The crowds roared, but it was just a distant hum. A noise in that background that didn’t reach him. The sand beneath his sandaled feet stuck to his skin, gritty and unforgiving. His twin blades gleamed in the light—sharp, cold, and waiting. Every fight, every kill, brought him to this moment. This place. This life.
Ashes. That’s who he’s become. Not the name his mother had whispered in love, not a name that ever belonged to a boy who dreamed of something better. Ashes is what he was now. Not a human. Not even a man. Just a creature, a weapon, a thing they’ve used for their own profit and entertainment.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had fought for anything other than survival. The Beast—he called it that, as if by distancing himself from it would make it less real—rised inside of him the moment the gates of the cell opened. It always had. The Beast was the part of him that didn’t feel the weight of the bodies he left behind. The part that would kill without hesitation or remorse.
But it was never just the Beast.
Somewhere beneath all that violence, under all the blood and the noise, a sliver of a boy who’s still there was locked away. Someone who wanted to be more than this.
Today was like every other day. His enemies charged, and he met them with ruthless efficiency. One fell, then another. And another. Their screams didn’t matter, their fear didn’t matter, What matters is the fight. The next fight. The next kill.
His breath came in sharp bursts, and the Beast urged him on, telling him to finish it, to end it. But as the last body hit the sand, something shifted. For a moment, just a moment, the weight of everything crashed down on him. The emptiness. The guilt. The feeling of being trapped in a life he didn’t choose, a life that had consumed him.
The cheers of the crowd were hollow in his ears. They called him Ashes, their champion, their monster. But he felt tired. Tired of being something they made. Tired of being a weapon. Tired of not knowing who he was anymore.
He had been a prisoner for so long that he had forgotten what it felt like to dream of something else.
But somewhere, deep inside, there was an ember of hope. A faint, fragile hope that maybe, just maybe, there was something more to life than this. A lift without the Beast. A life without the carnage and blood.
Asher stood there, victorious, but for the first time, he didn’t feel like the victor. The weight of what he had become hung heavily around him, and for once, he let himself wonder if it would be even possible to escape it.
Could he ever be free?