The whip cracked through the frigid air with the sound of breaking bone.
Tarvek flinched at the noise, his emaciated body hunching instinctively even though the strike wasn't meant for him.
Not this time.
The demon beside him, a hulking creature whose name he had never learned, collapsed forward onto the black ice.
Blood, dark and viscous in the eternal twilight of the pit, pooled beneath where the whip had flayed open his back.
The wound was deep enough to expose muscle and bone, the flesh peeling away in a grotesque spiral pattern.
"Get up," the overseer snarled, his voice carrying the casual cruelty of someone who'd delivered this command ten thousand times and would deliver it ten thousand more.
"The quota doesn't care if you're dying. Move, or I'll make sure you wish you had."
