Gorak never liked the quiet. It was the silence that haunted him, the absence of noise that let the screams crawl back into his mind. That's what war did to a man—it left ghosts, even if your skin stayed intact.
He wasn't always like this, broken and scarred, chained to a life of suffering. Once, he was a soldier, a proud warrior of the northern kingdom. He had fought for a cause, for his king, and for the family he left behind.
But that was a long time ago. Before everything turned to shit.
He could still remember the day it all started. It was supposed to be a routine mission—a border skirmish, nothing more. Gorak and his squad had been sent to push back a group of raiders who had been harassing the villages near the edge of the kingdom. Easy work for seasoned soldiers.
The sun was setting when they reached the village. Smoke billowed in the distance, the unmistakable scent of burning wood and flesh filling the air. They rushed in, expecting a quick battle. What they found instead was a massacre. Men, women, children—all butchered. Blood painted the ground, the walls, everything. The raiders had left nothing behind but bodies and ruin.
Gorak's jaw clenched as he recalled the sight, his grip tightening on the jagged piece of metal in his hand. He could still hear the cries of the survivors, their hollow eyes staring up at him as if he could somehow fix what had been done.
But that wasn't the worst of it. No, the real horror came when they tracked the raiders back to their camp. It was supposed to be a simple ambush, a swift strike to end their reign of terror. But they had walked straight into a trap.
They had underestimated their enemy. The raiders weren't just a band of thieves—they were an organized force, a group of mercenaries hired by a rival kingdom to sow chaos along the border. Gorak and his men were outnumbered, surrounded, and slaughtered like animals.
He should have died that day. Maybe it would've been better if he had. But instead, they captured him, bound him in chains, and marched him south, away from his homeland, away from the north and everything he had ever known.
That was the first time Gorak learned what it meant to be truly helpless. To have your fate ripped from your hands, your choices stripped away until you were nothing but a slave, a prisoner of war. They sold him to the highest bidder, and that's how he ended up here, digging in the dirt for a kingdom that wasn't his own, serving a king he had never sworn loyalty to.
The overseers called him a traitor, a deserter. They beat him when he didn't move fast enough, starved him when they felt like it. But no matter how many times they broke him, they could never take away the fire in his chest.
Because Gorak had one thing that kept him alive, one thing that kept him fighting, even when it felt like everything was lost: her.
Mira.
He could still picture her, standing at the gates of their village, her long dark hair flowing in the wind, her smile as bright as the sun. She was the reason he fought, the reason he endured the pain, the hunger, the endless beatings. She was the reason he hadn't given up.
They had married young, barely eighteen, but they had known from the moment they met that they were meant to be together. Mira was everything to him—his anchor, his light in the dark. And when the war came, when duty called him to fight for his kingdom, she was the one who told him to go, who told him she would wait for him no matter how long it took.
Gorak clenched his fists, his heart heavy with the weight of that promise. He hadn't seen her in years, hadn't even heard news of the north since the day he was taken. But he held onto the hope that she was still alive, that somehow, someday, he would find her again.
That hope was the only thing keeping him from falling apart completely. It was fragile, hanging by a thread, but it was there. And until that thread snapped, he would keep fighting. For her.
But even hope had its limits. There were days when the darkness threatened to swallow him whole, when he wondered if she had moved on, if she had found someone else, someone who wasn't trapped in a life of misery and chains. He wouldn't blame her if she had. What kind of life could he offer her now? He was no longer the man she had married. He was a shadow of that man, beaten and broken.
The sound of chains rattling snapped him out of his thoughts, pulling him back to the present. The barracks were still, save for the occasional groan or cough from the other slaves. Gorak glanced around, his eyes catching sight of Leon, who was tending to the wounded in the dim light of the moon.
Leon had been different from the others from the moment he arrived. There was something in his eyes, a hardness, a fire that reminded Gorak of himself. He moved with purpose, like a man who had seen death and come back from it.
Gorak didn't know where Leon came from or what his story was, but he knew one thing for certain: Leon wasn't just another slave. He was a fighter, a survivor. And Gorak respected that.
He watched as Leon knelt beside one of the injured men, cleaning his wounds with the makeshift supplies he had gathered. The man groaned in pain, but Leon didn't flinch. He worked with precision, his hands steady, his face emotionless.
Gorak sighed, running a hand through his matted hair. The silence pressed down on him like a weight, heavy and suffocating. He needed to keep moving, needed to keep his mind from wandering too far into the past. Because once it started, it was hard to stop.
He couldn't let himself drown in those memories, no matter how much they clawed at him. He had to stay focused, had to keep that sliver of hope alive.
For Mira. For the life he had lost. For the man he used to be.