The Lion’s Thrall (Kane Chronicles Fanfic)

I was sick a lot growing up.

Not the kind of sickness that goes away with a few days of rest and a spoonful of honey in your tea. No, it was the kind that clung to me like a shadow, the kind that left doctors flipping through their textbooks, rattling off long-winded theories—Leukemia, Grave's Disease, Scleroderma, something, anything to explain why my body was at war with itself.

But I can't remember the specifics. Maybe it was the medications dulling my thoughts, or maybe I just didn't want to remember. I don't recall the hospital beds, though I know I spent a lot of time in them. I don't remember the bandages, though I must've worn them often, soaking up blood that my body couldn't hold onto. I only remember him.

My dad was my tether to the world outside the sterile white walls of my room. When I was too weak to sit up, he'd pull a chair next to my bed, laptop propped on his knees, and play music videos from his childhood. "Johnny B. Goode," the Back to the Future version—he always said it was better than the original. Bad by Michael Jackson—he knew the whole routine, even if he danced like a broken marionette.

He looked so happy then, caught up in the music, grinning as he sang along, as if for those few minutes, neither of us had a reason to be sad. But I knew better. I could see the exhaustion etched into the lines of his face, hear it in the way his voice cracked when he thought I wasn't paying attention.

At night, when the medicine had me floating in that strange half-conscious haze, I'd hear him in the corner of the room, whispering into his phone. His voice would start steady, pleading. "Please, just a little help. The bills are—" Then softer, breaking. "I can't do this alone." And then silence. She had hung up. She always hung up.

My mother had left us before I was old enough to remember her. My dad never told me why, but I figured it out over time. She could've let me go. She knew there was a risk—doctors must have warned her—but she still chose to have me. And then, when it turned out I was sick, she walked away, like I was some unfinished project she didn't want to deal with.

Dad stayed. For years, he stayed. And I hated him for it.

I was eight when he stopped visiting me in the hospital. The doctors gave excuses—he was busy with work, he had family matters to attend to—but I knew better. He was finally moving on, finally realizing that I was dragging him down. I had been waiting for it, in a way. Maybe he'd go back to her, and have another kid, one who wasn't broken. Someone who wouldn't make him suffer like I did.

But I should've known better. My dad wasn't like that.

He came back after a few months, looking different. His head was shaved, his frame bulked up with muscle, and a scar twisted down his face, shaped almost like a snake. He looked like a stranger—until he smiled at me, the same soft, tired smile he always had, and I knew it was him.

I didn't know where he'd been. He mentioned new colleagues—Ruby and Julius—people I had never heard of before. He told me they were helping him find something, something important. And then, he handed me a strange soup and a handful of syringes filled with weird, murky liquids.

For a second, I thought he had become a drug dealer. But no—what he had found was something even crazier.

He had gotten himself wrapped up in the strangest, most delusional pyramid scheme I had ever heard of—rambling about "Apophis" and "Isis," ancient gods and forgotten rituals, swearing that the syringes he carried held the key to saving me.

He pleaded with the doctors, begged them to use the injections, convinced that whatever was in them would fix me. They refused, of course. My father may have had a doctorate, but he wasn't a medical professional—he was a desperate man grasping at straws.

And maybe that was why I wanted him to do it. The doctors had already exhausted every option, every treatment, every experimental drug. I wasn't getting better. I wasn't going to get better. So why were they stopping him? Why were they keeping me alive just to suffer?

For days, he kept asking—offering more money, selling more of himself just to hear the same answer. No. No. No. Each rejection chipped away at him, hollowing him out, and making him more frantic.

So I took matters into my own hands.

It happened on a rare "good" day—one of the days when I wasn't completely paralyzed by pain or medication, where I could lift my arms without feeling like they were made of lead. He had left his bag on the chair while he argued with the doctor, his voice low and urgent.

I reached inside. My fingers closed around the syringes.

And I jammed every single one into my arm.

The hospital room exploded into chaos. Alarms blared. Nurses swarmed me, scrambling to reverse whatever damage I had just done. Someone was shouting orders. Hands were grabbing at me, shoving tubes down my throat, trying to force the unknown substances out of my system.

Through it all, my father was still there—his face pale, eyes wild—begging me to drink the soup he had brought.

I couldn't move. I didn't want to move. The world blurred at the edges, my body too heavy, too distant. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was security dragging him away, his voice breaking as he called my name—

And then, the seizure started.

The next thing I knew, I was awake.

The blinding fluorescent lights above flickered erratically, casting jagged shadows across the room. The sterile white walls were smeared with something dark, something wet—blood. It dripped from the ceiling, soaked into the floor, and pooled beneath the bodies strewn about like discarded rag dolls.

Doctors. Nurses. People who had been fighting to save my life just moments ago.

Their limbs were bent at unnatural angles, their faces frozen in expressions of horror, some of them barely recognizable beneath the carnage. IV stands had been snapped in half, jagged shards of metal impaling torsos and pinning bodies to the walls. Scalpel trays lay overturned, surgical tools embedded in the flesh as if they had been thrown with inhuman force. A heart monitor lay beeping weakly beneath a severed arm, its steady rhythm the only sound in the suffocating silence.

It was as if someone had taken a brush dipped in viscera and painted a grotesque, living nightmare.

And in the center of it all, I stood.

Not strapped to a hospital bed. Not drowning in tubes and wires. Standing.

My legs, weak and withered from years of sickness, no longer trembled beneath me. My hands—shaking, but not from exhaustion—curled into fists, my nails digging into my palms, my breath coming out in short, panicked bursts.

I was alive. More than that—I was strong.

It was grotesque. Monstrous. Like a surrealist nightmare splashed across reality, a Picasso painting come to life in blood and viscera.

And yet, through it all, through the horror and the carnage, the only thing that truly terrified me...

Was the fact that I was standing.