Outcast indeed, he thought resentfully.

  He had always been, now that he thought about it.

  His mind drifted to older memories, ignoring the horned beast that was thrashing violently in the throes of another mutation.

  This was years ago, back in his time with his guardian, Atafa.

  The young boy lay on the ground covered in wounds.

  It was a regular day of training.

  “Your kind are meant to heal faster.”

  Elijah didn’t reply to his taunt and instead focused on looking for an opening. He knew that any lip he gave would be returned with brutal punishment.

  A kick to the skull sent him rolling across the dirt, his momentum only arrested by contact with one of the training dummies erected like as many trees in a forest.

  Then again, whether or not he spoke, the punishment was always brutal.

  “Why not attack?”

  “I can’t win.”

  “Ho.”

  His master gave a sound of surprised amusement.

  “And you think I’ll let you off just because you don’t fight back.”

  The young Lycan didn’t dare answer, but that was indeed in expectation; even a sadist bastard like him had to relent, no?

  The training session ended up with the man’s sword buried in his student’s leg, straight into the bone.

  “You seem to not understand what exactly it is you are.”

  The man spoke while he leaned on his weapon’s hilt, caring not that the added weight was excruciating to his impaled charge.

  “Life doesn’t care that you can’t win. Life will not give you a break because you do not fight back.”

  Smack!

  Atafa felt the blood drip down from his brow as the enraged yellow eyes of the young child burned a hole into him.

  His own vision turned to the small rock that had struck him.

  “You must marvel at the gifts of your body,” he said with a grin, “the ability to turn a small stone into a missile without relying on chants or spells. The ability to heal from deadly wounds at rates that defy mortal limits. Authority over all Earth Metals. What power you must revel in.”

  Due to the separation caused by the surprise attack, he was now crouched a little distance away from his master, the wounds healing rapidly like he had said.

  “Don’t be fooled; your powers aren’t some blessing. Mistress Ani didn’t give you these abilities to make you rulers or to make you special. The Earth has made your kind outcasts. You were given these special abilities so that you would tower over trembling creation like a giant and so that your fall by the hands of the august Elves would be all the more glorious. You were abhorred by Mother Earth from the moment she spat you out, and even now she, and all her creation with her, desire your destruction. Do you understand now what you are? Not just an osu, not just an outcast. You’re an abomination.”

  Elijah’s fury had cooled as he listened to his master’s diatribe.

  He looked at his hands with complex emotions. Moments ago, they had been covered with wounds; there wasn’t even evidence of scarring now.

  This was… unnatural.

  He was a monster.

  Unwanted.

  The gods reviled him.

  The earth abhorred him.

  Even his own parents… wasn’t it evidence of how much they cared that they had left him in the charge of this tyrant and had only seen him once since then?

  What was he?

  Why was he here?

  Why should he struggle against aggression and pain for an existence undesired?

  “What should I do?”

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  His voice was barely audible and carried with it a brokenness that could barely be imagined, let alone described.

  What could be done?

  What answer would satisfy such a question?

  Atafa turned away from him and began walking back to his quarters.

  “There’s only one thing you can do,” he said almost carelessly over his shoulder. “Live!”

  Back in the present, the words of his father came to him. That exact same wish: live!

  Yellow eyes glistened with energy as, moved by some power he couldn’t understand, Elijah’s body moved with its usual alacrity, evading what should have been the death knell from the mutant’s charge.

  No wonder it took so long to finish me off.

  Before him, the creature once recognisable as a wildebeest had crossed over to the realm that could truly be called monstrous.

  Its head was now a mass of eyeballs of varying sizes but equal horror, and strange and skinless limbs grew and proceeded from its trunk, making it unbalanced.

  Elijah now knew that he could not afford a drawn-out battle with such a transitory creature. For all he knew, it would soon grow wings.

  I didn’t want to have to use this, he said to himself, pushing out his palm towards his attacking opponent as though intending to stop it like some traffic warden.

  “Calling on the blessings of iron.”

  The sound of hooves and squishy flesh striking the ground was heard.

