I woke to the stench of rotting tea leaves and crushed pepper pods, my body half-buried beneath discarded sacks, dried blood stuck to my lips like old sap.
The last thing I remembered was Narayan's face—his eyes dull like tarnished copper, his voice as dry as the rice he gave me. Then the burn. The screaming. The chains.
I clawed free from the waste heap on the side of Market Road, coughing up bile and fury. No one spared me a glance. The slave handlers had already deemed me worthless—too thin, too young. Unprofitable. Like a cracked pot thrown back to the mud.
Let them think so.
I needed water. I needed silence.
Kerala—this green serpent land—whispered streams into the earth like secrets. I limped through spice-scented air until I found a narrow brook behind the market walls. Clear, cold, unjudging.
I fell to my knees and plunged my arms into it. The water stung the wounds like truth on a liar's tongue.
The pain in my thigh... sharp, unnatural. Not just torn flesh.
I pulled aside the leather strips of my torn garment and saw it: a swollen welt pulsing dark blue around a small puncture. I pressed down. A sliver of something… bone? No—too curved. Too smooth.
I gritted my teeth and pushed. My fingers met resistance, then slide. I yanked.
A jagged black object emerged slick with blood—a broken bear's fang.
That beast from the night of the fire... It must have snapped its tooth in me when it attacked. My legs had weakened since. I'd thought it was exhaustion.
But no.
This fang still carried venom—a slow paralyzing kind. The tremble in my fingers wasn't just fear. It was poison.
I laughed bitterly, low in my throat. Even nature fights me now?
i carefully store the best fang in my half torn pocket
Still, I had one rule—even back in the hills when I was a child never stay dirty.
I stripped off what I had left—rinsed every inch of myself in that stream, scrubbing with leaves and grit. My back burned where the brand marked me, a crude iron sigil meant to shame. I pressed my leather shoulder-wrap against it, fastening the strap tight.
Let no one see it. Let them forget.
I was no man's property.
But as I tightened the knots of my shirt and stood from the water, a sharp sting bloomed in my side—then deeper. A tearing beneath the old wound from my fall.
I looked down.
Blood again.
Moving.
Something squirmed.
The pain made my vision flash. I slapped at the spot, then felt it—a leech, thick and glossy, burrowing into the half-healed wound like a living curse.
I stumbled back into the river and screamed.
The leech twitched but would not let go.
Every motion pulled it in further, like it fed on pain itself. It wasn't like the forest ones we burned with salt. This was... different.
Worse.
There were old stories, even among the Mannan, of river leeches cursed by temple blood—creatures drawn to wounds that never close, that drink not just blood, but strength.
It moved.
"No… no," I muttered, digging my nails into the skin around it, trying to pinch or cut it out. But the thing had already disappeared inside, swallowed by torn muscle. It left no mark but agony and the feeling that something alive was now part of me.
Panic rose like bile.
I fell to the riverbank, scraping mud into my fingers, trying to press, cut, claw it free. My nails drew blood, but no leech came out. Just more fire. More pain.
I wanted to scream—but no one would care.
Who would help a marked slave boy crawling in the dirt? A parasite inside him, another in his back, and gods only knew how many more circling.
"I have no coin. No healer. No blade sharper than a tooth," I said aloud, just to hear something other than the rasp of my own breath.
Would I lose the leg?
I tested it—flexing the thigh. Burning. The muscle tightened wrong, too fast. A spasm wracked my side. It was already spreading. Not venom. Something else.
A thought coiled in my mind like smoke.
What kind of creature burrows into flesh with no fear?
This wasn't some wild forest leech. It found a wound. Chose it.
And now it lived in me.
My hand hovered over the wound, shaking. Could I cut it out? Would I bleed to death before I reached a village? And even if I did reach one—what then? Slaves don't get medicine. They get whipped and dumped back on the road.
I clutched the metallic necklace my mother gave me. Its edge bit into my palm like a reminder: Pain is proof you're alive.
" I have to find the way to remove it soon"