Ew.

  But there was more.

  A person. Not an animal or a monster, but a human person.

  An awful jigsaw of limbs and tissue, perfectly cut into pieces, and as I rifled deeper, the trunk offered up pieces, one after another. What must have been arms, shoulders, and a length of torso. Hands.

  A portion of a face that, when I set it on a clean cloth, still suggested a mouth.

  None of it looked… clean. “Gross” is the least that can be said. It wasn’t fresh-splattered either. What was left was the flesh, strange and pale, like things that had been preserved rather than freshly severed.

  For a moment I couldn’t name it, and I thought, “They were once whole.”

  The pieces, when put together, were small in places - too small for a full-grown body - but there were so many of them.

  And when I put a few in their place, I realized that there were two - children, girls - I couldn’t say how old they were. Prepubescent, though.

  That consideration made my skin prickle in a way that wasn’t quite disgust and wasn’t quite sorrow. And some embarrassment and shame.

  I counted the dozen and dozens of pieces in my head like I used to count overdue books: head, torso, two arms, two legs… then another set.

  Naked girls, cut into pieces.

  Something very wrong and very specific had happened here.

  The girls were similar, but when I pieced together an ear, in seven pieces, I noticed that it was far pointier than any other ear I’ve seen before. Either it was just a strange mutation or, pointing out the obvious, one of the girls was, or had been, an elf.

  I set another scrap of clean cloth on a flat rock, hands trembling less from revulsion than from the cold realization of what I had, and laid out the pieces like a crude puzzle. When I placed a forearm next to a shoulder, a small rise and fall moved the linen.

  I focused and watched. The rise and fall was real. Not spasms. Not the twitch of dead muscle. It was slow and regular breath? Or a heartbeat?

  For a moment I thought I was hallucinating from exhaustion and my own magic’s drain. I held my breath and strained to hear - tiny, almost inaudible, but there it was: the soft whisper of air moving, a living rhythm in detached parts.

  They weren’t dead in the way the bandits were dead. They were… preserved. Suspended. Far beyond what was survivable, yes, but yet, not entirely gone.

  I picked up a small piece of palm to examine it. There were no open wounds streaking with the blood. No oozing.

  When I pricked it with the blunt little knife I’d pocketed from a bandit’s belt, the blood was like any other blood.

  I had to know, even if I vomited.

  I whispered the healing spell, “Pana”.

  Light warmed my palm as it passed. The bead of blood trembled and then drew back into the cut, the skin knitting together. The cut sealed.

  If I could close a wound like that, if I could coax tissue to mend, then perhaps I could do more than tidy up corpses. Perhaps I could restore.

  “I’m walking the psycho path,” I said.

  I told myself it was a joke. I told myself it was a plan.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  I had choices: bury them, burn them, report them, or bring help.

  Any of those would be the sensible thing. But no.

  My own hunger for life, for a story, tugged harder. I’d come this far. I’d opened the trunk; no one else had.

  So I set to work.

  Slowly, methodically, I arranged the pieces on the linen. I eased a shoulder into place beside a torso, fitted a hand where a wrist would be, and laid a cheek against a jawline that matched.

  I worked with the silent, meticulous focus I’d used as a librarian cataloging a damaged tome: careful, reverent, a little obsessed. When a wrist refused to sit right, I adjusted the angle and tried again. When a piece shivered and went still, I murmured a soft healing charm and fed it the last of my reserves until warmth returned.

  I should have been horrified. Maybe later I would be. Right then, what I felt was a fierce, astonished proprietorship. These were problems to solve.

  When the first gray line of morning rubbed at the edges of the trees, I wrapped the reassembled pieces carefully in fresh linen I’d taken from a servant’s laundry and put them carefully back into the trunk.

  If anyone ever found the trunk, it would raise terrible questions. If anyone ever found the bundle, it might raise even worse.

  And if - more like when - I stitched the pieces together and opened their eyes properly, I would have to answer to myself for what I’d done.

  Over the next few nights, I returned to the hidden camp again and again.

  I took a few things with me to make it more cozy. A chair, of course. Something to cook with. A pillow to rest my head. Blankets and a few scraps of cloth to make a little floor covering. I stacked branches and twigs along the edges of my little hollow to make a windbreak, weaving the smaller ones together with strips of old cloth. It wasn’t much, but it was my fortress.

  Then I realized: the trunk needed a home too, not just a place on the bare earth. So I built a little shack. Nothing fancy - just a crude frame of branches lashed together with twine. I had stolen from the manor storeroom, walls patched with more cloth and bark, and a roof angled so that rain would run off. The floor I lined with leaves and linen scraps, soft enough to keep me from sliding into the dirt when I leaned over the trunk.

  The trunk sat in the middle, elevated on a few flat stones so it wouldn’t rot in the mud, with a small lantern I’d managed to sneak from the kitchen hanging overhead.

  I had a stool to sit on, a little shelf for my books, and even a makeshift table for tools and scraps.

  It was ridiculous, really. A two-year-old with a branch-and-cloth shack in the woods, working on… people. But in that tiny structure, the world made sense. The trunk was safe. The bodies were safe. I was safe.

  Every night I returned.

  Because the work took a long time and took a toll on my already damaged mental health.

  Bones refused to accept neighbors. Muscle pulled away. They just didn’t bond with each other.

  There were limits I had not yet learned to break.

  The first week, I focused on the most basic healing spell and ideas on how to get them to fuse with each other. Contact healing. Surface-level. It was more of a Band-Aid-like idea, not a surgery.

  The second week, I tried hemomancy, not that I knew much about it. The books I ‘borrowed,’ which became more permanent, about resurrection spells were well above my reading level.

  ‘Xipe’ encouraged blood flow and gave me some control over it.

  But the word alone created too much heat; I nearly cooked a forearm like a breakfast sausage. I was glad that I could heal myself. But I was still sore.

  I was glad that I hadn’t made a major mistake yet. No one knew that I was slipping into the woods every night to try and piece bodies back together.

  I felt like a mad doctor. But as long as I would try to sort of ‘heal’ them, I wasn’t a complete monster. Even if my goal was to solve this mystery, instead of trying to save what seemed to be two little girls

  Months passed.

  Magic wasn’t math - except sometimes, it was something like math. I discovered that stacking healing spells wasn’t like stacking strength spells. Strength multiplied. Healing… evolved. One Xipe atop another didn’t just work harder; it worked differently. The second layer could overcompensate, or misalign tissue, or accelerate something before it was ready. Timing mattered. Rhythm mattered. Sequence mattered.

  So I studied. I practiced. I experimented.

  I tried a dozen ways to coax flesh to respond, nerves to reconnect, muscles to obey, and bone to remember its place. I used Xipe and Pana on myself more often than I could remember, testing the magic on my tiny body. Each attempt left me sore and drained - but alive, intact, and sometimes better than before.

  Painful experiences, yes, but controlled pain, like the burning after a long workout.

  What I thought I needed was a pattern, a choreography. A spell that could heal everything at the same time - blood, nerve, bone, flesh - not in bursts or pieces. One misstep, and the pieces would break. They would spasm, tear, or crack under my inexperience.

  It became a ritual of trial and error. Of endless failure. Of nights stretching into mornings.

  I was glad I could heal the pieces themselves… glad, in a weird sort of way. Even if they didn’t stick together, single pieces were easy to manage. A severed hand could be smoothed, a sliced arm could knit cleanly, and a shattered toe could be reformed. They healed, they would scar, they would burn and bleed and break, and everything else.

  But I could heal them.

  That was good to know.