My experimentation with sigils has born fruit. Mwaahahaha. OK, so its not that grand, but we have found that any sigil with the word crafter in it tends to work well with any other sigil with that designation. Better yet nearly half the people get one.

  If we can get greater sigils working, we won’t have any issues with industry or production. Wood crafters, bone crafters, and even stone crafters all show potential to make their materials into just about anything. Now if only I could find another prism creature to get my light crafter upgraded.

  Day 47, Owen Landers

  Silas braced for impact. The heat rose dramatically as flame engulfed the bear like it had enveloped the dragonkin. He resigned himself to death, if they were only just now treating him as a threat, there was little he could do. Then the bear whined, releasing Silas’s arm, and trampled both him and the dragonkin.

  He was confused, that was the action of a wounded animal. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the time. The dragonkin attempted another stab with its horns, aiming for Silas’s eye this time. Silas lowered his head, letting the helmet take the brunt of the damage.

  It was so hot, lying on top of the flaming creature. His skin felt raw and tight. That did not stop him from wrapping his fingers around the dragonkin’s throat and squeezing. For obvious reasons, a creature wrapped in fire didn’t need large amounts of oxygen.

  Silas’s elbow screamed in pain as tendons pulled on the broken bone. He pulled back and slammed the dragonkin’s head into the stone. It dazed the creature as much as the pommel strikes had dazed Silas. He pulled back and slammed it down again. Something about the motion felt unsatisfying, so he shoved the horns to the side.

  Placing his foot on one Silas pinned it to the ground then grabbed the other with his good arm. The dragonkin tried to use its claws to slash at the back of Silas’s legs. He had long ago bolstered his calves and ankles, too many monsters tried to tear them out for him to leave them vulnerable. With a grunt Silas forked his entire body, prying the horns apart with every muscle in his body.

  He had expected the horn to break, instead, it came out at the root. The dragonkin screeched in pain. Silas had enough of this, they may have been looking for a fight, but they hadn’t been the ones to start this one. Reversing the grip on the horn, Silas shoved it point first, back into the dragonkin’s mouth.

  It gargled for a few moments as Silas twisted the horn through the brain stem and out the back of its neck. The creature twitched a few times. Silas immediately purified it. The purple smoke jogged something loose in his memories. The sigil floating over the body wasn’t meant for him.

  Silas whirled around. Samantha and Bella, where were they? When he turned, he found a strange sight. The bear was on fire, yes, but it didn’t seem to be happy about it. So that wasn’t the bear’s fire, it explained why it seemed panicked earlier. Animals typically did not like being burned alive.

  The beast was limping at Bella and Samantha while they stayed an equal distance away. They didn’t seem to be in any real danger, simply kiting the monster and letting the flames do their work. Maybe he had created the world’s first fire mages.

  Silas looked back down at the purified dragonkin, it should have gone to Bella. She needed a Greater Thermal Cultivator, and Silas had taken that opportunity from her. Granted, they froze and made him fight alone. Silas was fine with being a punching bag, so long as it had a purpose.

  He decided that what he should regret was not that the dragonkin was dead, but that it was purified. Spawn killing was a valid option for getting weak people full powered sigils. Maybe that was the point of the resurrection, after all, they only seemed to rise when a human was the one to kill them.

  Just to be safe he checked his notices. Thankfully the one he had been dreading was yet to arrive. Nimrod was still ignorant, or at least uncaring of Silas’s actions. He glanced at the bear again, it was slowing down as it was pelted by superheated rocks thrown by Bella and Samantha.

  A quick inspection of himself surprised Silas. He had been stabbed, clawed, had a broken arm, and a gouged face, however, he was in surprisingly good condition. His legs were fine and his good arm was burned, but that did not impact his fighting ability so long as he was able to ignore the pain. As far as stamina was concerned, Silas felt fine, not rested but far from winded. He was starting to think that Vitality was the best stat.

  It took him a moment to find his mantis blade. He had dropped it before he tackled the dragonkin, but the weapon had been kicked off to the side in their tussling. Weapon in hand, Silas wondered if it would be prudent to intervene in the low speed chase he was watching.

  No, he decided, it would be better for the pair to overcome their fear on their own. He would rather have slightly injured, confident companions than healthy unreliable ones. Finding a comfortable rock, Silas slid to a sitting position and went about patching himself up.