  “Calling on the power of refinement.”

  It was closer.

  “Calling on the spirits of the forge.”

  The expected collision never happened.

  Instead, there was a series of brutal squelches that would churn the stomachs of any listeners, and the powerful beat of his hooves on the blood-stained white sand ceased.

  Elijah’s ragged hair was covered in blood.

  It was the vital blood of the once all-too-persistent beast.

  Several iron spikes protruded from his already ruined garments and pierced into his enemy brutally, arresting its momentum fully.

  The creature strained more and actually increased in size, huge parts of its body now being nothing but large tumours. Despite the speed of its growth and ferocity of its struggle, it was unable to extricate itself from its intended prey’s power.

  What was more, the bounds seemed to become more stable with the struggle. Its viscous, dark red blood didn’t fall to the ground but instead seemed to gather into the spikes.

  The boy responsible was on one knee, desperately trying to stay up as he perspired and panted.

  “Hey,” he said to the creature, grinning a twisted and painful grin that revealed bloodstained teeth, “I win.”

  Without the possibility of fighting back, the mutant was torn apart, its carcass cast in all directions by the iron blades.

  Was it over?

  Elijah pushed himself back to his feet as the iron receded into his body and disappeared, leaving no evidence, besides the decimated corpse, of such an ability coming from him.

  He spent a few seconds on his feet stubbornly, but his injuries overcame him, and he found himself on his back again, breathing slowly and raggedly, his clouded-over eyes staring ahead.

  Damn it, he thought ruefully, that’s why I didn’t want to use that.

  The sudden ability he had used did nothing to improve the pernicious condition of his body. He couldn’t even twist his features into a proper scowl without pain shooting through him.

  Convinced that he would have to heal slowly and hope that that unaccountable reaction did not manifest again, he closed his eyes and paid attention to his other senses.

  That tremor he had felt during the battle… anyway, it was too late now. He wasn’t in any condition to flee.

  Several peaceful moments passed.

  Despite the enormous pain he felt, he was filled with an inexplicable serenity.

  Was that what it felt like to win?

  To grasp victory from the jaws of defeat even with your life on the line.

  So this is what it’s like to live… I’ve been missing out.

  The sand beneath him shivered.

  The battle between him and the giant wildebeest had been brutal, and its evidence was the white sand now dyed red.

  When two beasts fought, it was only natural that scavengers would follow shortly after to feast on the spoils.

  The sand shifted again. If he weren't already aware of what was coming, he could have mistaken it for some haptic illusion caused by the ruinous state of his body and the senses attached. He was aware, though.

  Once more it shifted, a deeper and unmistakable tremor this time, rolling through the earth beneath him, as though something far below had shifted its immense weight.

  His breathing faltered.

  Yes, sometimes after two beasts battled, scavengers came to finish the job.

  It wasn’t only scavengers who haunted the aftermath of mortal combat, though… sometimes it was a shark.

  The vibrations reached him through his spine, through the scorched and bloodied skin of his back, each pulse slower than the last but infinitely heavier. The desert, which moments ago had felt still and indifferent, now felt tense—drawn tight like a held breath.

  Sometimes it was a shark or something much, much worse.

  Dad.

  The sand nearby began to move. Not blown by wind, not scattered by impact, but displaced, flowing away from a single point as though repelled. Grains skittered across his arms and face, pattering softly, almost gently, in stark contrast to the growing pressure beneath them.

  Mom.

  A low sound followed—less a roar than a resonance, a vast and distant grinding that made his teeth ache and his bones hum like some sonorous musical instrument. The horizon itself seemed to waver, dunes sagging inward as though the desert were folding.

  Chaina.

  The ground broke.

  Sand erupted upward in a surging column, cascading like water poured from a shattered vessel. Something vast rose with it, dragging the desert skyward, its emergence slow and unstoppable. He could not see it clearly—only a curve of impossible scale, ridged and segmented, eclipsing what little light reached his half-lidded eyes.

  Master

  … If I had another chance, I'd live, and I'd live fully… Thank you.