To Forget and Be Forgotten

This chapter contains explicit depictions of extreme violence, dismemberment, and graphic gore. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

If you are sensitive to:

• Detailed body horror

• Prolonged violence

• Graphic injury descriptions

Author's Note:

The violence in this chapter is not gratuitous. It serves as a critical turning point for Seren -the moment the hunted becomes the hunter, and the Church receives the message that she will no longer run. This level of brutality is earned by the narrative and will have lasting consequences on her character arc.

The R18 tag exists for chapters exactly like this one.

Elias ran.

He ran the way men ran when they had been caught doing something they should not have been doing - fast, panicked, looking back over his shoulder every few strides to see if she was still behind him.

She was always still behind him.

The streets of Madras blurred past - narrow lanes, sleeping houses, the occasional dog startled awake by the sound of footsteps moving too fast for the hour. Seren did not run the way he ran. She moved like something that had been chasing prey for centuries, her feet finding the ground exactly when they needed to, her breathing steady, her eyes fixed on the back of his head.

He turned left.

She turned left.

He turned right.

She turned right.

He was fast. Young. Trained. The Church did not send amateurs to track immortals. But he was not faster than her. No one had been faster than her for a very long time.

Elias glanced back again.

This time, when he faced forward, she was already there.

Standing in the middle of the narrow street. Waiting for him.

He skidded to a stop, shoes scraping against stone. His chest heaved. Sweat ran down his temples. His eyes - wide, white in the darkness - darted left and right, looking for an escape that did not exist.

"Please," he said.

Seren said nothing.

"I was just following orders. I didn't- I wasn't going to-"

"You were going to report everything you heard," Seren said quietly. "You were going to tell the priest that I met with Cassian's descendant. That I'm still here. That I'm still the same as I was centuries ago."

Elias swallowed.

"And then," Seren continued, taking a single step forward, "you were going to help them plan another execution. Another burning. Another century of running."

"I didn't have a choice-"

"Neither do I."

She moved.

His left arm came off first.

Not cut. Not sliced. Pulled. Her hand closed around his wrist and she yanked backward with a force that should not have been possible from a frame that size. The joint gave way with a sound like wet wood splitting - a deep, tearing crack that echoed off the walls of the narrow street. Elias screamed as the arm separated from his shoulder, blood spraying in an arc that painted the wall behind him.

He looked down at the stump.

Then back up at her.

The scream that came out of him then was not human. It was the sound of a body trying to process something its mind refused to accept - high, raw, broken in the middle like a voice pushed past its limits.

Seren dropped the arm. It landed on the stone with a wet slap.

"Please," Elias sobbed, stumbling backward until his spine hit the wall. "Please, I'll do anything- I won't tell anyone- I'll disappear-"

"You knew about her," Seren said.

Elias's remaining hand flew to his throat, as if he could protect it with his palm.

"You knew about Kavitha. You were watching her. Planning to use her."

"I didn't- I never-"

His right arm came off next.

This time she did it slower. Her fingers found the gap between his humerus and his shoulder socket and she pushed - not outward, but inward, separating the bones with a grinding crunch that Elias felt in his teeth before the pain caught up. When she finally pulled, the arm came free in a wet rush of blood and torn ligament.

Elias's knees buckled.

He slid down the wall, leaving a dark smear on the stone behind him, his eyes already glazing with shock. His mouth opened and closed like a fish pulled from water. No sound came out anymore. Just a thin, wet whistle from somewhere deep in his throat.

Seren knelt in front of him.

The blood on the street had begun to pool around her shoes. It was warm. It always was.

"You chose the wrong immortal to hunt," she said.

Elias's eyes found hers. There was nothing in them anymore except the quiet, distant horror of someone who had already left his body and was simply waiting for it to stop.

She reached for his leg.

The crack of the femur was loud enough to wake a dog two streets over. It barked once, then fell silent, as if it understood that some sounds were not meant to be answered.

She worked in silence after that.

The wet sounds - the tearing of muscle, the grating of bone against bone, the slow peel of skin separating from what lay beneath - filled the narrow street like a conversation between two things that had no need for words. Every few seconds something would crack or pop or give way with a sound that should have been too soft for the violence it represented.

When she was done, Seren stood up.

The wall behind Elias was no longer visible beneath the red. The street itself had become something else entirely - a butcher's floor, dark and slick and steaming slightly in the warm night air.

She looked down at what remained.

Elias's head was still intact. His eyes were still open. Whatever he had been in his final moments - terrified, regretful, defiant - was no longer readable on his face. There was only the blank stillness of a body that had been taken apart piece by piece.

Seren gathered what she needed.

The head. One hand. Enough to send a message.

She wrapped them in the fabric of his own shirt, tied the bundle with a strip she tore from his trousers, and left the rest of him there - scattered across the stone, unrecognizable as anything that had once been a man.

The priest would find his right hand at the mission door tomorrow morning.

And he would understand.

The hunted was done running.