asrai

The accident had been queer. 

That’s what the paper would say, they also would speak about the sad story of a young woman who lost everything when the train rails failed. You’d tell the police, with what little voice you had left, that you couldn’t recall what happened or if you saw or heard anything out of the ordinary and that everything was a blur. 

You would not dare confess the truth: how the bodies of your family lay strewn across the mangled remains of the fifth wagon while you were found in the tenth, limbs shattered at unnatural angles. You would not admit that your sister’s sharp tongue had driven you storming down the length of the train in search of a moment’s peace; nor would you tell them how you felt every splintering crack as the metal skeleton of the carriage folded into the snow. Yes, it had been a blur, because what truly veiled your sight was the blood pouring from the great gash that carved your face, warm and viscous, sliding over your cheek with a heat that mocked the cold. You did not know how deep it ran; you only knew the sting, the burn, your own blood against the freezing press of the snow beneath your torn dress. Your arms refused to obey you, and your legs throbbed with that bright, electric agony reserved for bones broken beyond repair.

There was cold, and hands. Rough hands lifting you, softer ones trying to settle your trembling limbs, and then the sharp, violating clarity of light as they carried you through the doors. You didn’t know where you were, only that every sound felt as if someone were striking your bones directly—metal basins, hurried footsteps, a medic barking orders you couldn’t decipher.

Then the morphine came.

 A needle sliding into your arm, a voice asking you to breathe and then that molten warmth blooming, flooding, eroding the edges of pain until it turned into something distant and shimmering. You felt your consciousness slipping sideways, not falling asleep exactly, but dissolving, becoming light enough to be carried by the air.

When you next resurfaced, you were alone in a room that smelled of antiseptic and damp stone. A lantern hissed quietly from its hook, casting long, warped shadows across the walls. Your face throbbed with a deep, pulsing ache—each heartbeat felt like a hammer striking bone. Your limbs were immobilized beneath thick bandages and restraints meant to keep you from tearing open anything vital in your delirium.

You closed your eyes again, and the darkness spun.

Days passed—or perhaps hours; morphine stole your sense of time and fed you visions made of fever and sorrow. Sometimes you woke to a nurse, her voice shallow and sympathetic, wiping your brow or checking the swelling along your stitched cheek. Other times you woke to your own gasping, convinced you were back under the wreckage with snow melting beneath your spine.

Then came him.

Your uncle moved like a shadow entering a forbidden room—slow, deliberate, with the careful steps of someone approaching a wounded animal. His face looked older than you remembered, its lines etched deeper by grief or responsibility, you couldn’t tell which. He paused at the foot of your bed, as if unsure whether you were entirely conscious.

The silence that followed was heavy, filled with all the things he could not say aloud. About the bodies recovered. About how cold the countryside had been that morning. About the way all your family’s names had been confirmed, one by one, on a list you would never be permitted to read. He sat beside you, folding his gloves in his lap. For a long moment he said nothing, the weight of his presence both comforting and unbearable. You could sense he wanted to reach out, to place a hand on your arm, but he didn’t. Perhaps he feared that touch would unravel him. Or you.

“You must focus on healing,” he said at last, voice steady but eyes skirting yours. “Your future…your inheritance, your home…all of it is in careful hands, I promise you that.”

Something in you recoiled at the word inheritance. You tasted metal on your tongue again.

The morphine was rising; you felt it like a tide, pulling your eyelids down, dimming the room around him. You blinked slowly, the lantern above him smearing into a halo. He seemed to notice, leaning forward with a controlled urgency. 

The days that followed became a fever of half-formed images, drifting in and out of your mind like ghosts who did not realize you were not dead.

You remembered the nurse first. Or rather, you remembered the way she would enter the room with her eyes turned toward the floor, her footsteps soft out of pity or fear—you could never tell which. She spoke in a voice that was barely a whisper, as though sound itself might injure you. Whenever she approached the bed, she avoided looking directly at your face, glancing instead at your bandages, your hands, the tray at your bedside—anywhere but your eyes.

You had tried to speak to her once, to ask for water, or answers, or simply to prove you still existed. But only a dry rasp clawed up your throat. It burned—God, it burned—as though shards of ice had lodged themselves behind your tongue. Your voice had abandoned you entirely, leaving you mute, helpless, like an animal not meant for human language.

Your vision was no better. The bandage wrapped around your head covered half your sight entirely, an oppressive weight pressing down on your left eye. The world came to you through a single blurred lens, every shape doubled or smeared into shadow. Lanterns became halos, hands became specters, walls breathed with distorted patterns that crawled when you blinked. Even when you were awake, everything felt submerged, as though you were peering at life from beneath a frozen lake.

Pain pulsed through you in waves on your right side—dull, rhythmic, merciless. It throbbed in your legs, your ribs, your cheek, each heartbeat like a drum struck too close. But your left side felt terrifyingly void. You could not decide whether that absence frightened you more than the pain.

Sometimes you drifted in a darkness so thick you forgot you had a body at all.

Then, one day—or night, you could never tell which—your uncle returned.

He sat beside your bed as if summoned by your suffering, his face a stone mask. When he spoke, it sounded as though he were delivering terrible news to someone else entirely.

