Assassin from Abyss

Chapter 3: Always and Forever

Kei’s heart would not believe what his brain was telling it.

The whole of it was too much, too impossible, a thing that broke every rule he knew — and at the same time it was the one explanation that fit, the only reason he could find for why he was breathing at all.

He went at the door to get out of the room and out from under the weight of his own thoughts.

" Somebody open up. Hello — " Bam. Bam. Bam.

He kicked it. The metal held without giving so much as a shudder. For a minute, for twenty, he called and struck and threw himself at it, and it did nothing, and at last he gave the struggle up and sat down with his back against the damp wall.

" Damn door. " He breathed. " I need to calm down and think this through. This whole thing is out of its mind — but out of its mind and alive still beats dead. "

So he calmed himself, and he went back through what had been poured into him. The memories opened in order as he went down into them — the memories of Kaiser, the being whose dead body he now wore.

From birth, Kaiser had been scorned by the other Rakshasa of his clan, on the five-hundredth layer of the Abyss.

Three days short of the year he would reach adolescence, his mother told him why.

Her name was Rasvet, and she had been born to one of the noble clans of that layer — the youngest of her siblings, the most doted upon, pampered for the height of her domain affinity. All of it changed the day her family learned she was pregnant, and learned by whose seed. A human. A male slave.

Humans, on Black Earth, were food and they were sacrifice. The Rakshasa kept them for labor, and as blood-jars to be carried and drunk from, and when a mortal neared the end of his usefulness they gave him to the altars of the Black Mother, the ruler of Black Earth.

Rasvet had pitied one of them. A handsome man, red-haired, a slave in her own wing of the palace. And pity, as it will when something pulls the strings, budded into kindness and kindness into love, and love into the thing that got her with child. freēwebnovel.com

When her family found out, they killed the slave — brutally — and then the clan and the council of elders turned to the matter of the child, sleeping unknowing in its mother’s womb, and decided it too would die. freewebnσvel.cѳm

Rasvet, broken by her lover’s death, fought the decision with everything she had. Two of her brothers, Rodon and Anastas, could not stand to watch their beloved sister suffer, and stepped in to soften it, and after much persuasion the elders bent — a little.

They gave Rasvet a choice, in two parts.

If she bore the child, she would be stripped of her noble title for good and live out her days as a commoner on this layer, barred from ever crossing to another. And the child — if it came out human, it would go straight to the altars of the Black Earth Mother. If it came out Rakshasa, it would be counted one of the clan only if it passed the true awakening ritual at adolescence. And if it failed the ritual, it would be thrown into the Screaming Sea.

The other part of the choice was simpler. Destroy the thing in her womb, and return to the nobility and the comfort she had been born to.

Rasvet did not think about it. She set her signet — the crest of her house cut into it — into the elders’ hands, and walked out of the palace without a sound, the tears already dried on a face that had made up its mind.

The years after, she raised Kaiser on the whole of her love, and told him nothing of where she had come from or what waited ahead of him.

Until that day.

Rasvet came home that evening badly hurt. Kaiser, seeing the state of her, began to panic.

She calmed him. " Don’t fret, son. I have taken a healing pill already — I will be right by morning. Come. Sit by me. There is something I have to tell you. "

And as he learned his mother’s past, the tears came into his eyes.

She saw them, and reached up and ruffled his red hair. " Be strong. You will complete the awakening ritual, and you will make your mother proud. It is in three days. Come — let me tell you what it is, and then we will eat. " She showed him a bright red pill in her palm. " I will take another of these after dinner. "

That night, Rasvet died in her sleep.

In the morning Kaiser found a letter left on her body.

" Son. If you fail the ritual, eat the red pill I showed you — it is in my pouch. Do not let them throw you into the Screaming Sea. I am sorry to leave you alone. But my heart could not have borne to watch you taken. Even living, I would have died a little every day.

" And, son — if one day you should reach the lord stage, eat the blue pill I have left for you.

" You are the best thing life ever gave me. And whatever comes — your mother loves you. Always, and forever. "