  Realistically, there wasn’t that much he could do. While he knew how to use needle and thread to stitch up injuries, he lacked thread. Unlike most people, he could use animal hair as the unsanitary nature of fur would be covered by flesh lord. Unfortunately, the only creatures with fur long enough to use as thread were the rubber monkeys and there was no way rubber was useable as a stitching material.

  What he did have was a kind of bone staple. It was crude, but it worked. Silas was sure there would be a scar on his gut, and he was absolutely sure there would be one running from just below his nose across to the hinge of his jaw. Silas tried to picture it. That one might actually look kind of cool.

  The next step on his journey of recovery was to eat. He had brought food and water with them. Actually eating the food was hard. Chewing meat hurt when half the muscles on one side of his face were mangled. It hurt, however, the impact of pain on his mind had been weakened over the last few months. Silas didn’t know if he was getting used to it or if the temporary impact of injuries made him better at coping.

  He chuckled to himself, “Maybe I’m becoming a masochist.”

  Popping another piece of dehydrated meat into his mouth, Silas watched Bella whack the bear’s forepaw with her war club. It cut the skin and caused a respectable amount of pain, but did nothing significant. Samantha darted in with her spear, thrusting it with her whole body weight. Unfortunately, ten year old girls weren’t heavy, even the ones who played rugby.

  The bear batted her away. Samantha tumbled over but suffered no damage. The blow was weak, and two of its legs were injured, dramatically reducing its leverage. This went on for nearly thirty minutes, long enough that Silas felt pity for the bear. It had been chopped, burned, and then finally received death by a thousand cuts.

  Once it went down, Silas got to his feet. He prodded the bone staples in his face. The flesh didn’t feel any different. It was a bother that super speed healing was still too slow to feel. First world problems, or was it a resident of hell problem? First world people didn’t get stabbed in the face by the lizard man servants of a Babylonian hunting god.

  Bella looked up as he approached and winced, “Your nose.”

  Silas blinked, then looked crosseyed at it. It was a bit off, but without a mirror, it was hard to tell, “Is it that bad?”

  Samantha leaned over to get a better look, “Yeah, it looks a bit like a mushroom. One that's been stepped on.”

  For all his shenanigans growing up, he had never broken his nose. He had seen it get fixed in a few movies, mostly dramas that Abby liked. So he grabbed it and pulled it straight. Silas immediately let go to yell some unintelligible four letter words. Either the plucky but heavily bullied love interest was tougher than a U.S. soldier with ten extra stats, either that or movies were full of bull. It did kind of work though, at least when it came to shape.

  “Bella, it’s about time you got yourself a greater sigil,” Silas nodded to the smoking corpse that both girls were still hesitant to approach.

  There was some uncertainty, this looked like a Terra Ursa, but it had fire powers. Was it an infernal Ursa or something that Bella would be unable to use? Could creatures of different species but similar kinds be used? Silas was keen to know. There might be multiple types of beholder to use.

  Bella took an uncertain breath before approaching the beast and purifying it. They all jumped back when the smoke was not black, but a flickering crimson as if the black corruption was infected by something. It bled to purple like normal and left a sigil like normal, it even had the same sigil as the Terra Ursa possessed.

  Silas looked over at Bella, “Please tell me you got a notice explaining this.”

  Fortunately, Bella had the unfocused look of someone reading their mail, “Uh, yes,” then her eyes widened, “Oh this isn’t good.”

  “What?” both Silas and Samantha asked.

  “You know how monsters don’t resurrect when another monster kills them? It's because their soul is co-opted for a kind of breeding process. It isn’t giving me much information, but my tech is telling me that this thing is a dragonkin,” Bella said, “I think they are like a kind of spirit tarantula hawk.”

  Silas shuddered at that. He remembered how often monster meat had parasites, now he wondered if those were incubating horrors. The biotech was not a reliable source of information, which was frustrating. Thankfully there was an easy way to figure out if the bear sigil was actually a dragonkin, “Take the sigil.”

  He expected her to hesitate, it was an unknown after all. Bella didn’t show any hesitation, any fear of the beast had been snuffed out along with its life. The sigil dissolved into her hand and while Silas helped with this one, he hadn’t done the bulk of the work. This apparently meant that whatever ownership system these sigils had did not recognize his claim as superior.

