At the twentieth blow, the silence was so complete it seemed to swallow every sound in the cavern. Brando no longer felt he was on the anvil, nor in Maleth's cave, nor anywhere he could recognize. Brando was inside the memory, but this time not as Brando Casadei.

  ***

  The base of the stairs was cold.

  The body lay twisted at an unnatural angle, legs bent beneath the torso in ways that shouldn't be possible. Pain was everywhere: in his back, his neck, his ribs... but it was a distant pain, as if it belonged to someone else.

  Michele looked up.

  At the top of the stairs, Brando stood motionless. Arms still extended from the push. Eyes wide open.

  Michele tried to move. His body didn't respond. Something in his spine had snapped—he could feel it, that sensation of disconnection between brain and limbs. That wasn't what terrified him.

  It was what he saw.

  Brando was still there, at the top of the stairs. But there was something else. Something inside him. Something pressing against the boundaries of his skin, peering through his eyes like a predator watching from a window.

  Then space folded.

  Michele felt reality slip away like water through fingers. The orphanage corridor dissolved into fragments, walls receding into infinity, ceiling vanishing into nothing. He found himself in another place.

  There was no floor. There was no sky. Only an electric blue void stretching in every direction, cold and unnatural, like the inside of an ice cell. The air itself seemed frozen, crystallized into particles that glittered like dead stardust.

  And at the center of that void: him.

  Michele saw it.

  He didn't want to see it. His brain screamed to close his eyes, to turn away, to do anything except look. He couldn't. Something held his eyelids open with invisible fingers.

  It was colossal. Tall as a building, maybe more. A true mass of roots, tentacles, and interwoven organic matter that braided and separated in an endless cycle of viscous movement.

  And where a head should have been, there was the Eye. A single red eye that pulsed. Thump. Thump. Thump. Each pulsation sent waves of pressure through the void, and Michele felt them in his chest, in his skull, in his bones. They weren't sound waves—they were something older, more primitive, something that spoke directly to the reptilian brain, to the most ancient part of human beings, the part that knew only one thing:

  Danger.

  The entity made no sounds, didn't move toward him, did nothing. It simply existed, and its existence was white noise filling his mind, erasing every thought. Michele tried to remember his own name—he couldn't. Tried to remember where he was—he couldn't. Tried to remember what he was.

  Human, he thought desperately. I'm human. My name is... my name is...

  Michele opened his mouth to scream. His lips moved, his throat vibrated, but no sound emerged. The scream itself had been devoured before it was born—that thing had swallowed every possibility of noise, every possibility of communication, every possibility of escape.

  The eye, Michele thought, the last coherent thought his brain managed to form. There's something inside...

  Then the Eye pulsed, once, twice, and on the third pulsation it exploded into red light.

  It wasn't light in the traditional sense—it was a shockwave, an avalanche of something expanding in all directions simultaneously.

  Michele's brain shut down.

  Michele didn't die from the fall. He didn't die from spinal trauma. He died because he had seen that, and no human brain could contain such a vision and continue to live.

  ***

  Brando woke up screaming.

  The anvil was cold beneath his back. No. The anvil had always been scorching. He was the one who was cold, frozen to the marrow, as if someone had kept him in a freezer for hours.

  "Brando!" Alessio's voice.

  Brando opened his eyes.

  Maleth's cavern. Obsidian stalactites. Lava channels. Suffocating heat. Everything the same as before.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  He wasn't.

  Now I know.

  The thought cut through the mental fog like a blade.

  For years he had carried that guilt. The push. The stairs. Michele dead at the bottom. The stares at the orphanage. The words whispered behind his back: murderer, monster. He had learned to live with that weight, to bury it so deep he almost didn't feel it anymore.

  Now he had seen. Through Michele's eyes, through his mind as he died. He had seen what really killed him.

  Not the fall. Not the spinal trauma.

  What's inside me.

  That thing. That dark god made of roots and tentacles, with that red eye pulsing like a diseased heart. It was inside him. It had always been inside him. And Michele had seen it.

  For an instant, through Brando's eyes, Michele had looked straight into the abyss.

  And the abyss had looked back.

  It meant there was something inside him, something cosmically, terribly wrong, something that had killed a boy just because that boy had dared to look him in the eyes at the wrong moment.

  And that thing was still there.

  "Brando." Alessio again, closer. "Can you hear me?"

  "I hear you," he croaked.

  He pushed himself up on his elbows. Every muscle protested, burned skin pulling with each movement, bruised ribs sending jolts through his chest. The physical pain was almost a relief—something concrete to hold onto.

  Rusty was crouched at the foot of the anvil, all three eyes fixed on Brando with an intensity he'd never seen before, fur bristling, the third eye pulsing violet.

