The infirmary reeked of blood and bitter herbs. Eli worked with practiced hands, changing bandages beneath flickering lamplight. Bran, the guard injured during the morning's "demonstration," winced as Eli adjusted the wrappings across his ribcage.
"Your friend," Bran rasped, eyes fixed on the ceiling, "he smiled when he did it. Like it wasn't just a fight—like he enjoyed it."
Eli paused, fingers stilling against the stained linen. "He's not my friend," he said quietly. "None of them are."
"But he is what he is now," Bran muttered. "Whatever brought you here... it's changing all of you."
Eli didn't answer. He didn't need to. The question had already taken root in the back of his mind days ago, growing like a tumor: What are we becoming?
The cold strategist Alex, with his chilling detachment and endless schemes. Vlad, who seemed to feed on injury like it made him feel alive. Nyt, smiling gently while her eyes watched everything like a predator gauging distance.
And me? Eli looked down at his hands—callused, steady, still capable of easing pain. But even now, every time he healed someone, he felt it. The strange hollowness afterward. A creeping fatigue in his bones that rest couldn't fix.
"Changed into what?" Bran asked again, voice a whisper now.
Eli folded the last bandage and stepped away. "I don't know," he admitted. "But I'm going to find out. Before it's too late."
Later that night, he found them in their common room, hunched around a table crowded with maps and crumpled notes. The sight stopped him cold.
Nyt was casually spinning threads of silver light between her fingers like yarn. Vlad leaned over the table, his expression focused, knuckles bruised. And at the center—Alex, eyes darting across documents with predatory calm.
They looked more like warlords than summoned heroes. And that realization made Eli's stomach twist.
"You're planning something," he said, stepping into the room.
Nyt looked up with practiced warmth—a mask she wore well. "We didn't hear you come in."
"I was in the infirmary," he replied, voice tight. "Patching up the guard Vlad destroyed this morning."
Vlad didn't flinch. "He was in the way."
"He was a person," Eli snapped.
"People die in war," Alex said without looking up. "And this place summoned us for exactly that."
"Then maybe we shouldn't become what they want."
Alex finally met his eyes. "You think this is about what they want? This is about what we need to survive. That's the difference between you and me. You still think this world has rules worth following."
"No," Eli said. "I think we're the ones who bring the rules with us. Or we lose ourselves trying to play their game."
The words hung in the air like an accusation. Eli watched their faces, searching for some flicker of humanity. Alex's expression remained cold, analytical. Vlad's smile held too much hunger. And Nyt...
"You're upset," Nyt said, rising from her chair with fluid grace. Her voice carried practiced sympathy, but something underneath made his skin crawl. "We understand that. But you have to see the bigger picture."
She moved closer, silver light still dancing around her fingers. When she reached out to touch his arm, Eli felt something wrong in the contact—not comfort, but something that wanted to take.
"The bigger picture?" Eli stepped back, breaking the contact. "You mean the one where we become monsters to fight monsters?"
"Where we become effective," Alex corrected. "Moral purity is a luxury we can't afford."
"Listen to yourself!" Eli's voice cracked with frustration. "Six days ago you were—" He stopped. He didn't actually know what any of them had been. They were strangers who'd been thrown together by circumstance, nothing more.
But that didn't make their transformation any less horrifying.
"That person died the moment we were summoned," Alex said, his voice flat. "The sooner you accept that, the better your chances of survival."
"What if I don't want to survive at that cost?"
The question escaped before Eli could stop it, raw and desperate. The silence that followed felt like a physical weight.
Vlad looked up from the maps, something almost like curiosity in his expression. "You'd rather die than compromise your precious morals?"
"I'd rather die than become something that would horrify any decent person."
Nyt made a sound that might have been sympathy. "Oh, Eli. You're so determined to be the hero, aren't you? Even if it kills you."
There was something in her tone—not mockery, exactly, but something worse. Pity. As if his desire to remain human was a character flaw she was indulging.
"And you're so determined to be clever that you've forgotten what you're supposed to be clever for." Eli turned to face her fully. "Do you even remember what it feels like to care about something other than power?"
For just a moment, something flickered across Nyt's face. Pain, maybe, or regret. Then it was gone, replaced by that same predatory calculation.
"Caring is weakness," she said quietly. "It's vulnerability that others exploit. Here, I can take power and use it. That's what matters."
"By manipulating people? By absorbing their magic like some kind of parasite?"
"By being effective." The silver light around her fingers pulsed brighter. "I have the power to actually change things, Eli. Isn't that what heroes are supposed to do?"
