Chapter Text
Time behaved strangely in the prison.
Sometimes it stretched thin, others it gathered without warning. Sometimes Yuder counted the steady drip of water against stone. Sometimes there was nothing to count at all.
There were hours when the world narrowed to the slow drag of filthy water against stone, the swollen cloth shackles around his wrists and ankles pulling with the current until skin split and bone ground faintly beneath the pressure. Then even that became distant, pain moving through his body like a report delivered from somewhere far away.
His legs throbbed beneath the water. The bones had been shattered days ago – or perhaps weeks. His jailors had done it while laughing, taking turns with the kind of enthusiasm men showed when they wished to prove courage in front of one another.
They had wanted him to cry. To scream.
He didn’t.
That had been the way of most things here. They hurt him, and when he failed to react in a way that satisfied them, their triumph curdled into disquiet. It was not enough that he was chained, not enough that he was bleeding or that his legs were useless beneath him and his wrists had been rubbed raw by restraints soaked heavy with water.
Some part of them still remembered what he had been before they pierced his mana core.
Their powers had never been comparable to his own. Even together, even with rank and imperial authority dressed around their cowardice like armor, they would not have stood against him if his power had answered. That knowledge lingered in them like a bad smell. Yuder saw it in the quick flinch of their eyes whenever he moved too suddenly. Heard it in the way they cursed before striking him again, as though volume could make up for the difference between them.
The wound in his core was what allowed them to keep pretending.
It sat deep in his abdomen, a punctured emptiness where power should have gathered. Every instinctive attempt to draw from that well drove pain through him hard enough to steal the edges from the world. Then came the hollow echo as he reached inward and found only a vast and ringing absence where power should have answered.
They had not become stronger than him.
They had only found where to break him.
The water shifted.
It was a small movement, nothing more than the current dragging against the soaked cloth at his back, but the fabric pulled over the wounds between his shoulder blades and sent a bright, immediate line of pain through him. Yuder’s fingers twitched once beneath the water.
His back was the worst.
The wounds between his shoulder blades still lay open, the torn skin sensitive enough that even the movement of damp cloth against it sent bright, precise pain through him. But pain had become ordinary by then, it could be endured without taking anything more from him.
The absence could not.
The place where weight and warmth and balance should have lived now felt scooped out. Every breath pulled on nothing. Every shift of his shoulders met empty air.
His wings were gone.
Torn out with gleeful abandon.
He remembered the instant the magic tool was ripped from his wrist.
The concealment broke all at once. Space shuddered behind him, and his wings flared out of hiding with the force of a body that had spent too long being compressed. Two of the men closest to him were knocked back. One struck the wall with a curse; another stumbled hard enough that his knee hit stone.
For a single breath, there was silence.
Then the sound rose all at once, greed and fear intertwining until he could no longer separate one from the other.
“He’s Winged!?”
“By the Sun God… look at that pattern…”
“Look at the size of them.”
“How many feathers do you think—”
“The Emperor will be so pleased.”
Not one of them hesitated for long.
The first hands that touched his wings were reverent. Almost gentle. They stroked along the feathers as though confirming something precious, something that might make them rich or honored or forgiven for all the filth already on their hands.
The hands that touched Yuder were not reverent at all.
They seized his shoulders hard enough to wrench a sound from any ordinary man. When no sound came, one of them swore and drove his knee into Yuder’s ruined leg before forcing him down. Cold stone struck his cheek. His chest hit next, breath leaving him in a thin, silent line.
They were not careless with him. Carelessness would have been kinder. Hands pinned him with deliberate cruelty, fingers digging into bruises, thumbs pressing into torn places, weight set where broken bone would grind with petty, furious precision.
One wing was pulled out to its full span.
The grip there was different. Firm and careful – possessive. They did not bend the feathers nor crush the delicate structure beneath their hands. The wing mattered to them.
The knife entered near the root.
The blade dug into the skin below his shoulder blade and tore through flesh and muscle with ugly force, sawing where resistance held, dragging where a sharper instrument might have passed swiftly. Pain burst white and immediate through his back. His body tried to fold the wing in, to pull it close, tried with a blind animal instinct to protect what had never been meant for other hands.
They laughed when it moved.
“Don’t damage it, you idiot.”
“You don’t deserve these anyway.”
“We’ll make sure they’re taken care of.”
The first wing came free.
