It feels like my own hand.

  I swallow hard. The villagers. The Elders. If they saw this, they would not see a man. They would see an abomination to be burned.

  I focus on the tentacle, this new hand, and try to will it still. For a single, strained heartbeat, it obeys, hanging still in the air. Then, it gives a small, inquisitive twitch.

  I am not in control.

  A second twitch, a whip-crack of black flesh, more violent this time.

  What if Belladonna were in the room? What if it reached for her?

  I scramble across the floor, my eyes hunting for anything that can be made a weapon. The cleaver in the kitchen block. The iron poker by the cold hearth. The rusty axe by the woodpile outside. No. Not clean enough. Not fast enough.

  The frantic rhythm in my chest demands a blade. Not just any blade.

  Alistair's dagger.

  But Alistair is gone. Only Derrick remains. And Derrick is the one who hid it.

  An image surfaces as a sudden flash. Derrick's hand. The dagger. Wood scraping wood. My thick, clumsy fingers find the loose floorboard, and claw at the wood. I wrench it free.

  There it is.

  The tentacle whips through the air, nearly arm-length now.

  I grab the dagger's hilt, the feel of it alien in Derrick's heavy hand.

  The tentacle rears back, its tip quivering like a compass needle.

  Gritting my teeth, I press the cold steel against the base of the writhing growth. The blade meets a strange, rubbery resistance, less like flesh and more like a thick root. Each drag of the blade is a fresh surge of bile rising in my throat. It squirms, the sound a high, thin mewl as the last of it pulls apart.

  The tentacle falls to the floor with a wet slap. Thick, black fluid, cold as oil, gushes from the open wound. I clutch my side, my eyes locked on the thing on the floor.

  It twitches in a pool of fluid. Its frantic, worm-like movements slow.

  The flesh contracts, pulling inward, folding over itself, forming a small, stunted human shape.

  A homunculus.

  A grotesque parody of a person, no bigger than my arm.

  It has a head, a torso, two arms, two legs.

  For one, eternal second, it is still.

  Then, its tiny head turns. Its face is a blank slate of flesh. No eyes, no mouth. But as it turns toward me, the wound in my side gives a hot, answering pulse. A twitch of shared muscle. A phantom limb I never knew I had.

  This thing came from me.

  The edges of the room go soft, blurring into a grey smear. All I can see is the thing on the floor. My mind tries to give it a name. Rot. Tumour. Blight.

  The words dissolve.

  A new word forces itself into my throat. Birth.

  I watch as the last, shallow breath leaves its tiny, malformed chest. The twitching stops. It is still.

  Dead.

  I cannot let anyone see it. I cannot let it be burned as an abomination. I—

  Discard the failed specimen.

  No. It deserves a quiet end.

  In the cellar, behind a row of ale casks, there is a small, forgotten crawlspace sealed with loose bricks. I carry the small, swaddled bundle down into the damp dark. I remove the bricks, place the body inside, and seal the wall again.

  I look at my reflection in a shard of broken bottle on the floor. Derrick's tired, heavy face stares back. How am I supposed to walk out there? How can I face Belladonna when I feel like my own body might erupt again at any moment?

  I look back at the weeping wound in my side. My fingers probe it, searching for a seam in the corrupted flesh.

  I need help.

  No. Not a doctor. Not a healer.

  An alchemist.

  There is only one person in this village whose knowledge might even begin to touch this horror. Nora.

  I am wearing the face of the man who ordered her execution less than twenty-four hours ago. Walking to her door is like a lamb asking a wolf for protection from the shepherd. But she is an alchemist. Her work is rot and growth, the study of things that are and things that should not be. She is the only person in this entire village who might look at a wound like this and see a puzzle instead of an abomination.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  The alternative is to sit here and wait to see what crawls out of me next. I pull my tunic down over the weeping wound, grit my teeth against the fire in my side, and step out of the tavern, my path set for Nora's cottage.

  The afternoon light is weak and grey, doing little to cheer the muddy street. A dozen opening lines for Nora tumble through my mind, each one more foolish than the last.

  My side throbs. I ignore it.

  One foot. Then the other. Just walk. Don't show them the hurt. Don't give them the satisfaction.

  As I near her cottage, a voice cuts through the quiet from the mouth of the darkened alley.

  "Stop right there."

  I turn.

  Nora stands silhouetted in the alleyway. "I buried three friends last year because the Flesh Tax took their children and they lost the will to live."

  Her voice is low, a gravelly thing. "I have watched this village bleed out, one quiet cut at a time. And you, Derrick. You, the Councilman. You were supposed to be our shield."

  She steps out of the shadows. She holds the long, curved scythe she uses for harvesting. The blade is level with my throat.

  Her knuckles are sharp points of bone against the wood of the handle. "Last night, you sent a man to murder me in my bed. Today, you have the audacity to walk my streets."

  She raises the scythe, its curved blade shining. "It ends now. You have five seconds to explain why this blade should not find your eye," she says, her grip tightening on the wood of the handle. "Or I swear on the graves of every child this village has lost, I will add you to the soil."

  Find a crack. A weakness.

  Her son? No, that would harden her.

  Her fear? She has none left.

  I can't break it. I have to show her.

  My hands shake as I lift my tunic, exposing the brand.

  The scythe lowers, but only by an inch. Nora's eyes, still narrowed, are fixed on the weeping brand. Her face pulls tight.

  "In the house," she commands. "Now."

  Inside, the warmth of the hearth does nothing to thaw the ice between us.

