### USER
Write me the opening paragraphs of the opening chapter of a new 'Grimdark' trilogy in the style of Joe Abercrombie and Rob J Hayes.

### ASSISTANT
<response>
<text>
The wind off the Shattered Coast didn’t howl—it laughed. A thin, broken thing that clawed through the blackened ribs of Daggerhold like a drunk picking meat from his teeth. Rain came sideways, hard as sling-stones, rattling the tin roofs and turning the alleyways into gutters of piss and blood. Somewhere a bell tolled—once, twice—then gave up, as if even metal had sense enough to quit this city. In the lee of the crumbling seawall, a body hung from a chain, turning slow. The face had been flayed for the bounty, but the tattoos were still visible on the chest: a serpent devouring its own cock. The Serpent’s Kiss, they’d called him. Now he was just another ornament in the Governor’s garden of rot.

Below, in the reek of low tide, a woman knelt in the muck. One eye was a ruined plum; the other reflected the corpse like a coin dropped in tar. She pressed two fingers to the dead man’s neck anyway. Habit. Hope. Fool’s currency. “He’s gone, Lark,” she whispered to the shadows. “And we’re still owing.” The answer came as the click of a flintlock behind her ear, and a voice like rusted wire: “Debts don’t die with the debtor, love. They just change hands.”
</text>
<probability>0.07</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
They say the sky over the Ashen Marches once held stars. Now it holds only cinders, drifting down like grey snow to settle on the roofs of Misery Row. I was born on a night when the cinders tasted of iron and the midwife used her own teeth to cut the cord. She died before she could name me; Ma said that was mercy. The man who owned us called me Null, because nothing was exactly what I was worth. Tonight, nothing walks the Row with a stolen sword and a coat too thin for winter, hunting a man who wears the Duke’s sigil carved into his own arm. They say he’s already dead. They say a lot of things. I’m here to make one of them true.
</text>
<probability>0.06</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
The first thing you learn in the Legion of the Bastard God is how to die quietly. The second is how to make someone else die noisily. I’d mastered both by the time I was fourteen summers, or what passes for summer in this frost-bitten arse-crack of the world. Now, a decade later and three days desert-cold, I knelt in the ruins of a chapel with my own piss freezing beneath me and a priest’s eyeball skewered on my dagger. The eye stared at me, milky and accusing, as if it could still read the black letters branded into my cheek: OATH-BREAKER. Behind me, the rest of the squad argued about whether to eat the horses or the prisoners first. I was voting for the horses—less screaming, more meat—but the prisoners had started praying, and prayers draw predators. Out here, even gods travel in packs.
</text>
<probability>0.08</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
The city of Hollowspire never slept; it passed out. Face-down in the gutter, twitching, dreaming of the next fix: war, faith, or the pale sap they squeeze from corpse-blooms down in the Drip. I’d sold every part of me worth selling except the parts no one wanted, and still the collectors came knocking. Tonight they wore the Duke’s colors—crimson and gold, bright as fresh blood on a new coin. They dragged me from the opium den with my trousers around my ankles and a dead girl’s lips still warm on my neck. “Captain Thorne,” the leader said, voice smooth as oil on water, “the Regent requires your sword.” I told him my sword was currently occupied trying to cut its way out of my own throat. He smiled the way a shark smiles when it smells chum. “Good,” he said. “Suicide is a kind of loyalty. Bring the blade. We’ll find the throat later.”
</text>
<probability>0.09</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
The axe that took my leg also took my name. Left me with a stump that aches when it rains and a reputation that aches all the time. They call me Gutter now, because that’s where they found me: face-down in one, drunk on rot-gut and regret, waiting for the rats to finish what the war started. The rats, it turns out, are more merciful than men. They at least wait until you’re cold. The man standing over my pallet tonight doesn’t wait for anything. He wears a cloak stitched from the flags of every nation he’s burned, and when he speaks it sounds like siege engines grinding over bone. “I need a broken thing,” he says, tossing a purse that clinks like teeth. “Broken things fit better in the cracks of the world.” I count the coins—thirteen, unlucky for someone—and spit blood onto his polished boots. “I’m not broken,” I tell him. “I’m just bent the wrong way.” He laughs, and the sound is a coffin lid slamming shut. “Same difference,” he says. “Welcome back to the war.”
</text>
<probability>0.05</probability>
</response>