For a moment, his mind refused the shape of it. The other wing kept straining, beating uselessly against their hold, while the left side of his back simply… ended. A wet, ragged nothing where something vital had been.
That was worse than the pain.
He would have rather lost a hand. The thought was neither reasonable nor useful, but it came with perfect clarity. A hand could hold a sword, write orders, kill an enemy. His wings had been hidden for years. He could not remember the last time he had flown without fear of being seen. They had been danger, evidence, inconvenience – something to bind beneath magic and discipline.
None of that mattered.
They had been his before power, before rank, before the title of Commander had settled over him like armor. They had been part of the private shape of his body, the balance he had never needed to name because it had always been there.
Then the remaining wing was forced flat.
This time, his body knew what was coming.
The feathers trembled despite him. His shoulder pulled once, uselessly, against the grip holding him down. One of the men cursed and pressed harder against the wound where the first wing had been, grinding his palm into torn flesh as though punishing him for the movement.
“Still not a goddamn sound.”
“Is he even human?”
“Just cut it already.”
The second wing was taken with the same eager cruelty.
By then, their voices had begun to fade beneath the pain. Or perhaps Yuder had retreated from them. It was difficult to tell. The world had become stone beneath his face, hands on his body, the wet heat running down his back, and the impossible wrongness of a body that no longer knew how to lie correctly against the ground.
When they were finished, they dragged him back to the water prison.
Blood ran openly from the ragged wounds between his shoulders. It soaked into what remained of his clothes, then diluted in the filthy water as the shackles were fastened again. He was almost grateful he did not have to walk. Without the weight behind him, the world felt wrong. His body kept searching for balance and finding nothing, kept expecting feathers to drag against stone or water or air.
Nothing answered.
Yuder made no sound.
Not when they laughed. Not when one of them touched the torn place at his back and said he looked almost human now. Not when pain and absence twisted together until there was no room left for thought.
His expression did not change.
But deep beneath the silence, somewhere no one else could reach, something in him lowered its head and mourned.
It did not stop.
---
Yuder woke sharply.
His body came upright before thought fully returned, breath tearing once through his chest, both eyes open and focused with a clarity he had not possessed for years.
Both eyes.
The realization struck him strangely, without context at first. The room before him was small and bare: cheap walls, a narrow bed, scratchy fabric twisted beneath one hand. The air held dust and old wood instead of damp stone, filthy water, and blood.
An inn room.
His clothes told him when before his mind finished naming where. The fabric was cheap, the cut common, too loose through the shoulders in a way he had not experienced since receiving the uniform of the Arcane Legion.
The thought came with impossible clarity despite its absurdity:
He was back.
The moment the thought settled, his attention snapped desperately to his back.
The weight… was not there.
His breathing tightened before he noticed it. His fingers moved to his wrist and found the bracelet still in place, the old magic tool sitting against his skin as though nothing had happened. As though there were still something hidden beneath it.
He removed it with fingers that were steady until the final clasp came loose.
The bracelet fell away.
Nothing happened.
No shift in space. No sudden release of pressure behind him. No great curve of wings unfolding from concealment, no feathers brushing against his arms nor familiar breadth settling into place at his back.
Yuder stared at his bare wrist for a long moment.
The room remained quiet around him. Nothing moved. Nothing answered the silence gathering beneath his ribs.
After a while, he stood.
The movement felt strange, his body obeying with the reluctance of something forced to confirm what it already knew. His feet found the floor. His hand closed once around the bracelet, hard enough for the edge of the old magic tool to bite into his palm.
Then he turned toward the mirror.
It was small and clouded at the edges, the reflection within it slightly warped by age. It showed him a young man in cheap clothes, a face he had not seen intact for years, both eyes clear and focused. At a glance, he looked almost untouched.
Yuder pulled his shirt off.
The fabric dragged over his shoulders without catching on anything that should have been there. For a moment, that was worse than pain.
He turned enough for the mirror to show his back.
Long, ragged scars marred the skin between his shoulder blades. They were thickest near the roots, twisted and uneven where the wings had been torn out. From there, the marks traced downward past his ribs in pale, broken lines, following the old paths of muscle and attachment that no longer existed.
Yuder stared.
He was not sure how long.
His mind circled around something without touching it. The impossible had happened. Time had reversed. His body had been returned to a younger shape: before prison, before execution, before the ruin of his final days.
He had returned.
He was alive. The future had opened before him again, impossible and unwritten.
His wings were still gone.