Chapter 33: The Hand That Haunts
AVIN’S POV
"Life sucks, even when I have been given a second chance I have made no real efforts to make the best out of it.. All I do is fuck it up, on earth and on whatever the hell this hell hole is....
So far, all I have been able to do is mess shit up... and Miranda... all this is my fault"
The words slid out of me bitter and small, swallowed by the dark like a confession muttered into a grave. A giggle that tasted of iron escaped my lips, then dissolved into a long, hopeless sigh.
"Now she hates me... and I’m pretty sure she is going to be like my first villain.. feels like how things work around here...
.
.
Anyway, this is a pretty long fall"
I opened my eyes into nothing. Not a ceiling, not the familiar grain of my chamber — only absolute black, a sucking emptiness that had no up and no down. For a breath that felt like a lifetime I realized I was moving: falling, tumbling, a slow merciless drop that rewound the whole of me, past mistakes flickering like bad film.
I kept my gaze downwards, peering into the void as if something there might anchor me. For a moment the dark was a smooth, indifferent thing. Then a thought, petty — popped through the fog of panic.
"Ah," I chuckled.
"Is this a dream?"
The thought felt like a laugh at the universe. Another stale rerun. I thought of the last dream, the falling one that had started the first time my world cracked open.
I sighed, a wet, tired sound that tasted of defeat.
"Like the one I had the last time?... with the falling?
So unoriginal"
Below me the void resolve into a shape — slow at first, then impossibly fast. Not stone. Not the familiar dungeon floor I’d known before. This was wrong in a way that made my teeth ache. It looked like... a hand.
"What the fuck is that "
The world tugged. The hand was not static; gravity doubled and then ripped me toward it. I accelerated without any agency, my stomach knotting into a tight, cold rope. I struck the palm with an impact that was softness and hate at once: the skin-yield of flesh beneath callused ridges. It was coarse under my palms, like burlap grown to flesh.
Worse, every second it breathed — a slow, sickly movement that told me what my mind refused: it was alive.
Panic skittered up my spine. I tried to braid calm around my panic, squeezing the same mantra out of myself.
"It’s a dream, it’s a dream, It’s a dream"
The hand shifted and carried me upward, like a servant hoisting a curious toy. I planted my arms on the living surface and hauled my head up. There, filling the sky, a single enormous eye opened — a purple-pupiled iris that glowed with a tint I recognized too well. It was like a familiar chord struck wrong.
The fear settled like ice. Recognition was a brand.
That voice — low, intimate, weaponized — cut the stillness.
"You"
The word did not merely sound. It hammered through bone, through veins, down into a place inside me that had been bruised long ago. My knees buckled and my hands flew to my ears in a useless attempt to shut it out.
But the surface under my knees changed. Sand trembled beneath me: the hand had become a desert. The world rolled into dunes; the horizon wavered. Above the dunes the silhouette rose — a monstrous purple shadow that swallowed the sky.
I stumbled over a rock and fell hard, the gravel rasping at my palms. "Fuck," I spat, crawling, trying to put miles between me and that humongous presence. But it moved. Its feet lifted like storms, and the shadow fell again; the ground trembled with every impossible step.
There was nowhere to run. The foot coming down was the size of a mountain.
"Guess I am gonna have to die in a dream again"
I thought the thought like a bitter joke, bracing where souls are braced. The foot struck the sand like fate — and then, as if someone had blown a candle, the figure vanished. The world stuttered. There was a prickling at the back of my neck as the illusion folded away.
My eyes drifted down and, impossibly, Miranda stood in front of me. Not colossal, not spectral — normal, human, inches from my chest. Her head tilted up and she looked at me with an evil frown that gouged through me like a knife.
"No, no"
I said it aloud and took a step back, expecting distance to grow. It didn’t. I stepped again and again until the space between us was the width of a gasp.
It was as if she were tethered to me by some nightmare string; whether I moved or the world shifted, she remained inches away. Then my limbs went wrong: my muscles stopped obeying. Motion stiffened into denial. My feet were stone.
I could not take my eyes off her. They were magnets.
Her face began to bruise. Not from a blow. Not from anything external. Dark purpling spread across skin as if the world itself had inked her with pain. It looked exactly like the last face I’d seen in that temple: battered, marked, hollow-eyed. My stomach lurched with a tide of guilt — fresh, raw, as if I could taste the betrayal in my mouth.
Her frown flipped, becoming a grin that was all teeth and danger. She raised her hands and dragged them along my arms. When her fingers traced my skin, the sensation wasn’t just heat — it was a revelation of pain so precise it felt like memory being burned out and replaced.