### USER
Continue on from the 4th response now.

### ASSISTANT
<response>
<text>
They marched me through the palace like a prized pig—shackles clinking, bare feet leaving bloody crescents on the marble. Courtiers in powdered masks turned to watch, whispering behind lace that couldn’t hide the stink of fear. Somewhere a quartet played a waltz in a minor key, all sighing strings and no heart. The Regent waited on a throne carved from a single whale vertebra, candlelight flickering across the scrimshaw scenes of flayed saints. He didn’t speak, only lifted one ringed finger. A steward unrolled a parchment: my name—my real one—written in ink the color of dried blood. Beneath it, three words: “Retrieve the Heart.” I laughed, a sound like gravel in a tin cup. “Thought you ate that years ago.” The Regent’s smile was thin as a garrote. “Not that heart, Thorne. The other one. The one that still beats under two miles of stone and a thousand forgotten oaths.” He tossed me a key forged from black iron. It burned cold against my palm. “Bring it back,” he said, “and I’ll let you finish cutting your own throat. Refuse, and I’ll keep you alive long enough to wish you hadn’t.”
</text>
<probability>0.06</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
Dawn found me kneeling in the palace midden, vomiting last night’s opium while a one-eyed surgeon stitched a tracking rune into the meat of my thigh. The needle sang as it bit, a lullaby in a language that predated mercy. When he finished, he wiped his hands on my shirt and whispered, “Run if you like. The rune will open you up mile by mile, tendon by tendon, until you’re a red map leading straight back here.” I asked him if the Regent had sent many volunteers. He showed me a box of tongues preserved in brine—each one, he claimed, had once belonged to a man who thought escape was still an option. I counted seven before I stopped counting. Then they gave me back my sword, edge dulled so I’d have to work harder at killing. Some gifts keep on taking.
</text>
<probability>0.07</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
The gate they shoved me out of is called Traitor’s Mouth, though no one remembers who first spat the name. It yawns beneath the eastern wall, a stone throat lined with iron teeth that chew deserters slow. I passed beneath those teeth at dusk, boots sloshing with piss and rain, coat pockets stuffed with stale bread and lies. Ahead, the Ashen Road unrolled like a scar across the world’s face. Somewhere along its length waited the Heart—whatever the hells that meant—and every mile between here and there carried my death in its pocket. I took the first step anyway. The second was easier. The third felt like coming home.
</text>
<probability>0.08</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
Three leagues out, the rain turned to sleet and the sleet turned to razors. I found the first corpse hung from a wayside shrine, intestines braided into the symbol of the Burned Saint. Ravens had eaten the eyes, leaving twin black holes that watched me pass without judgment. I cut the body down, more from habit than kindness, and found a scrap of parchment nailed to the sternum: “The Heart beats loudest when it’s broken.” No signature, just a smear of ash. I pocketed the note, told myself it meant nothing, and kept walking. Behind me, the city’s lights guttered one by one, as if someone were blowing out candles at a funeral I hadn’t been invited to attend.
</text>
<probability>0.05</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
Night in the borderlands is a living thing—it crawls inside your skin and makes nests from your memories. Around the meager fire I’d coaxed from damp twigs, the dark pressed close, breathing through the mouths of dead men. I’d just begun to nod off when the girl stepped out of nowhere, barefoot, eyes like winter ponds. She couldn’t have been more than twelve, but her voice carried the weight of cemeteries. “You’re going the wrong way,” she said. “The Heart’s not west anymore. It moved.” I asked her who told her that. She smiled, revealing teeth filed to points. “The same ones who’ll eat your name if you keep walking.” Then she turned and vanished between the trees, leaving only the echo of small bones breaking. I tossed another branch on the fire and tried not to wonder whose bones they were.
</text>
<probability>0.09</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
By the time the moon clawed its way above the clouds, I’d reached the crossroads where merchants once hanged thieves as signposts. Three rotting bodies still dangled, their faces flayed into permanent grins. One of them was still twitching. I cut him down out of spite and found a copper coin sewn under his tongue. On it, etched so fine it could’ve been a scratch: a heart pierced by seven swords. The same sigil burned into the Regent’s parchment. The hanged man’s eyes snapped open, milky but seeing. “Return what was taken,” he rasped, “or become the taking.” Then his head lolled, and the night swallowed whatever had spoken through him. I left the coin in the mud and walked on, but the weight of it followed—cold, circular, inevitable.
</text>
<probability>0.04</probability>
</response>