  Maleth was still. The mad Forger had stopped laughing, gesturing, acting crazy. He stared at Brando with those white-fire eyes, and there was something different in his gaze.

  "I've seen many memories on this anvil," Maleth said. His voice had lost its earlier madness—it was low, grave, almost a whisper. "Wars. Massacres. Betrayals."

  The fire in his eyes flickered.

  "But never anything like this."

  Brando pulled himself into a sitting position, head spinning, and ignored the vertigo.

  "What did you see?"

  Maleth laughed, a bitter laugh with nothing amused about it.

  "See? I didn't see anything, kid. I felt. When the hammer struck that crystal, when your memory opened up..." He shook his head, chains clinking. "It was like standing near a black hole. Something that sucks everything into itself, so vast my mind couldn't even perceive its edges."

  He approached the anvil, the heat emanating from his body suffocating, but Brando didn't move.

  "Kid," Maleth said, lowering his voice as if afraid someone might hear, "what the fuck are you, exactly?"

  Brando opened his mouth.

  Closed it.

  I'm an orphan from Rione Sanità. I'm a Zeta. I'm Karanti. None of those answers worked. None captured what he had just discovered.

  "I don't know," he admitted. "Not yet."

  Maleth nodded.

  "At least you're honest." He moved away toward the other anvil, the smaller one where the crystal lay. What had been the core of Brando's memory.

  It had changed.

  Before the forging it was amorphous, faded violet. Now it had a defined shape—a perfect parallelepiped, the size of a fist—and the color had become a black so deep it looked like a piece of void torn away and solidified. Red striations ran through it like veins.

  Veins that pulsed.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  The same rhythm as the Eye.

  "The first trial is complete," Maleth said. "The memory has been beaten and crystallized."

  Brando stared at the black crystal. Part of him wanted to touch it. Another part wanted to run as far away as possible.

  "And the second?" Alessio asked, stepping forward. "You said three trials."

  Maleth turned, and on his burned face appeared a smile that had nothing reassuring about it.

  "The 20 Damned aren't complete yet. The crystal has been forged, yes, but it must be accepted."

  "Accepted?" Brando repeated.

  "That thing inside you..." Maleth pointed at his chest with a burned finger. "You've seen it. You've felt it. But you've never truly dealt with it."

  Actually, he had once, in Jason's Chamber, but Brando wasn't sure that situation counted. Either way, those words hit him like a punch. Talk to that thing? Seriously?

  "No," he said automatically. "Not—"

  "You need to establish who's in charge," Maleth interrupted. "Until you do, the crystal remains unstable. And you remain... divided."

  He approached the anvil again.

  "The second trial will be a confrontation. You must enter your own head and face that thing face to face."

  "Face it how?" Brando's voice came out higher than he intended. "It's a fucking cosmic god! You felt what it does—it killed Michele just by looking at him!"

  "And you're still alive," Maleth replied, calm. "That thing has been inside you since you were born, probably. It's seen you every day of your life. Yet here you are. Breathing. Speaking. Have you ever wondered why?"

  Brando had no answer.

  "If it wanted to kill you, it would have done it already. It doesn't want to. Or it can't. Either way, it means you have power over it. Or at least that you could."

  "And if I fail?"

  Maleth's smile vanished.

  "If you try to fight it, you lose. It's beyond your comprehension, beyond your strength. If you try to run, it consumes you from within, slowly. You become an empty shell with it at the controls."

  The words hung suspended in the hot air.

  "The only way is to negotiate. Establish boundaries. Accept that it's part of you without giving it control."

  Accept.

  The word burned more than the cavern's heat.

  For years Brando had buried everything—the traumas, the rage, the loneliness. He had built walls inside himself so high and so thick that even he couldn't see what was behind them anymore.

  And now someone was asking him to tear them down. To look in the face what he had hidden. To accept it.

  Alessio stepped closer, his metal hand on Brando's shoulder.

  "You don't have to do this alone," the veteran said. "I can't follow you into your head, but I'll stay here standing guard. If that thing tries to screw you over, remember you've still got things to do out here."

  Brando looked at him. Then at Rusty, who let out a soft whimper. Then at Maleth.

  Three figures so different—a veteran trapped in a tin body, a puppy with three eyes, a mad smith chained to an anvil.

  They were there. For him.

  You're not alone.

  The thought emerged from the chaos in his head like a beacon in the storm.

  His whole life he had been alone. At the orphanage. In the Rione. At the Academy. Always the Zeta. Always the anomaly. Always the one to avoid, to despise, to forget.

  Now there was Giordano. There was Rusty. There were Alessio and the other veterans. Folgore, Sara—there was even Bianca, somewhere, waiting to be saved.

  You have something to come back to. You have someone counting on you.

  He inhaled. The hot air burned his lungs.

  "How does it work?"