  "On the stool," she says, pointing. "Shirt off."

  I obey, my movements stiff. The air feels cold on my exposed skin. She approaches with a tray of alchemical tools. Glass rods. Silver tweezers. A small, polished obsidian lens.

  She circles the stool, her eyes never leaving the brand. "This corruption." She leans closer. "What is this?"

  A knot of air locks in my throat. She sees it. She knows.

  "It's not rot," she continues, picking up the obsidian lens. "It's generative. As if the flesh is trying to build something." She bends down, peering through the lens.

  A frantic rhythm thumps against my bones, but the real terror is the pressure building beneath the brand, the throb of something stirring.

  Don't move. Don't erupt.

  "And this fissure at the centre." She traces the air just above the wound with a glass rod. "It's fresh. Like a pressure valve. Something was released from here. Recently."

  My mind scrambles for a lie.

  A fall.

  A splinter from a brawl.

  She straightens up. Her face is pale. She stares at the stark, simple line branded into my skin.

  "Gods alive." The obsidian lens clatters from her hand onto the tray. "I know that line. That's their mark."

  Nora doesn't stumble back. She freezes. "The Abacus Seal," she breathes.

  "Darkwater," she says, the word flat. "The west wing workshop."

  Nora sways, one hand finding the back of a nearby chair to steady herself before she lowers her body into it. "I was just an apprentice. Barely eighteen. That was sixty years ago," she says, her voice distant. "Before the swamp had receded this far. Before the Flesh Tax. Before any of this."

  Her attention drifts towards the fire. "My masters," she says. "They were brilliant. But they had no soul."

  "The brand isn't just a mark, Derrick. It's a formula that threads itself into the host's nervous system, seeking out the strongest emotional anchor. For you, that's your daughter. Once found, the brand hijacks that connection, rewiring your neural pathways until the concept 'protect Belladonna' is overwritten by 'obey them.' Your love for her will cease to exist."

  Her eyes lose their focus on me, the firelight reflecting in them now catching on a scene sixty years in the past. "There was a man. A stonemason from a village long since swallowed by the swamp. His true love was his craft. His hands. My masters brought him to the workshop to demonstrate the brand's power."

  Nora shudders, wrapping her arms around herself. "That night, after they branded him, I saw him walk out of the workshop, his eyes empty. He went to the great stone monolith he had spent five years carving for the village square. And with his own bare hands, he ground it down to dust. Methodically. Without stopping. He didn't stop until his fingers were bloody stumps and the stone was nothing but sand. He destroyed the one thing he loved most in the world, because they commanded it."

  She looks down at her own hands, and begins rubbing the back of her left hand with the thumb of her right. The motion is repetitive, almost abrasive, as if trying to scrub away a stain only she can see.

  "The worst part," she says, her voice thinning, "the part that has haunted me for sixty years, is that I helped them. I was the one who heated the iron, thinking it was for a routine warding ceremony. I held the tray. They took it from me and went into the chamber. I waited outside. When they were done, when I saw that proud man walk out with empty eyes, I packed my bags and left before dawn. I never looked back."

  She gives a short laugh. "I was a fool. A young, arrogant fool. I thought I could undo it. I thought I could break the brand. I spent the next twenty years of my life trying to. I tried every solvent, every counter-spell."

  She shakes her head. "It was useless."

  She picks up the obsidian lens from her tray, holding it in her palm. For a moment, she stares into its polished, dark surface. Then she closes her fist around it, the bones of her fist pressing against her skin.

  "After all that struggle, after all that failure, they found me. Twenty years after I fled, the monsters I ran from came to Greyhollow. They perfected their system. They made a pact with our Elders and called it the Flesh Tax."

  She opens her hand, staring at the deep red imprint the lens has left on her skin. "I thought the evil I ran from was sleeping. But it was busy. It was building."

  She falls silent for a moment. Then her expression sharpens, her focus landing back on me, on the brand on my skin. "And now, after sixty years, the ghost of their first great success is sitting in my chair."

  Her touch is firm as her hand finds my arm. "There is no breaking it, Derrick. The brand remakes you, changing the architecture of your mind. It is you. And you cannot escape yourself. It's a logical impossibility."

  My hand trembles on my knee. "But my love for Belladonna is still here." Hope makes my throat tighten, the words I want to say catching on it. "That has to mean there's a flaw. Maybe it didn't work."

  "That's not your love," she says, her expression unchanging. "That's a ghost emotion the brand leaves behind to maintain the host's sanity."

  She leans forward an inch, jabbing a finger at my chest. "Listen to me. Once they decide they prefer you mad, they will cut it. Then you will be no different from the stonemason."

  The trembling in my hand stops. I wish it hadn't. The stillness feels like surrender.

  Nora turns to a cabinet, her back to me, and for a moment she just stands there, her hand hovering over a row of jars. "I've pictured it, you know. Going back. Just to see what new monsters they've built in that workshop."

  She grabs a small, clay pot.

  She turns back, her eyes holding a new, hard fire. "The brand is impossible to break. I did not say it's impossible to fight."

  She presses the small, clay pot into my hand. "This will numb the flesh. It's a temporary solution to a permanent problem."

  "You have one day until the collection, Derrick. One day until the Collectors come for Alistair." She leans in, each word landing like a sharpened stone. "I have just told you that your cage is inescapable. So I ask you this. What is a man to do when his prison cell is on fire?"

  Nora straightens up and walks to her door, holding it open for me. "Think on it. I'll see you in the square tomorrow."