  Bella’s eyes once again glazed over as she read over her status, “It is for Sturdy Gatherer, nothing seems to be off with it.”

  Silas sighed in relief. Purification should mean that any contaminants were removed. Unfortunately, pure had many different meanings. Pure steel was possible, despite steel being an alloy of iron and carbon.

  Samantha bounced on the balls of her feet in excitement, “What does it do? Can you take extra long naps? Are you immune to bee stings? Can you eat as much honey as you want without getting cavities?”

  “Uh, no. I’ll just read it to you…Greater Sturdy Gatherer: strength and toughness increase with effective mass Greater: Items that are consistently worn can be considered part of your effective mass,” Bella looked up at Silas with her eyes wide, “If I wear this armor often enough, my strength should increase?“

  Silas shrugged, “It's worth a try, but I suspect it won’t work until you unlock your spirit stat.”

  It was a good ability. If Silas was able to make her something stupidly heavy, like a full tungsten set of armor, the initial ability might actually make her strong enough to use it. That thought put a smile on his face, Bella would be a nearly invincible tank in armor like that.

  Bella deflated a bit at that. She was only about halfway to getting ten in capacity and she had crippled herself to do it. Her burnt hand showed no signs of recovering. Most of her other burns had healed, leaving only slight scarring where her burnt skin had torn. The hand was still a blackened desiccated thing. Silas was starting to think that it needed to be amputated. It would decrease Bella’s mass so it had been something they had avoided.

  “Will we keep going?” Samantha asked.

  “No, my arm is broken. It will take a few days to heal. Then I will scout for a beholder. This outing has driven home the futility of stunting my advancement,” Silas said. If he died, Bella and Samantha would likely follow, he could just accept the loss of the greater flesh lord sigil, but that would be foolish. A small difference in healing could make a massive difference in survival.

  They harvested a few dozen pounds of meat from the bear before heading back. The return trip was far easier, mostly because they had already killed most of the monsters on their route. They stepped into the clearing and noticed something odd.

  The dirt was wet around the lake. Several lines of damp dirt traced lines from the maze of stone formations, to the pond. The lake had also grown in size. Only by a few feet, but it was still growth. Silas looked up at the purple sky with a handful of clouds floating through it. Were they in a basin of some kind?

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  He supposed he shouldn’t complain if he had somehow stumbled across the lowest point in the area. Though, it was possible that it had been made that way by the Kaiju fight. The foot of dirt would not have stopped their claws from reaching the bedrock and creating a low point for water to collect. At least that was what Silas thought, he wasn’t whatever cross of a geologist, astronomer, and phantasmologist was called.

  Regardless, water was a deterrent to local threats, and not running out would be a boon. Feeling rain would also be nice, the sky would be darkened, reducing the reflected purple light and making it look like just another overcast day in the desert.

  “Survive, get home, find Abby,” Silas muttered as he looked upon at the blank purple sky. This wasn’t home, it never would be. He had a goal and it was more important than anything else.

  He harvested a few bones from the corpse pile to prepare for a week or two of being trapped in a hole. It was becoming depressingly normal to bunker down for extended times. They slid the stone into place and started their routines again.

  Making his armor was becoming easier, repairing it faster. Even with only one hand it only took half a day. Then it was back to exercising, eating, and sleeping. Three days in Silas’s arm was useable, though not combat ready. On day seven, a troop of eight dragonkin came through.

  They searched the area, but weren’t on the lookout for sealed burrows in the rock formation. Two weeks in, Samantha increased the rank of her Greater Thermal Cultivator.

  “Watch this,” she held out a hand with a flat bone slate resting upon it.

  Samantha stuck out her tongue in concentration and started drawing on the slate. It was as if her finger was a wood burning tool, leaving behind a fingertip width line of charred bone. She finished the drawing with a flourish and flipped the slate first to Bella, then showed Silas.

  “I was writing my name in cursive when I got more control,” She said as she showed off her work.

  Silas congratulated her, but internally he was concerned. Samantha had been pushing herself hard, far more than most adults Silas knew. Even so, her methods had been less self destructive than either Silas’s or Bella’s and she had grown substantially less. In nearly two months she had gotten two ranks from her sigils, at least that she could tell. Bella had received three, while Silas had gotten five.