### USER
Continue on from the 2nd response now.

### ASSISTANT
<response>
<text>
The rune they carved into my thigh throbbed in time with my pulse, a second heartbeat that whispered directions I didn’t want to follow. By noon the skin around the stitches had gone black, veins darkening like spilled ink. I tried to pick the sigil out with the point of my dagger, but the steel recoiled, hissing as if dipped in acid. Somewhere behind me, a horn sounded—three short blasts that meant the Regent’s hounds had picked up the scent. I pictured them: pale things bred in lightless kennels, eyes milk-white, maws packed with teeth filed to surgical points. They didn’t need to see you; they could taste the rune’s itch on the wind. I spat blood into the dust and limped faster, cursing the day I’d ever learned what loyalty cost.
</text>
<probability>0.06</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
The village wasn’t on any map—just a clutch of hovels huddled around a poisoned well, the air thick with smoke from green wood and desperation. I traded the last of my bread for a mouthful of rot-gut and a lie about the road ahead. The innkeeper, a woman whose face looked like it had been rearranged by a hammer, leaned close enough for me to smell the grave on her breath. “Heart’s a word men use when they mean something else,” she muttered. “Around here, we call it the Hollow Drum. Beats loud enough to wake the dead, they say. Problem is, it wakes the living too.” She slid a cracked bowl across the table; inside, a single human eye floated in brine, iris the color of storm clouds. “Gift from the last fool who went looking. Keep it. Might show you the way—if it likes you.” The eye blinked once, slow, then fixed on me with the patience of a thing that had already seen how I die.
</text>
<probability>0.07</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
The storm caught me on the ridge, hailstones the size of sling-bullets punching holes in the scrub. I took shelter beneath a dead oak whose branches clawed at the sky like a man begging for mercy that would never come. Lightning flashed, and in that white instant I saw them: shapes moving through the downpour, too tall, too thin, walking backward with their heads twisted round the wrong way. They carried lanterns made from human pelvises, the candles inside sputtering fat that smelled of churches and burning hair. One of them lifted an arm—impossibly long—and pointed straight at the rune carved in my flesh. The lanterns swung in unison, and the night filled with a sound like children laughing underwater. When vision returned, the ridge was empty except for footprints that ended mid-stride, as if the earth had simply swallowed them whole. The rune burned hotter, urging me downhill, toward the valley where no birds sang.
</text>
<probability>0.05</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
I found the monk at the bottom of a sinkhole, legs shattered, lips blistered from praying to a god who’d stopped listening years ago. His robes had once been crimson; now they were the color of old scabs. Between gasps he told me the Heart wasn’t an object but a moment—a heartbeat stolen from the world’s first dying breath. “Carry it too long,” he wheezed, “and you’ll hear every lie you ever told echoing inside your ribs.” He pressed a shard of obsidian into my palm, its edge still warm from cutting his own throat. “Trade this for passage under the mountain. The stone remembers mercy, even if men don’t.” Then he died, eyes rolled back to show only white, and the sinkhole began to close like a mouth finishing a meal. I scrambled out clutching the shard, skin crawling with the certainty that something below was already chewing on his bones.
</text>
<probability>0.08</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
Dawn brought no sun, only a bruised sky leaking rust-colored rain. I followed the old trade road west until the stones gave way to bone—thousands of them, mortared into a causeway that crunched beneath my boots. Each skull had been drilled and strung on wire, wind whistling through the holes to play a tune I almost remembered from childhood. Halfway across, the causeway shuddered. The heads turned as one, empty sockets tracking my steps. One jaw hinged open and spoke in the monk’s dying voice: “Turn back, Thorne. The Heart beats for no one living.” I answered by drawing my dulled blade and pressing on. Behind me, the skulls began to sing—a lullaby my mother hummed while she sold me for the first time. I walked faster, but the song followed, soft and patient, the way a noose follows a neck.
</text>
<probability>0.04</probability>
</response>

