Page 5 of Sage Haven
Providence.
A promise?
A warning?
I didn’t know, but at least it was a direction, and any direction was better than the one I had just come from.
***
When I arrived, it didn’t take long to realize that Providence was nothing like Sanele.
Sanele had choked the life out of everyone within its city limits. Its factories and power plants casted the streets in permanent dusk, compounded by the air that was thick with smoke and something like hopelessness. The people wore exhaustion like it was all they ever knew, all hollow eyes and thin mouths, but Providence…
Providence breathed.
It was old, but not broken.
The buildings were sturdy, their stonework softened by ivy and time. Fields stretched wild beyond the town’s edge, full of life, with air that was clean and crisp, filling my lungs in a way that made me dizzy at first, as if I’d forgotten how to really breathe.
And for the first time in years, I felt something stir inside me.
Hope.
Small, fragile, but real.
It made me feel like I could start over here and that maybe I could build something new.
Something better.
A life carved from boredom instead of tragedy.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy.
I knew my ghosts weren’t finished with me.
They would find me in the quiet moments, slipping through any cracks I hadn’t yet sealed, but for now, I could pretend.
So, I found a small apartment days later and took a job at a café, the kind of place where people smiled for no reason, and for a while, I let myself believe I belonged.
And I believed it, until my past found me again, and everything I thought I’d escaped came crashing back.
2
REICH
“YOU MOTHERFUCKER!”
The words ripped from his throat, rough and raw. His voice cracked under the strain, breaking apart into something else, something unrecognizable. It was the final, desperate wail of a man who knew his gods had already abandoned him. A sound meant for no one and nothing except to remind himself that he still existed, if only for another moment.
Each scream he unleashed was another note in the symphony I had spent years perfecting. There were conductors of music and conductors of war, but me?
I composed agony.
Orchestrated suffering with precision.
I stood still. Silent. Watching.
He thrashed, limbs spasming against the steel coils of razor wire that encased him like a grotesque cocoon. The more he fought, the more the wire dug in. Sinking deeper into his muscles and tendons. Each jerking movement carved long, jagged tears in his flesh, opening him up like a fruit being split at the seam. Blood seeped from his wounds in dark rivulets, tracing paths over his ruined skin and running rivers to the concrete beneath him in a spreading pool of failure.