  It wasn’t that Samantha was slow. To the contrary, Silas believed she was growing quickly. That would mean that people on Earth, three months into the apocalypse were only now getting their first sigil ranks. Sure, there would be a few exceptions, a few risk takers here and there. Humanity was a decade or more away from being strong enough to handle some of hell's more dangerous denizens.

  Not for the first time he considered unlocking his spirit and rushing his way through the dragonkin camp. Abby might be in danger even now, and there was nothing he could do about it. Regardless, he was done waiting. It was time to find a beholder, God help anything that got in his way.

  A lot of things got in his way. They only succeeded in helping Silas adapt to his new strength and stamina. Sphinxes, German raptors, rubber monkeys, and even a lone werewolf were put down as the three of them carved their way through ravines. Every so often they would come across strange variants of familiar creatures.

  There was a gorilla creature that had many of the same traits as the rubber monkeys. Silas didn’t care. He had the two girls light liquify some stone before hurling it at the beast. Its fur smoked like a burning tire. Silas left the body behind, wondering if he had just introduced pollution to hell. Not that he was particularly concerned.

  They even came across another tick for Samantha. She cooked its brain before getting the greater variant of that sigil. It wasn’t useable yet, but that would come in time. Their hunt took them away from the dragonkin hive, so they didn’t find any to finish filling out Bella’s set.

  Three days into the hunt he found his quarry. The beholder was substantially more terrifying in his memories. Silas remembered a tentacled creature straight out of a nightmare. A ravenous tumor covered in eyes and teeth. Looking down on it, it seemed smaller.

  Yes, it was big, its main body was the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, however, it seemed somehow flimsy. There were somewhere between one and two hundred tentacles, they were nasty, able to both bite and constrict. This was not like the Terra Ursa, but it was the closest thing Silas had to that experience.

  “This one’s mine,” He glanced over at Bella. She nodded, “If anything tries to join the fight, please kill it.”

  Bella crouched, letting one hand trail along the dirt, “Sammy, let’s set up a barrier,” Then looking back at Silas she asked, “Are you sure you want to do this alone?”

  Taking a deep breath, Silas nodded, “I think this is something I have to do. Out of every monster here, this is the one I have the worst experience with. I can’t risk freezing up if one shows up out of nowhere.”

  Bella winced at the reminder of their bear experience, “I understand.”

  Silas could only shake his head. What was his life coming to? He had two people setting up what was effectively a lava moat to keep him isolated. The beholder finished munching on the bipedal turtle creature it had slipped tendrils into. It was a display that made Silas unsure of his armor’s efficacy.

  He only hesitated for a moment before firming his resolve and continuing. Several dozen eyes locked onto Silas before blinking to drooling maws. Forked tongues tasted the air and several arms slithered towards Silas.

  “Time for round two,” Silas drew his mantis blade.

  He started moving faster, knowing that this would be a battle decided by who could reach the other's vitals first. The first few tentacles didn’t even slow him down. They wrapped around his legs and sliced themselves off on the stone razor blades implanted in his grieves.

  Then the tide of flesh washed in. A veritable wave of hungry teeth and hateful eyes crashed into Silas’s chest, stalling his charge with their mass. They twisted around him, many cutting themselves apart. Some found purchase, through sheer numbers joints were restrained and gaps were penetrated.

  Silas felt several maws bite into his back, the needle teeth having no trouble getting through his skin. He yelled in defiance and swept the mantis blade in a wide circle. If this had been a movie, the blade would have sliced cleanly in a circle clearing an area for Silas to use.

  Unfortunately, his sword was mundane and his strength was not yet superhuman. Like a net of vines, his blade carved through a half dozen tentacles before coming to a halt. Silas yelled, letting out his pent up frustration, and chopped again. He was doing damage faster than the beholder could heal, but not by much.

  It wasn’t that the creature couldn’t heal fast, but that Silas was standing over a good amount of the biomass he chopped. There was also a limit to the amount of food each mouth could consume per bite. Still, there were a lot of maws on a lot of tentacles. Silas grimaced as another appendage wriggled under his upper arm protection.

  He used the vambrace razors to slice it off then chopped it with his sword. There were so many limbs, that it felt like he had dragged a weed eater to a rainforest. The first weeds were back before he was done cutting the last one.

  “Just stay hurt!” Silas roared as he cut the same tentacle for the fifth time.