### USER
Continue on from the 3rd response now.

### ASSISTANT
<response>
<text>
The valley floor was a bowl of ash where even the wind forgot its name. I stumbled downslope, thigh wound pulsing in Morse I couldn’t read, and found the first marker: a child’s doll impaled on a rib-cage of black glass. Its stitched mouth had been ripped wider, stuffed with white petals that crumbled into maggots when I touched them. The petals smelled of church incense and dead weddings. Behind me the hounds gave voice—no baying, just a wet clicking like fingernails on slate. I pocketed the doll’s porcelain eye; the rune in my flesh cooled a fraction, as if appeased. Somewhere ahead the Hollow Drum waited, beating time for corpses that hadn’t finished falling.
</text>
<probability>0.05</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
Night in the valley had teeth. It gnawed the edges of my fire, stole the warmth before it reached my skin. I woke to find the one-eyed surgeon sitting opposite, needle still threaded with my own sinew. “You’re walking wrong,” he said, voice echoing from the hole where his eye had been. “Every third step must be backwards or the valley swallows your footprints.” He demonstrated—three paces, the third reversed—and vanished between heartbeats, leaving only the reek of vinegar and the fresh stitch in my calf spelling RUN. The hounds’ clicking grew louder, syncopated with the distant drum. I obeyed the stitch, limping in crippled waltz, while ash rose like applause beneath my boots.
</text>
<probability>0.06</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
I reached the petrified forest at moonset. Trees of bone reached skyward, branches fused in gestures of surrender. From their hollows watched the Flayed Brotherhood—men who’d traded their skins for maps inked on raw muscle. Their leader stepped forward, tendons glistening like fresh rope. “Payment,” he hissed, extending a hand that showed bone through translucent meat. I gave him the porcelain eye; he popped it into an empty socket, blinked once, and pointed toward a cleft in the rock shaped like a screaming mouth. “Drum’s heart beats twice: once to call you, once to end you. Choose which beat you dance to.” The Brotherhood melted into the lattice of bone, taking the night with them. I entered the mouth, taste of iron and confession thick on my tongue.
</text>
<probability>0.07</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
Inside the cleft the air was syrupy, each breath a lungful of old screams. Luminescent fungi showed murals of regents past, each figure missing the same left ventricle. At the tunnel’s end stood a door of living meat, pulse visible beneath translucent membrane. It parted for the rune’s heat, revealing a chamber where a single drum—skin stretched tight over a cage of ribs—beat the rhythm of my childhood terror. Before it knelt a girl no older than ten, eyes sewn shut with gold thread, hands drumming in perfect mimicry though she never moved. Her mouth opened and my mother’s voice spilled out: “You came home, darling. Bring me what’s left of you.” The rune flared, splitting skin, and I understood the Heart had been beating inside me all along, counting down to its own birth.
</text>
<probability>0.04</probability>
</response>

<response>
<text>
I drew the dulled blade—the Regent’s cruel joke—and sliced the drum’s skin. No blood, only sound: a single note that unraveled memory. Every corpse I’d made stepped from the dark, wearing my face in various stages of rot. They circled, applauding with wet meat slaps, waiting for me to join the dance. Instead I drove the shard of obsidian into my own thigh, carving the rune into something new. Pain flared white, and the note faltered. The girl’s sewn eyes wept mercury; the drum stuttered. In the hush I heard the hounds scrabbling at the cleft entrance, heard the Regent’s distant laughter, heard my own heart answering the Hollow Drum beat for beat. I chose the third option: neither caller nor called, but the silence between. The drumskin tore; the girl smiled; the valley exhaled. And I fell forward into the beatless dark, carrying the Heart that had never been a heart at all—only the echo of a man who refused to keep time.
</text>
<probability>0.03</probability>
</response>