The pricked soul

An ancient town was nameless perhaps and lying deserted and solitary. The inhabitants were strange and looking oppressed as by some great calamity. Beneath crooked rooftops and soot-stained walls, the world moved in whispers. Among those whispers lived a boy named John, a name few called him by. Most people use to call that wretched boy with a twist of pity or contempt.

John didn’t know where he had come from, only that the orphanage’s stone cradle had claimed him in the frost-bitten winter of his fourth year. Since then, life had pressed its thumb upon him; never quite enough to crush him but always enough to bruise and hurt.

His days were spent fetching water, scrubbing pans, and dodging Sister Lova’s swinging cane. He walked with a quiet limp not from injury but from the habit of shrinking into himself.Life had treated him so mercilessly that words weren’t his trade; he spoke little, felt deeply and carried his emotions the way old men carried war medals close to the chest, worn-out like burdens.

One evening, while emptying waste behind the stables, John found something odd—someone; rather a girl. Small, no older than him; wrapped in linen and curled in the hay like a frightened animal. Her hair was the color of dusk and her eyes held storms. When their gazes met, neither flinched.

"Who are you?" he asked, voice barely more than breath.

She didn’t answer. Instead, she held up a hand and in it, a silver pin. A heart pricked through by a needle.

"It hurts," she said. "All the time."

He looked closer, not at the pin, but at her. Her face was thin, eyes red, not from crying, but from holding back tears for too long. It was a face he knew well—it was his, mirrored in emotion.

He sat beside her in silence for minutes may be for hours. She didn’t run, and he didn’t ask her to leave.

“Why does it hurt?” he asked.

“Because it’s still beating,” she whispered. “Even when no one wants it to.”

That night John did something he hadn’t done in years—he dreamed. In that dream he stood in a field of white poppies under a violet sky. The girl was there holding the silver heart pin. She pressed it to his chest.

“Now you’ll feel it too,” she said.

When he woke, she was gone. Only the pin remained.

John kept the pin hidden in the sole of his boot. Over the days that followed strange things began to happen. He cried while peeling potatoes. He laughed, once, during a thunderstorm. He screamed into his pillow after Lava struck him, not because of pain but because the ache was no longer numb—it was raw, real.

One morning, he found a bird with a broken wing. The old John would’ve walked past. But now? Now he gathered it in trembling hands, wept for its struggle and whispered lullabies as he cradled it in his shirt.

The other boys noticed. "Gone soft," one muttered. "Touched in the head," said another. But none dared touch the pin, the strange little thing that John wore on his threadbare coat, over his heart.

Then came winter wherein food was scarce. Tempers were shorter and Lava crueler.

One night, during a biting storm, a fire broke out in the east wing. Screams split the stone halls; children ran. Smoke choked the air.

Elric could’ve escaped. He stood at the door, freedom inches away. But something pulled him back—the weight of the pin, or perhaps the memory of a girl in the hay.

He turned. Found the smallest ones hiding beneath a bed. He carried them. Shielded them. Through fire. Through falling beams. Through pain.

The last thing he saw before collapsing was the silver pin, glowing faintly through the smoke.

They called him a miracle, afterward. A boy who should’ve died but didn’t. A wretched soul who had found some kind of grace.

They never found the girl, though Elric swore she had visited him in the infirmary. "You felt it," she had whispered, touching his chest. "You let it prick you."

Years passed. Elric grew. Left Mirewick. Became a quiet man with calloused hands and kind eyes. He wore the pin always.

Some nights, when the wind blew cold and the stars hung low, he would feel it stir—*the prick.* A reminder. That feeling, though it wounds, is what makes us whole.

And in that pain, he had found something no one could take away:

A soul, fully his own.