  An up front confrontation was likely not his greatest idea. Now that he was in the thick of danger, ideas for how to solve or bypass his problems started cropping up. He could have had the girls dump a few buckets of lava on it from the rock formation. Silas could have built a spike trap and lured it in. Maybe he could have attracted other monsters to fight it, then finished off the wounded creature.

  He shook his head. No, just like his companions, he had his own demons. This creature had dragged him into this world, it was the impetuous for all the misery he had gone through over the last three months. It had treated him like a child and suffered for it the first time. He needed to prove to himself that he could win, and win head on.

  A tentacle wrapped around his head and tried to drag him to the ground. Both hands were busy slicing apart other parts of the monster, so he did something that would have horrified the Silas of a few months ago. He bit the tentacle, it was rubbery, similar to the overcooked octopus he had once eaten at a cheap Chinese buffet.

  Notice: Flesh Lord has resisted several parasites and diseases from Famelicus Oculo Dominus

  Notice: A dense source of compatible material ingested, all effects of Fresh Lord are enhanced.

  Silas didn’t really have time to process the notice, however, he did have time to process the dramatic increase to his healing speed. He didn’t know if the beholder had adapted its body to work with its sigil and as a holder of the same sigil he could abuse its healing factor or if there was something special about consuming material from a creature that had the same sigil. Either way, he could use this.

  “You’re dead,” Silas snarled.

  The beholder didn’t react. It just kept coming. Less than twenty minutes into the contest, the mantis blade went dull. Chopping hundreds of tentacles was not good for the edge. Silas didn’t see a metal club being of much use, so he abandoned the weapon. Drawing his skinning knives, he went to work with them.

  Surprisingly the shorter serrated blades worked well on the tentacles. The jagged tears took longer to heal and were just as easy to make. Unfortunately, stone was not a great material to use against the writhing mass he was surrounded with. The teeth on his knives broke, leaving him with two pointed pieces of stone.

  They were discarded as well. Silas was without a weapon and more teeth sank into his arms, legs, and neck. Without any other choice, Silas fought fire with fire. He brought a limb to his mouth, then bit and tore. Normally, his teeth would suffer the same fate as his knives, getting pulled loose by a recoiling limb. However, each chunk of ‘compatible material’ reset it.

  The beholder’s behavior changed. Silas didn’t notice at first, but the tsunami had become more of a wave. He looked around, there were still a huge number of limbs, but the beholder was not using them. In fact, it wasn’t even looking at Silas. He frowned, trying to piece together what it was doing.

  Its many eyes flitted around the edge of the makeshift arena. Then Silas realized why its assault had lessened. The monster was trying to flee. Unfortunately for it, Bella and Samantha had spent the last thirty minutes wisely. A moat of luminescent liquid stone encircled them. Silas doubted it was more than half an inch deep, but half an inch of lava was nothing to scoff at.

  Silas laughed, “You realized it, you can’t win.”

  It was true, while they could go until their respective sigils failed, only the beholder’s flesh would supercharge Flesh Lord. It might take days, but they could both stay awake for that long. Eventually, the beholder would be worn down in the most ridiculous method that Silas could imagine. He wondered if a conflict between two beholders would go on indefinitely.

  Taking the reprieve in pressure, Silas backpedaled to where he had dropped his weapon. While the blade was too dull to cut, it was still pointy enough. He tore at a few dozen more tentacles before shoving it in his scabbard. The taste of blood filled his mouth and his face was sticky with congealing fluids. Something about that felt wrong, but Silas wasn’t in the right place to be thinking about right and wrong.

  Silas dropped into a sprinters stance. Several tentacles took the chance to sink their teeth into his arms and legs. He reached, pulling on that energy. Runners called it a second wind, a function of Vitality. He had read somewhere that the mental barrier was the greatest obstacle to breaking a world record.

  He had more stamina than anyone in the world, why couldn’t he spend it all at once? With that thought he shoved off as hard as he could. Silas was no Usain Bolt, however, he wasn’t far off. Add on seventy pounds of armor and fifteen pounds of sword and Silas was difficult to stop.

  Tentacles tore as he dashed forward. Needle teeth were left behind as they were torn out of the monster’s tiny mouth. This headlong dash had failed when he started the conflict, the beholder had been able to bring all its arms to bear. This time it was distracted, half of the tentacles were stretched out, attempting to find purchase on the rock formation. It was trying to climb over the lava tench.