“We have been waiting,” he said quietly, “for you to grow stronger. Strong enough for… for the funeral.”

Your breath stopped. You did not need to ask whose funeral—those words had only one meaning now.

He hesitated, choosing his next phrases with the delicacy of a surgeon handling a blade.

“The cold countryside preserved them longer than expected,” he went on, voice tight. “Longer than any of us dared hope. But we could not wait any more. The ground… it had to be closed.”

You tried to reach toward him, some desperate instinct commanding you to hold onto the last living thread of your family, but your arm refused to lift. It trembled uselessly at your side. He noticed. He almost touched you—but stopped himself.

“They were buried yesterday,” he said softly. “All of them.”

The lantern above you flickered, and for a moment the shadows stretched across the walls like mourning veils.

Later—how much later, you couldn’t tell—a man arrived. A stranger.

He entered the room with the strange confidence of someone who belonged there, though you immediately knew he didn’t. He carried a case the size of a book, metal-edged and humming faintly as he opened it. Without a word to you, he positioned some strange contraption on a tripod at the foot of your bed. A camera. 

You recognized it vaguely through the drugged haze, but the details felt wrong—too sharp, too mechanical, like a device of dissection rather than memory.

He did not ask permission. He did not speak. He only adjusted the lens with clinical precision and took several photographs of your broken form, the flash burning white across your remaining vision.

When it ended, he packed the instrument away and slipped from the room as silently as he had come. That memory bothered you more than the others. 

Your uncle returned once more. He delivered his words with a tone of reassurance, but you could sense a tremor beneath the surface.

“I have found you the best surgeon coin can secure,” he said. “A man whose skill is… extraordinary. You will be under his care soon.”

You blinked slowly, trying to focus, the edges of the room bending inward like a closing book.

“You will go to him the moment you are strong enough to be moved. His methods are unconventional, but his results—remarkable.” His voice wavered.

You wanted to ask his name, but your throat still refused to form sound.

Your uncle leaned closer, lowering his voice to a reverent whisper, as if speaking a forbidden name.

“His name is Dr. Victor Frankenstein.”

The room spun again.

—

The room spins and when it settles, it is no longer the same room.

You realize this only because cold air lashes your face. Hands are on you again—too many, too fast—unwrapping blankets, lifting you from the bed with the brutal efficiency of men who have done this before. Your vision blurs into streaks of lamplight and shadow, and someone mutters, “Careful with that side,” though you can’t tell whose voice it is.

You try to speak. A grunt escapes instead. It vibrates in your throat like an animal’s cry.

They hurry you down a hallway that smells of winter and old stone, then out into the night. The cold is a blade. It cuts through your thin hospital shift and finds every seam in your broken body. You feel yourself pitching sideways, then caught—your head lolling against a shoulder you cannot see.

“Easy,” someone says. Nothing is easy.

The carriage waits with its lantern lit, a solitary eye glowing in the fog. The horses paw at the frozen ground, impatient, shadows steaming from their nostrils like smoke from a furnace. You are pushed inside—not gently—and the impact sends a sharp, electric shudder through your ribs. It feels as though your bones sing with pain.

The door slams. The horses lurch forward. And the world becomes motion.

Every step the beasts take reverberates through the floor, up your spine, into your skull. The carriage wheels grind over stones, and each jolt rattles the shattered scaffolding of your limbs. The agony is rhythmic, relentless—like being shaken apart piece by piece.

You clutch at nothing. Your bandaged hand slides against the wooden floorboards. You try again to speak, but your throat burns, raw and useless. Only a broken rasp emerges.

Shapes move in the corners of your vision.

For a moment—an instant so brief you’re not sure it happened—you see someone sitting across from you. A figure, tall and still, face swallowed by shadow. They do not breathe. They do not blink. They only watch you.

You blink once, twice, and the seat is empty.

Your stomach clenches. The carriage turns, wheels catching on a rut, and the jolt knocks your head sideways. Your single uncovered eye swims; every streetlamp the carriage passes bleeds into strange, warped forms. Some look like glowing skulls. Others like towering silhouettes that lean close as you pass, whispering without mouths.

You shut your eye to banish them. It doesn’t help.

The pain on your right side pulses like a heartbeat you cannot escape. But your left side is worse in its own way—an abyss, a hollow absence that feels inhuman. Like a limb that has forgotten it belongs to you.

Another bump in the road sends you sliding. Something cracks—maybe outside, maybe inside you. You groan. The sound frightens you; it doesn’t sound like you at all.

You drift.

Your head droops forward, and suddenly the lantern light seems too bright, too watchful. It flickers in a way lanterns shouldn’t flicker, stretching long fingers of shadow across the walls.

For a moment you think the shadows are reaching for you.

You force your eyes open again only because the carriage hits another stone, and the shock bolts you awake with fresh pain. The horses’ hooves echo like hammers striking coffins. The night outside is a blur of black trees and pale moonlight whipping past.

You are being taken somewhere. You know only the direction, just the cold, inexorable pull toward a stranger’s hands.

The only clear thought that pierces the fog is this: