"DON'T GET CAUGHT. DON'T GET CAUGHT. DON'T. FUCKING. GET. CAUGHT."
She chanted these words repeatedly, displaying reasons and visualising the aftermath of getting caught.
You'll be bonded. Restrained. Confined. With no freedom over yourself. Prayin...
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The very first time I saw him, the world was collapsing in flames. Everything—flesh, stone, even the sky—burned with a hunger that swallowed us whole. Blood pooled at my feet, staining the air with its bitter scent. But what haunted me more than the carnage was his face.
His left eye burned red, fiercer than any fire, a mirror to the destruction he commanded. Yet his right eye, cold and blue, was unnervingly calm, as though untouched by the horrors he unleashed. It was as if two souls were warred within him—one drenched in blood, the other indifferent to the ruin sourrrounding us.
And in that moment, my twenty one year old self had realized that he wasn't just destroying the world— he was savoring it.
Back then, if I hadn't pressed my forehead to the blood-soaked floor, my head would've rolled away like all the others, severed clean from my body. I remember the cold tremor in my bones as I had knelt, feeling the wet heat of death creeping towards me– towards us. All of us.
He was only nineteen, and yet there was something monstrous behind his youth. While the world crumbled beneath his feet, he spared only those who bent, who gave him their submission like an offering. I was twenty-one, older but powerless before him, a deranged boy drunk on the destruction he brought.
I remember how he had watched the heads fall off with a hollow smile, leaving those of us who knelt alive— not out of mercy, but because he enjoyed the power of watching us cower.
But I’d seen his good side, or at least I convinced myself I had. His kindness was like a shadow—fleeting, untouchable, and perhaps never real. Invincible in its absence. Or maybe I was sicker than him, lost in a madness of my own, desperately clawing for something good in someone like him.
I told myself there had to be more, that behind the blood and cruelty was a heart worth saving. Yet every time I looked deeper, all I found was darkness. Maybe I wasn’t searching for his good side—I was searching for a reason to keep surviving in this place.
A place he reigns over.
I was nothing to him—a mere woman pulled from the wreckage, a pawn among the chaos he unleashed with relentless abandon. His men, loyal and indifferent, had merely hired me amidst the ruin he created, and now, six years later, the truth remains unchanged.
I am still a ghost in his world, a silent witness to the unending destruction he commands, my existence swallowed by the cold, unfeeling void he leaves in his wake.
Sometimes, I wonder if everyone in The Blackbone Zone is like me—a ghost drifting through his world, unseen and insignificant. I’ve watched others, seemingly content in their submission, finding a perverse sense of purpose within the chaos he creates. They wear their respect like a shield, masking their own shadows with facades of acceptance.
All of us were same.
But two weeks ago, a girl who seemed no older than eighteen was imprisoned in a glass cage was brought to our Blackbone Zone, her raven hair cascading to her waist like a dark shroud. Her eyes, large and green, like a forest darkened by shadow.