  Silas was only halfway to his target when it found the needed purchase. It hauled itself up onto the formation and up towards the plateau above. He didn’t hesitate to give chase. Leaping up he grabbed onto one of the trailing limbs and started hauling himself up.

  “Thank God for crazy stamina,” Silas muttered as he hauled himself up, hand over hand.

  They were halfway up the formation before the beholder attempted to remove Silas. This was not a skill that it had needed to develop, as the slaps from the small tentacles were nearly harmless. When it attempted to pull Silas down, he simply wrapped the ropy tendril around his hand to keep himself from sliding.

  In the end, the beholder chose to chew off its own limbs. Not a quick process as eating through a constantly regrowing limb with needle teeth was difficult. When it did manage to remove a limb, Silas had more than enough time to grab another. He tossed the severed one away, letting it flop to the ground.

  Surprisingly, using gravity to remove limbs sped up the struggle. With no regeneration incoming, Silas was able to make headway when he used his forearm blades to cut more off. The smell of cooking meat wafted up as the lava immolated the falling pieces.

  Silas couldn’t help a smile crossing his face as he made his way up. The beholder never stopped climbing and soon, they were atop the formation. Suddenly the movements of the beholder changed. It went from trying to keep Silas away, to dragging him forward.

  He cried out in surprise at the abrupt change, unable to keep his footing. The top of the formation was small, maybe two hundred square feet. There wasn’t enough space to fight, let alone evade the remaining limbs. Something the beholder counted on. The small mouths had done no lasting damage, so it hauled Silas towards the main body.

  He tore several more limbs off but was ultimately unable to avoid being shoved into the tumor’s large mouth. Despite the body’s large size, it was mouth was still too small to fit Silas completely. Then the jaw slammed closed. Needle teeth scaled up to the size of tent steaks punched through his legs, cracking his thick bone armor.

  Silas screamed in pain. He knew this had been a possibility, but despite the number of injuries he had sustained, he still was not used to pain like this. What would come next? The beholder was mostly mouth, how did it digest food without a stomach?

  The tongue licked him. Silas felt nothing until it slid across his face. It burned like an acid. Silas would have laughed if he hadn’t been in so much pain, of course the monster had acid spit. It was a potent acid too, judging from how poorly his armor was holding up. His skin was constantly healing, so he did have a bit of wiggle room.

  Taking the given time, he tore his scabbard off. He lacked the room to unsheathe the blade, something that had not been part of his plan. There was always a chance that the beholder would use its main mouth, Silas had assumed that he could just stab it from the interior.

  He looked around for a plan B. Another burning tongue swipe gave Silas an idea. He rubbed the scabbard along the thick tongue, letting it dissolve. It took longer than he was comfortable with, so he tore the weakened bone off in chunks. Then he thrust the weapon straight up. No bone impeded him, the pointy metal slid in quite easily.

  The beholder froze. Silas wasn’t done. Twisting the blade he hauled it back out. The barbed reverse edge tore gobbets of flesh out, only for Silas to repeat the process. The beholder was quick to spit Silas out.

  He sat a bit dazed, as the monster swayed. Shaking his head Silas knew he didn’t have the time to waste. Grabbing a tentacle he bit into it, wincing as he felt bone armor get ejected and muscle reattach itself. A few moments later Silas climbed to his feet, he was shaky but able to stand. He wondered if thanking God for Eldritch medical care was really the pious thing to do. Shrugging he decided that he could worry about it later.

  While maiming the creature’s insides was the first real damage that either part had inflicted, Silas knew that it wasn’t permanent. As soon as the beholder realized that cannibalizing its arms was good for more than regrowing them, it would begin to heal.

  The mantis blade could likely finish the monster off, given enough time. However, Silas had a better idea. He rushed around the creature, braced his back to it, and shoved it. Normally, he wouldn’t be able to topple something this heavy, however, it was on a few coiled tentacles and was swaying in shock. A barbed lobotomy would do that to anyone.

  He shoved and it fell. Silas moved to the edge and watched it hit the ground. Lava splashed at its impact, cooking flesh and lighting it on fire. There was no way it would survive that.

  A piece of Silas felt like cheering. It was a barbaric side that he felt growing over the last few months. He wasn’t sure he disliked it either.