Chapter Fifteen: The Long Climb Back to Life Darkness ruled him for three days.
No dreams.
No sound but the thin rasp of his breath.
His body was a ruin—broken ribs, torn muscles, blood thick as mud pooling beneath him. His mind, when it stirred, floated like wreckage in a black sea.
He did not hear the goblins die.
Did not hear the bones crack, the shrieks cut short.
He missed the fury of Flame—the growls, the tearing, the defiant roar of a creature that would not let her knight fall unavenged.
He missed it all.
When he woke at last, it was slow—like thawing from ice.
A weight pressed against his side: warm, heavy, breathing.
Flame.
Her golden eyes blinked slow and patient.
When he coughed, weak and dry, she rose and padded away. A moment later she returned, her muzzle dripping. She had carried water from a stream in her mouth, letting it fall gently between his cracked lips. It was not enough to quench thirst, but enough to anchor him back to life.
Later she brought food—roots and berries crushed between her teeth, offered without pride. Jasper, trembling, chewed. Nearby, Flame devoured a hare she had caught, its blood staining her muzzle, a kill made without hesitation.
Strength trickled into him like the slow drip of a wounded cask.
Jasper stilled his mind.
He gritted his teeth.
With a growl that scraped his throat raw, he reached down, seized the sword that still pierced his leg—and pulled.
One clean, brutal motion.
The blade came free slick with blood. Pain blinded him. His scream startled even the shadows. But luck—or gods darker than the sunlit ones—had spared his arteries.
He was not dead yet.
Clutching the wound, Jasper reached for his pouch. His fingers found the grainy sting of salt. Without mercy, he packed it deep into the wound. The agony was pure, white-hot, but it woke every corner of his fading soul.
He lived.
Around him, the ravine waited. Cold, wet, indifferent.
But Jasper of the Horse Kings was not a man easily killed.
The first weeks were cruelty made flesh.
He could barely crawl at first. Every motion tore at his ribs, ripped at his healing leg. His body was a map of lacerations, purple blooms of bruises, muscles that refused to obey.
Flame hunted endlessly—hares, wild goats, fat lizards from the stones. She ate first, as was right, but she left him his share, nudging carcasses toward him with a rough, maternal paw.
Jasper learned the rocks, learned the roots.
He scavenged—mushrooms, bitter berries, bark he stripped with bleeding hands.
At night, he shivered beneath a cloak of scavenged furs and Flame’s silent vigil.
He built himself back like a blacksmith reforging a blade.
First sitting.
Then crawling.
Then limping.
Pain was nothing.
Pain had always been a companion—one he knew how to tame, how to bind into strength.
The days were marked only by the faint light seeping down the cliffs and the stars slicing the narrow gap of sky.
He fashioned crude crutches from the branches he found.
He forced himself to stand.
Forced himself to walk.
One step a day. Then two.
Fall. Rise. Fall again.
Weeks passed.
His body thickened again—not the polished muscle of a court knight, but the sinew and hardened flesh of a slave, a survivor.
Every morning he drove himself through exercises—small at first, invisible almost, but growing.
Stretching. Breathing. Testing the limits. Expanding them.
The ravine became his training ground.
The rocks became his teachers.
Flame never left his side.
When he stumbled and cursed, she watched.
When he roared at the stubbornness of his own flesh, she laid her head across his lap and listened.
Finally—after a month, maybe more—he stood without falling.
His breath no longer whistled in his chest.
His sword arm, though slower than before, could lift and cut.
Not whole.
But enough.
Sixty percent of what he had once been—enough to fight. Enough to kill.
He limped to the center of the ravine one morning, his battered armor glinting dully in the cold light, his sword newly sharpened on stone. He looked up—five hundred feet of sheer, crumbling cliff—toward the sky that had forgotten him.
He did not curse it.
He only measured it.
And he began to plan his escape.
Entered by: 0xe9a1…78d3
Chapter Sixteen: The Cave Between Lives
He stood again at the base of the cliff.
His hand pressed to the stone, where the shale loosened with every gust, and for a breath, he believed he could do it. That he must do it. That if he didn’t climb now—bloodied and limping—he would die as they wished: nameless in a ravine.
But then—Flame growled.
Not in warning.
In invitation.
She had strayed left, paws soft on stone, nose pressed to an outcropping half-buried beneath twisted bramble. Her golden eyes flicked back once. Then she vanished into shadow.
Jasper followed.
The entrance was low, hidden behind curtain vines and jagged roots. No goblin would’ve noticed. No human would’ve trusted it.
But he was neither now.
Bent, breath caught, he stepped inside.
The cave swallowed him.
The air changed. Cold and wet. Not lifeless—ancient.
The walls pulsed with mineral veins like sleeping muscle.
He pressed a hand to them. They were warm.
Flame padded ahead, her outline silvered in the thin light that filtered through unseen cracks. Her tail flicked with purpose. She knew.
The cave narrowed. Then widened again.
And then—
Light.
Not torchlight. Not the harsh glare of goblin fire.
But a shaft of silver-blue from above, clean and holy, spilling from a break in the stone. Moonlight.
Jasper tilted his head. He could see sky—a patch of it—framed by roots and earth and crumbling stone.
A way out.
He staggered forward. Collapsed in the light. Let it bathe his face.
Flame circled once. Then laid beside him.
Not a word was spoken.
But he understood.
This was no chance.
This was no accident.
This cave—this wound in the earth—had been waiting for him.
A place between death and ascent. Between chapters.
He would not climb the cliff with torn muscle and shattered ribs.
He would rise from within.
A third life.
He spent days there.
Drinking from the cold stream that trickled along the back wall.
Feeding on berries Flame brought, and roots, and the occasional squirrel or snake she laid at his feet with quiet pride.
He healed.
Faster than he should have. Slower than he wanted.
He stretched in the narrow spaces.
Wrapped his limbs in vines for resistance.
Carved marks into the stone—ten for each set of push-ups, circles for each stretch of silence.
Pain was breath now.
Memory, rhythm.
Each day he rose earlier.
Each night he slept deeper.
The armor of the Horse King gleamed faintly by firelight—untouched by battle, as if rebuking the very idea of failure.
He whispered to it, sometimes.
“If you're truly blessed... if you remember the first Horse King… then remember me, too.”
And the armor never answered.
But it never broke.
On the thirty-first day, Flame stood beside the shaft of light.
She looked up. Growled softly.
Jasper stood.
His bones felt whole. Not new—but reforged.
Sixty percent was now seventy-five.
And seventy-five was enough.
He stretched one last time.
Gripped the roots growing down the shaft like nature’s ladder.
He climbed.
At the top, wind greeted him.
Clean. Cold. Sharp with promise.
He pulled himself free, boots finding the moss of a forgotten forest path. He looked down once more into the shaft, into the dark that had cradled him.
He did not speak.
But something within him whispered:
You have died again. And risen. Again.
Flame emerged beside him.
Silent. Proud.
They stood at the forest’s edge.
He imagined in the distance, the black spire of the goblin tower clawed at the sky.
Jasper looked afar into the distance. Long. Quiet.
Then he turned.
Away.
Revenge could wait.
It must wait.
Not because he feared death. But because he had tasted it.
And in the after, he had tasted something rarer.
Freedom.
He was a slave once. And a slave knows what it is to burn for revenge—and die with nothing.
To live, to breathe, to walk—that was rebellion enough for now.
He and Flame slipped into the green shadows of the trees.
No destination. No oath. Just movement. Just silence.
The goblins would boast. They would forget.
Good.
Let them.
Because the horseman lived.
And the world was wide.
Entered by: 0xe9a1…78d3