"Not like this." Eli shook his head. "Not by becoming the very thing we're supposed to fight against."
Alex stood, moving to the window with mechanical precision. "You're clinging to a fantasy. The idea that good intentions matter more than results. But this world doesn't care about your intentions. It only cares whether you're strong enough to impose your will or weak enough to be consumed."
"So we just... give up? Abandon everything that makes us human?"
"We evolve." Alex's reflection in the window looked like a stranger—sharp angles and cold calculation. "We become what this world requires us to be."
Eli felt something breaking inside his chest, a grief so profound it made breathing difficult. These people weren't his friends—they never had been. But they were human once, or at least he'd hoped they were.
"I don't believe that," he said aloud. "I don't believe any of you were always monsters waiting for an excuse."
Vlad laughed, the sound sharp as breaking glass. "Believe what you want. Won't change what we're becoming."
"What you're choosing to become. I refuse."
"Refuse what?" Nyt asked, and there was genuine curiosity in her voice now.
"All of it. The cynicism, the cruelty, the idea that surviving here means becoming something inhuman." Eli straightened his shoulders. "If this world wants to turn us into weapons, then I'll be the weapon that heals instead of harms. If it wants us to be monsters, I'll be the monster that protects innocence instead of consuming it."
Alex turned from the window, something almost like interest flickering in his expression. "And when your idealism gets you killed? When your refusal to make hard choices costs lives you could have saved?"
"Then at least I'll die as someone I can recognize."
The silence stretched between them, heavy with the weight of fundamental incompatibility. Eli could see the calculations happening behind Alex's eyes, the way Nyt was measuring him like a problem to be solved, the hunger in Vlad's expression.
They were lost. All of them, in different ways.
The commotion in the courtyard interrupted whatever response might have come. Through the window, they could see a procession entering the castle gates—white-robed figures on horseback, banners bearing the symbol of the kingdom's dominant religious order.
"Church delegation," Vlad observed, flexing his healing hand unconsciously. "Wonder what they want."
Alex's expression shifted, patterns clicking into place behind his eyes. "They want their prophesied hero. The one pure enough to channel divine power without corruption."
All three of them looked at Eli, and he felt something cold settle in his stomach. The weight of expectation, of being seen as something he wasn't sure he could be.
"They want me," he said quietly.
"Yes," Alex replied, and there was something calculating in his tone that made Eli's skin crawl. "And that might be exactly what we need."
The betrayal was so casual, so matter-of-fact, that it took Eli's breath away. Not the emotional devastation of losing friends, but the cold realization that he'd never been anything more than a piece on Alex's board.
"You're going to use me," he said.
"I'm going to let you be what you want to be," Alex corrected. "The pure hero, the one who saves everyone. The Church will give you that opportunity."
"And you?"
Alex's smile was winter-cold. "We'll do what needs to be done while you play saint."
Eli looked at them one last time—three people who had chosen to become something inhuman in the name of survival. Part of him pitied them. Part of him envied their certainty.
But mostly, he felt relieved.
"Then I guess this is goodbye," he said quietly.
None of them contradicted him.
By evening, Eli knelt in his new quarters beneath the chapel's soaring arches, praying for guidance before an altar that seemed to pulse with divine warmth. The light that answered his call was pure, untainted by the corruption that seemed to seep from every stone of the castle above.
This is right, he thought, feeling divine energy flow through him like healing rain. This is what I was meant to become.
But even as the Light filled him with purpose and certainty, part of him grieved for the people he had left behind. Not friends—they had never been friends—but fellow humans who had chosen to become something else.
I couldn't save them, he admitted to the flickering candles. Maybe I was never supposed to try.
The Light offered no judgment, only acceptance. Only the promise that he could still save others, even if he had failed to save the people who mattered most to his naive hope for fellowship.
It would have to be enough.
In the castle above, Alex stood at the window and calculated probabilities. The fracture was complete now—Eli isolated with the Church, the group dynamics simplified, moral constraints removed. Everything proceeding according to plan.
So why did he feel like something essential had been carved out of his chest?
Sentiment, he told himself. Another weakness that needs to be discarded.
But late at night, when patterns swirled behind his closed eyes and showed him all the ways their choices would ripple out into catastrophe, he found himself thinking about a concept he'd once called friendship.
When the stakes had been low enough that caring about people hadn't felt like a luxury he couldn't afford.
That person is dead, he reminded himself. Killed by necessity and circumstance.
But knowing something was pointless had never stopped the human heart from mourning.
And Alex was still human.
At least for now.