounded orc down with surprising gentleness. His own knees crack as he straightens, wiping a hand across his mouth. He eyes the room, the cleaned tables, the freshly wrapped limbs, the faint steam rising from buckets of boiled water.

“You did all this?”

“I didn’t sleep.”

“You’ll die doing this.”

“Maybe. But they won’t.”

Durk looks at me for a long time.

“You know,” he says, dragging over a bench with a sigh, “They’re starting to trust you.”

“I noticed.”

“That’s dangerous.”

I glance down at the orc’s wound. Deep but clean. I’ll need to close it soon. “For me?”

“For everyone. They don’t like when things start shifting. When someone down here starts standing up.”

I rinse my hands in scalding water. It burns, but it wakes me. “What am I supposed to do? Let them rot?”

Durk chuckles. “That’s your problem. You think you still got choices.”

I don't answer him. I focus on my stitching, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from shaking. My vision doubles for a second. Then clears.

The thing is—he’s right.

Even the guards now… they leave scraps of food for me near the cot. They grunt thanks when I wrap their broken fingers or lance their boils. One of them asked me to check his rash the other night. Another slipped me a dull blade with a nod and said, “You’ll know what to do with it.”

I keep it under the sink.

I don’t think about it much.

Not yet.

But it’s there.

And so is the truth threading through all of this like a poisoned wire—there’s power in being needed. Power I never asked for. Power that terrifies me more than anything Lotor could dream up.

Because it makes me visible.

And in this place, being visible is the first step to being burned.

Barsok’s eyes have changed.

Not in color or shape. Not in anything anyone else might notice. But I see it. A flicker of unease whenever I pass one of the guards and they nod respectfully. A shadow beneath his brow when someone tosses me extra bread or mutters a half-hearted thanks for stopping their fever.

It’s not jealousy. I know the taste of that beast, bitter and green and clawing. This isn’t that.

It’s fear. Not of me—of what they’re building around me. A pedestal with no foundation.

“They build you up,” he says, crouched in our cell while I squeeze fresh salve into a cloth, “to make the fall louder.”

I look up. “Is that what they did to you?”

He doesn’t answer at first. Just watches the fire in the brazier crackle low, throwing long shadows up the wall.

Then he nods. Once. Slow. Like it takes effort to dig the truth up from wherever he buried it.

“Louder than thunder,” he mutters.

I set the salve aside and move toward him, but he turns his face away slightly. Not from me—from the memory. From the storm I can’t see.

“Maybe they will,” I say softly. “Maybe they’re waiting to watch me burn. But they’ll have to try harder than that.”

His jaw flexes. His fingers curl into the straw. His silence says everything else.

That night, I leave our cell alone.

I don’t mean to wander. I just need to breathe. The infirmary reeks of vinegar and blood, and the tension in Barsok’s shoulders wraps around me like wire. I slip through the corridor between the lower cells, torchlight flickering like a heartbeat against the stone.

He steps out of the dark like he was waiting for me.

One of the new gladiators. Young. Too young. Hair slicked back, tunic cut low, breath thick with sour wine.

“Well, well,” he drawls, dragging a thumb along his jaw. “The healer with the magic hands.”

I freeze. My pulse stumbles. I glance past him, but the corridor narrows here—no one nearby. No exit close enough.

“Just going to my cell,” I say, stepping sideways.

His hand slams into the wall beside my head.

“You’re famous now,” he whispers, leaning in. “Everyone wants a piece.”

I don’t think. I shove him back hard enough to stagger him, my fingers already reaching for the tiny blade I keep in my boot. But I never get the chance to use it.

Because Barsok is there.

One second the corridor is filled with tension. The next, it’s filled with something colder. He doesn’t roar. Doesn’t growl. He just appears, silent and vast, and the air changes around him.

The boy turns, and Barsok grabs him by the collar, lifts him like a sack of grain, and slams him into the wall. The stone groans. The boy’s mouth opens in a squeak, too shocked to scream.

“No,” I say, reaching out.

But there’s no fight.

Just a sharp sound, like meat hitting stone. Then silence.

The boy slumps to the ground, his lip split, his nose broken, blood puddling beneath him.

I don’t ask if he’s dead.

Barsok stands over him, shoulders heaving. His fists drip. His eyes glow low in the torchlight like coals banked in ash.

Then he looks at me.

It’s not rage in his face. It’s regret. Dull and choking. He stares at his own hands like he doesn’t recognize them.

“I broke my promise,” he says, voice thick.

I take a step closer.

“I swore I wouldn’t become what they want. What they built me to be. A monster.”

I touch his face. Just the edge of my fingers on his jaw. His skin is hot, bristled with tension, but he doesn’t pull away.

“You didn’t become one,” I whisper. “You saved me from one.”

