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What does it mean to take a breath of fresh air and promptly realise you don’t need to. That the force of life that keeps one’s lungs expanding and retracting, the oxygen that flows through one’s bloodstream and keeps their heart pumping. For that to be unnecessary? For the hole in his chest to be a physical thing rather than a metaphorical idea?
Occtis Tachonis stops breathing. He waits for that moment where lungs burn and vision falters, and finds it never comes. He can feel his organs moving to fill the extra room in his chest, his ribs protecting something no longer there.
“There was always something wrong with you.”
Sitting there, Occtis does not breathe. Still as the dead. What does it mean to take a breath of fresh air into lungs that only move because they can? He can remember the garotte around his neck, his last breath used for little more than a useless last ditch effort.
He can still remember the knife. It had all happened so quickly, the creak of the door and the silence and the agony and terror. The mockery of undead pinning him down, the wire suffocating him, the blood in his mouth, the blood on his chest, the blood soaked into his clothes.
How long did it take? Between the knock and his heart being torn from his chest. Ten seconds? Five? Twenty? The moments between death and rebirth seemed to exist in only the blink of an eye. Knowledge of undead armies and war and plans for carnage and annihilation. His mind is so quiet despite the anarchy raging through him. It's all so cold.
What does it mean for a man to die and be reborn without a heart?