"You shout truths with a tongue trained to lie-just to live another day. But you are broken, as we all are. Shattered things pretending to be whole."
-- Polly Falcon, Manifestation of Hunger
Yusuf's grin hadn't faded, but his eyes, those eyes, shifted. Not with madness, not with rage, but with a brightness too sharp to be human. They glowed. Faint at first, then stronger, casting a green hue in the shadows like phosphorescent moss clinging to a corpse.
And then, they locked on me.
I froze.
It wasn't a look. It wasn't attention. It was penetration. A gaze that slipped past the surface of skin, bone, and thought. A gaze that unraveled threads I didn't even know were woven into me.
And then came the crawling.
The now-familiar sensation.
Like ants burrowing just beneath my flesh, frantic and coordinated, tiny legs scraping at truths I hadn't dared to face. It clawed its way through my spine, my ribs, behind my eyes. My breath hitched. My fists clenched.
But this time, it wasn't just happening.
I saw him doing it.
His glowing eyes didn't flicker, they pulsed, each beat pushing deeper into something he had no right touching.
He saw the recognition in me.
Saw that I knew.
And he grunted.
A wet, guttural sound, somewhere between surprise and pain, and then, like a marionette with its strings cut, he crumpled. His body hit the dirt hard. He spasmed violently, limbs jerking, back arching. Foam pooled at the corners of his cracked lips. His heels scraped the ground in short, panicked bursts.
"Yusuf!" I moved without thinking.
No answer. Just his body convulsing, twitching like it was being electrocuted by something unseen. His mouth opened in a silent scream, no sound came out, just the gurgle of breath fighting against whatever war was happening inside him.
And then… stillness.
Total, unnatural stillness.
No shivers. No twitch.
He lay on his back, arms splayed, lips parted. The glow in his eyes was gone. Not faded, gone. As if it had never existed.
My boots scraped the gravel as I stepped closer, hesitating over his slack form.
Was he… dead?
I crouched beside him, watching for the rise of his chest, the flutter of an eyelid. Nothing.
Then, cautiously, I reached out and held a hand just above his lips.
A faint breath.
Warm and shallow.
Alive.
Barely.
I glance around the alley.
Still no one. Just Yusuf, half-dead, sprawled on the cold ground, and me.
I try to lift him, to sling one of his wiry arms over my shoulder, maybe drag him toward the nearby wall. But his weight is dead and uneven, and my shoulder still aches from the training door. Every tug only makes his limbs loll like wet ropes. I don't want to scrape him across the ground like a sack of meat, so I give up.
With a sigh, I lower him gently and sit beside him, the filth of the alley soaking into my clothes.
Seconds pass. Then minutes.
Just as I begin to wonder whether he's slipping away for good, Yusuf gasps, a sharp, rattling intake like he's drowning in air. He lurches upright so suddenly that I nearly flinch backward.
Then he looks at me.
And the look in his eyes is pity.
A hollow, haunted sort of pity that belongs to a man who's seen too much of the world and didn't like what he found.
His voice breaks the stillness with raw panic:
"YOU… WHO MARKED YOU?!"
I recoil slightly at the force in his tone. His eyes are wide, bloodshot, and yet too sharp to be called mad.
"It wasn't the gods," he spits. "If it were them, I would have felt it. I've watched their fingerprints all my life. This… this is different."
He clutches at his scalp, trembling.
"I was wondering why fate felt strange, why the weave was fraying. Threads unraveling. Destinies unbinding. Now I see ..." he points a shaking, bony finger at me, "...you. What did you do?!"
I open my mouth, but he doesn't wait.
He laughs.
Not softly. Not kindly.
The laughter comes in heaves, torn from somewhere deeper than his lungs, and with it come tears, rivulets of grief tracing the lines in his dirt-caked face.
"Maybe… maybe the administrator hasn't abandoned us after all," he chokes, almost whispering now. "Maybe… maybe we're not alone in this ruin."
My mouth is dry, but I push past it.
"What do you mean by being marked?"
He wipes at his face with a filthy sleeve and mutters, "You don't need to know. Not now."
Of course. Another cryptic mage. Another riddle wrapped in prophecy.
I exhale, long and slow.
"Why can't any of you just answer a question directly?" I murmur to no one in particular.
But I'm not done.
Not with what happened earlier.
"What was that?" I ask, sharper now. "Back there. When your eyes were glowing. When I felt like I was being unraveled."
He blinks.
"Oh. That?" His voice lightens, as if we're chatting about the weather. "That was Identify."
My brow tightens.
"That wasn't Identify."
"Not the kind you're used to," he admits. "Mine's old. The real one. Untethered by this system's boundaries."
"And what did you see?" I ask.
He doesn't hesitate.
"Your soul." His voice drops into reverence, almost fear. "I looked, and what I saw shouldn't exist. Your soul is dense. Too dense. Too… alive. It's like a sun pressed into the shell of a child. And your title, Second Life. That's not something the system gives. Not in this world"
He stares at me, eyes gleaming with confusion and awe.
"Are you… are you someone sent by the administrator? To help this world?"
I don't answer.
Because I don't know.
Not really.
Because maybe I was just trying to fix my own regrets.
Maybe I am marked.
But by what? By who?