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Jayce was going to die here if he didn’t do something.
His leg had been snapped in two. He could barely sit up without blinding pain that made him fall back to the ground, sick to his stomach. He had to drag himself through dirt and dust, through the pulsing, multicolored, craters of the arcane, just to get around. He cleaned the wound with the dirty water in the cave, wrapped it up in the torn fabric of his clothes, tried to set the shattered pieces of bone, and did everything he could do, but in his heart, he knew it wasn’t going to heal well. His only hope was to find a way out of there as soon as possible.
Hard to do when he couldn’t even stand.
The pain of his broken leg wasn’t his only concern.
A night later, still in this horrible pit, Jayce was left clenching his hollow stomach. His fingers gripped, dug, and pushed against the gnawing hunger in his gut. He curled up on his side and sobbed when it became too unbearable to think about anything else.
Hunger makes you delusional. It drives you insane, makes you angry. You couldn’t think through the pain, and you can barely feel anything besides the all consuming hunger.
Hunger makes you desperate.
Jayce’s leg wasn’t getting better.
He had tried to eat something, anything. There was nothing around for miles, being so deep underground. He was forced to satisfy himself with the filthy water in front of him. The sun didn’t reach down here, but he could only assume it had been days before he found something.
He had killed a strange, lizard-like creature. It had skittered over his body while he was in search of some sleep. He didn’t have to think, couldn’t think. He felt the movement of something alive, and he reacted on instinct. His eyes had snapped open, he had scrambled to action, grabbing the creature as it shrieked and struggled at the attack, and slammed it into the ground until it stopped squirming. Until he heard bones breaking under his palm and saw blood splatter.
He had wasted no time tearing into the small animal. He didn’t think of the raw meat he would be ingesting, or the arcane magic clearly infecting the body, mutating it into something unnatural. His mind was filled with nothing but relief and hunger as its blood soaked his chin and its tiny entrails slipped down his throat.
And yet, despite all the pain and all the yearning for more, Jayce could not keep the food down.
He tried again and again. Each time he caught a creature, he’d break them into pieces, tear their skin apart, cook them in a fire, test different parts of them, everything. Everything he tried ended in the same result. His stomach would expel his food and he would be left sicker and hungrier than before.
He never stopped because that was all there was. He had no choice. He needed to eat something.
Then, the last time he hunted for his food came. Then, the creature had slipped from his grasp and skittered away, climbing up a wall. Then, Jayce—desperate, hungry, angry— had stood up to reach the animal.
He howled as his broken leg collapsed from under him, sending him right back to the ground.
In the first time since—however long it has been since the hunger had begun, Jayce had remembered the pain.
When the stars faded from his vision, and he had stopped heaving up nothing from his aching stomach, he took a look at the damage.
Before it was even unwrapped, he could see his leg was a disgusting mess of dead flesh and infection. He could see his skin inflamed and blackened with necrosis, along with the sickly pale pastels of the arcane’s touch infecting it. Skin turned yellow and peeling off and curling up his leg. Muscles turned gray and hardened like stone. A sticky and colorful pus leaked out of the wound and attached itself to his hand, oozing down like slime.
He had set the bone before, but it wasn’t healing correctly. The break was still crooked, the spot where they had started to connect before it had been snapped again had created a large mass of tissue. He could see it underneath all the blood and gore.
His leg wasn’t healing. He couldn’t eat. The hunger made him go crazy. He had to do something. He had to do something or else he would die down here.
Jayce stared at the live flesh of his leg.
His stomach ached.
The sound of dragging through the dirt and grime on the floor was becoming white noise to him. Everything sounded like white noise to him now.
He could barely think.
Jayce hasn’t eaten in days. He was going to die if he didn’t do something.
His back hit the wall of his prison, his eyes glazed, his breathing coming in short bursts and soft whimpers. He pulled his good leg up, bending the stiff limb at the knee to stabilize him. Then, he dragged his bad leg in, keeping it lying on the ground. With one hand on the leg, just above the festering wound, he grabbed a long, jagged piece of the hammer he had deconstructed. He dipped it into the simmering fire, heating the end of it until it glowed red and angry, like hot lava.
Once it burned bright, Jayce didn’t hesitate. He pressed the burning metal against his skin.
He screamed—cursed, cried, wailed— high above his head, into the vast void of the cavern.
His head slammed into the stone behind him before his body rocked forward, shoulders curled and tense, as he screamed again.
His skin sizzled, the smell of cooking meat filled the air.
The pain was excruciating.
He didn’t know how long he had to wait, but once the nerves were killed and he felt like a frayed wire, sparking and zapping every pain response in his body, he moved the tool back into the fire to heat it back up. His arms shook and his soft whimpers had turned into harsh sobs, but he brought the tool back to his leg once more to char the skin black.
Soon, his leg was blistered and smoldered, blood bubbled and pooled under him, tendons snapped and muscles cooked throughout.
The tool clattered to the ground beside him and Jayce—hurt, scared, desperate— dug his nails deep into his flesh.
He shouted at the flash of pain that spiked up when he did, but he was too desperate to care. His fingers curled around and tore a chunk of flesh from his calf. His arm jerked back, blood spraying, hitting him in the eye, painting the wall behind him. He held the meat in his hand. He didn’t look at it, he couldn’t. He could only turn his head and shove the food into his mouth, chewing quickly and swallowing it down.
Once it made its way down his throat, he dug in for more, pulling out a stringy piece of muscle and making a truly awful sound as he slurped it down.
He continued ravaging his own leg for its meat, chewing and swallowing it down till it became a heavy weight in his aching stomach. His hands were soaked with his own blood and it got smeared on his face. Across his nose, down his chin, speckling his beard with gorey scraps.
When you grow hungry, you grow angry. You can lash out, hurt, or kill just to satiate the feeling. When you grow hungry, you grow maddened. You can’t think outside of all the pain, every thought is surrounded by your needs. And once the hunger reaches its peak in agony, once the violence has no outlet, and once the mind loses all rationality, you grow desperate. Jayce had felt it all, and it drove him to do the unthinkable.
He had devoured his own body and flesh because there was nothing else. His leg wasn’t healing. He couldn’t save it, but if he got rid of it, he might just be able to save himself.
With the weight of a meal sitting in his gut, he quickly moved onto his next step before he could register his actions and lose the fight to continue.
His leg was stripped of skin and muscle, enough so that he could see the damaged bone clearly. He could see what was keeping it still attached to his body. So with the last strength left inside himself, he grabbed his foot and ripped the last remaining pieces of his tendons keeping his sanity intact.
The jagged bone was all that remained.
Jayce pushed off the wall of the cavern, using what’s left of his hammer like a cane to balance himself. He stared up at the cave wall, feeling dizzy at the height he had to climb.
His makeshift cane dropped, falling with an echoing thud on the ground next to his amputated limb.
What’s left of his leg had been bandaged poorly with the remains of his vest. More parts of his hammer had been stripped away to make a brace for his leg, strapped tightly around his thigh and his knee with the leather straps keeping everything wrapped up. Two steel rods were flattened out and wrapped up by the red leather straps from the hammer’s handle. They attached the two metal bands together, moving with the four sets of gears fixed in place on the sides. And just below his knee, fastened outside of the bandages, was what was left of his hammer.
He looked down at his poorly constructed prosthetic. It hurt. It hurt unbelievably so, but it worked. He could stand on the beaten, slender prosthesis. And the wide, flat point of what was now his foot, was just thin enough to dig into the hard rock of the wall.
Jayce did what he needed to do to survive.