Raiten:

  When I open my eyes, it's to look into the dead eyes of someone else. Familiar dead eyes. With a worm crawling out the corner of one and some feces slinking down the other. I shake my head and look around—find myself back hunching over that hole, where we as a clan collectively killed the Angel of Verdan. She lies scrunched and wicked now, her body mangled and pirouted like some plaything of a primordial from one of Daichi’s cruel tales.

  The smell is horrendous. It stinks up to the surface like the earth itself is trying to expel the foulness.

  I feel a shiver up my spine rather than down—a jolt-like feeling of danger. The presence of which is soon announced by my assailers.

  “Look at him. He still gazes upon her dead body like a perverted bastard. I’m telling you, whoreson! Even if she was still alive, she wouldn’t let you fuck her corpse!” One of the children yells.

  I recognize the voice. It's one I haven’t heard in years.

  Kai’s daughter, Tumun, is a creature derived from the devil himself. At thirteen, she already leads a posse of admirers who bark and shit at her every whim. And she bullied me relentlessly in my youth—took great pleasure from beating me down.

  I smile as she approaches with her two followers tailing her.

  Maybe this time, the dream won’t be so bad.

  It will be a nice reprieve from getting my ass beat in the real world. Oh, how I’ve dreamed of these scenarios—these wretched days in which I took and never gave. But now I can give. And I can give a whole lot.

  My palms open and I take an Eternal Spring stance, feet sliding out like a dancer.

  Tumun pauses, her mountain-crocodile smile now turning into a sneer.

  “Where did you—”

  “Tumun,” another voice chimes in. He’s characteristically indifferent, but the way in which Kai says her name, it emits the slightest of disapproval. As if to say, ‘Do not bother with this type of trash.’

  She gets the message immediately. With one last derisive look at me, she flips her hair back and slinks off like a wolf denied its prey.

  The pack follows. And I am left standing in the presence of Kai, whose metal war bands tinkle slightly in the breeze that chills the mountains.

  He doesn’t even afford me a glance as he strides up next to me, eyes glued to the hole that we have made.

  I open my mouth to speak, and close it promptly. A thought occurs to me: I don’t remember this conversation. This interaction, even. But, then again, I was so young here. So maybe Thrae is affording me the ability to revisit these events with a new perspective.

  “I thought you might be here,” Kai says after a moment. His monotone voice cuts through the wind itself—seemingly dragging it to a stop.

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  When he doesn’t elaborate, I clear my throat and try sounding like my normal self. Doesn’t work. It just sounds like a kid trying to make his voice adult.

  “Why?”

  He shrugs. Then, he gestures to his daughter’s retreating form.

  “They… do not understand what we understand,” he says. Then, he points down to the pit. “What she understood for many days on end. Tell me, bastard, what do you think would’ve happened if she was taken out of the hole? If she was healed and given the opportunity to recover?”

  My eyes glaze over the Angel of Verdan’s pale blonde hair, now matted gray and dirty by all sorts of sweet scented rot.

  “She’d kill us all.”

  Kai nods sagely. “Every. Last. One. Down to the babes I’d reckon. And you know, I would not blame her one bit. That’s just the way things work.” He turns to me with a discerning eye, as if seeing me for the first time in his life. Judging my value.

  Then, he kneels to my level. “That speech I gave our people earlier, it was paltry—futile. Dog shit, if you will. None of that fake strength ideology really matters. No, you see, the reason why we lost, is because we are lacking in one particular quantity. An incremental weakness that buries itself in our ranks like a disease. Do you know what that is?”

  I frown and shake my head. He’s starting to sound like how he was at the tower. And I don’t like those memories one bit.

  “315729.”

  What? My face contorts in confusion. He affords me a slight upturning of his lips—closest thing I’ve seen to a smile on his face.

  “315729. In Servanta, that becomes the Suffering Differential. I quite enjoy the theory, for I made it myself. You see, little bastard, there is a reason why you and I are drawn to this scene. Why every day, we gaze upon her dead body like some gore-obsessed, macabre djinn,” he reasons as he raises his hands and pulls his palms close into a fist. “It is because we understand this senseless cruelty. We understand her. That is the very same reason that, despite all the training our little clan runts get to become soldiers, despite all their wealth and lineage, you of all people may one day surpass them.”

  My face darkens. I remember this conversation now. Not entirely, but mostly because it rhymes with all of his other conversations with me at the tower. His wretched upbringing comes to mind and I spare myself the image by holding my puke.

  He takes my gagging for confusion.

  Surprisingly, Kai pats my shoulder. “You are too young to understand this fully now. But perhaps when you are older, I can show you what I mean.”

  It takes all the restraint I have not to punch him here and now. I can take on other children in this body, but Kai is a different matter entirely. Besides, I just have to wait him out. If I do, I can go get my reward for all this suffering.

  Mother.

  “You look angry, bastard.”

  “I’m—” I pause, taking a deep breath. This is just a dream. Anything you do here is useless. Killing him now does not undo what he did to you. “I’m fine.”

  He makes a humming sound before standing. He takes one last look at the Angel of Verdan before striding off.

  I too afford the dead woman one last stare. I suppose I owe my life to her death—futile as the trap might’ve seemed, it did weaken the Lady enough for Kiren and I to last until Saegor came along. As thanks, I clasp my hands together and do something rather unbecoming of me: I pray for her, to whatever might be up there, above the heavens and the world we suffer in. I pray that she receives respite and kindness in ways she did not in this life.

  No one deserves to undergo what she went through.

  No one besides the man who put her through it.

  I’ll give Daichi the cruelest death of them all.

  With that comforting thought, I begin running once more to my mother’s house.