His throat works like he’s trying to swallow broken glass.

Behind us, the corridor stretches back into darkness. Somewhere, another torch crackles. The moans of the wounded echo in the distance. But here, in this breath, it’s quiet.

His eyes finally meet mine again.

“You shouldn’t have to need saving,” he says.

“None of us should,” I reply. “But here we are.”

He lifts one hand, hovers it near my waist, unsure. I take it and press it flat against my ribs, where my heart still hammers like a war drum.

“We all fall,” I say. “Some of us just land closer to monsters than others.”

He exhales like it’s the first breath he’s taken in hours.

I guide him back to the cell without speaking. We pass no one. No guards. No prisoners. Just silence wrapped in blood.

Inside, I rinse his knuckles in the basin. He doesn’t flinch when the salt stings. I press gauze to the worst split. He holds still the whole time.

When I finish, he speaks again—barely above a whisper.

“I don’t want to lose this. Whatever it is.”

“You won’t,” I tell him. “Not unless you let go.”

He doesn’t.

The torchlight bleeds down the hallway in sickly orange stripes, casting flickering shadows on the stone walls as we return to the cell.

The blood on Barsok’s hands has dried into rust-colored lines.

I can still smell it—sharp, metallic, with that faint trace of sweat and earth that always clings to him.

But I don’t recoil. I don’t ask questions.

I already know all the answers that matter.

Inside, the silence wraps around us like a second skin.

The air is heavy with everything unsaid.

He sits on the edge of the straw pallet we’ve managed to make less terrible with stolen blankets and flattened rags.

I kneel before him, slowly, not because I am weak but because something about the moment demands reverence.

Like this isn't just a man covered in scars.

Like he's a temple of pain that only I get to enter.

He watches me with those storm-dark eyes, his expression unreadable, carved from stone but trembling at the edges.

My hand finds his wrist. His pulse jumps against my thumb.

I lean in, my breath fanning against his throat, and press my lips gently where that beat drums beneath the surface.

A kiss, not of passion or claim, but of recognition.

He lets out a sound—not quite a sigh, not quite a sob—and tilts his head so our foreheads meet. We stay like that, breathing together. Not speaking. Not needing to. My fingers trace the edge of his jaw, where the fur gives way to skin scarred from more battles than he’ll ever recount aloud.

His arms encircle me slowly. No urgency. No hunger. Just care so precise it nearly undoes me.

He’s massive—bigger than anything in this gods-forsaken pit—but right now he holds me like I might break if he shifts wrong. His hands splay across my back, one callused palm moving in slow circles, grounding me. My breath hitches. I blink fast, trying to trap the tears before they fall.

His voice breaks the silence first, low and rough as worn stone. “You sure?”

I nod, barely moving. “You?”

He nods too. His horns graze the stone wall as he leans back against it, drawing me with him. I rest my cheek against his chest. Beneath the fur and muscle, his heart beats steady, slow, a rhythm I could fall into if I let myself.

No more words come.

We lie down together, side by side. No kiss.

No wild press of mouths or skin or need.

Just warmth. Just closeness. I tuck my face beneath his chin, feel the weight of his breath stirring the loose strands of my hair.

He shifts so that his leg touches mine, his hand wrapped around my wrist like a promise he doesn’t know how to say out loud.

The chains are still there—on our lives, on our wrists, on the rules of this place—but they feel.

.. quieter. Less suffocating. Maybe it’s the illusion of safety or the simple act of knowing someone would bleed for me again.

Maybe it’s the firelight dancing on the walls or the echo of his voice still tangled in my memory.

But for the first time since they threw me into this gods-cursed arena, I don’t feel like I’m surviving just to survive.

I feel seen.

I feel like someone.

The quiet settles between us like dust, soft and patient.

He doesn’t move, doesn’t push. I think that’s what undoes me the most—not the violence he’s capable of, not the stories he keeps locked behind those eyes, but the restraint.

The reverence. The way he treats me like I’m more than blood and bruises.

His breath deepens. I feel his body relax beneath mine, muscles unwinding, heartbeat slowing. I shift just enough to brush my lips against his jaw—light as the touch of a prayer—and then I settle back down, our foreheads resting against each other.

I dream, not of blood or fire, not of chains or screams, but of wind through grass and the way his hand felt when it closed around mine. Of sunlight breaking through clouds. Of what it might be like to be free with him. To wake somewhere far from this place and laugh without fear of who might hear.

I don’t say the words forming in my heart.

Not yet.

But I think them.

Loud and clear.

I trust him.

Not because he’s the strongest, or the fiercest, or the most feared among the pit.

But because in his silence, I see the man he used to be. The one he still clings to in the dead of night. The one who believes there’s still something worth protecting, even if it costs him pieces of his soul.

I think I love that man.