Imagine someone branding you with a star and that brand also peeled out the place where your courage lived. The touch was a lightning of white-hot needles that crawled across every nerve ending, like acid embroidered with stinging wires. Muscles contracted like instruments being plucked; the pain tunneled through to bone, and every nerve responded with fireworks. It was not ache. It was an ingestion of nerve into flame. The sound of it might have been silent, but my chest screamed.
She climbed to my shoulder and the flare intensified. Each millimetre higher was a new pitch of agony, as if someone tuned a violin inside me and drew the bow harder and harder.
She moved to my neck and only then — when her fingers settled around my throat with an almost tender gentleness — did the pain become absolute. The warmth spread like molten glass, then worse: a pressure that felt like my lungs were being rearranged, compressed to a thread. I wanted to scream, to beg, to claw her off — but my voice was molasses, my limbs lead. The desperation of not being able to make a sound ramped the pain into a new horror. Frustration is a fire that intensifies every wound.
Her grip tightened. The world constricted to her hand and the sound of blood in my ears. Then, with the dream’s cruel logic, the scene jumped. I was on the desert again, and she was over me, the weight of her body focused on my chest as her hands constricted. Air clawed at me and slipped away. It felt as if air had learned to avoid me.
I fought, grasping at her wrist. My fingers found something immovable; her hand had become stone. It was as though the universe had sculpted her grip into a statue and fused it to my flesh. Every attempt to pry her away only made the pressure more absolute. A rotten humor suggested the strangest cruelty: I was drowning in the presence of the one thing I had betrayed.
Her smile remained, wide and feral. But tears tracked down her face, clean rivers cutting bright paths through the bruise-dark. There was such fracture on her skin: fury braided with sorrow. It was obscene and intimate.
Like contagion, my eyes began to leak. Tears came uninvited, hot and unstoppable, blurring the world into watercolor. Vision smeared, breathing got thin — the desert sky folded down into a pinhole.
And in the slipping seconds, her voice was a last keystone.
"Clive"
-GASP-
I ripped awake, a jagged gasp tearing from my chest. The room rushed to meet me: the bed, the curtains, the dim morning that did not care about my private wars. I was sitting upright, heart slamming like a trapped animal. My hand flew to my neck — and my fingers met pain: a bruise in the exact shape of fingers and palm, dark and angry.
"What the fuck is happening?"
The chair beside the bed — the place she had sat before — stood witness in the quiet room. Sadness began to well up behind my eyes again, that slow tide of regret. But something in me flared, hotter and rawer than the sorrow.
"I’M SO SICK OF THIS"
I screamed it on top of my lungs, a sound that peeled at the air. Then I slapped myself as hard as I could. The crack of skin on skin was a small, righteous thunder.
"ow," I whispered, fingers rubbing the reddened flesh. It stung. It centered.
"I can’t be always sulking like this... this is me and I should behave like me"
I exhaled. Another slap — this time the other cheek — and the shock of it dealt a clean reset to the fog in my head.
A timid tap at the door. A small feminine voice, stuttering, floated through the wood: "Um.. breakfast is ready, and your presence has been requested by Master Ashborn in the Dining hall, young master"
I looked up and called, "Alright, I will be there." Her footsteps retreated and the house fell back into its ordinary rhythms. I breathed again, loud and practical.
"I have to get my mind together and make better plans and arrangements.. what’s in the past remains in the past
.. hopefully that principle works in this world too"
The words felt like fragile scaffolding. I moved mechanically: bath hot enough to clear the dream film from my skin, teeth scrubbed until my jaw ached, fingers steadying the tremor in my hand. I dressed like someone who belonged: a blue suit cut to fit, buttons polished, a small chain of jewelry against my collarbone. The outward armor of rank.
Heading to the dining hall this time was easy; the path no longer surprised me. The doors opened and the long table came into view — only Ashborn seated, a calm island. He looked up as I entered, expression unreadable.
To the left, Leo stood, still as a statue, that familiar dangerous grin stretched on his face like a razor. He watched me as if I were an animal to be judged.
I eased into the chair assigned to me — the same one I’d been forced into last time — and tried to be small. "Maybe I really am learning," I thought, the idea awkward and fragile.
My hand went to the cutlery. Fork poised. A normal action. A point of normalcy.
Then Ashborn’s voice cut clean through the room.
"He is here"
The words landed like a stone. Reflex pushed the question out of me before I could stop it.
"Who?"
Leo’s voice slipped like oil into the silence.
"Stand in attention for the Duke’s entrance"
The phrase snapped me rigid. My eyes widened. Every muscle tensed. The room had become a held breath. The doorway felt miles away but also like the only place that mattered.