story

Much of a person’s life is already dictated, with natural unfairness, by where and to whom they were born. When the lot cast upon a child is one of mistreatment, that realisation makes for a dreary one. If I were myself, but born in fairer lands, could I have done more? If I were myself, but properly raised, would I be healthy now? Even should opportunity batter such a person with exit ramps off the paths of their parents, or hard work forge for them the same, the ties of kinship and habits of upbringing rarely fade completely.

For Jacklyn Blackthorne, unwilling heir to the bloodiest underworld in Ordanz, these were uncomfortable thoughts.

Consider first his country, the cruel nation of Ordanz. A land smothered by uninhabitable tundra but for its northernmost reaches, none but the richest have the luxury of knowing whether a single morsel will today cross their plate. Poverty is the lot for the hundreds of millions of people who inhabit the country’s subterranean tunnel-systems and vault-chambers, with most fated to labour in inhumane conditions as miners or factory-men. After paying tithes for rent, heating, air, food, and water from the scant pennies of their paycheck, and saving fastidiously for a month, a truly lucky duck might purchase such an extravagant treat as an egg. Else the typical life is that of a slave, indentured and beaten, then worked and replaced.

Consider next Jacklyn’s father, the foreign exile Mason Whitewood. Kicked out of his homelands in the Kingdoms of Asphodel, without any assets to cushion his fall through the classes, he quickly became a thief, and then a slave, within a couple months of entering Ordanz. Being more savvy than the typical vault-dweller, though, and unaccustomed to the harsh demands or communal lifestyle imposed on Ordish slaves, rather than submit, he found ways to cheat other slaves out of benefits and into doing his work for him.

His overseers spotted his terrible work ethic and exploitation of other slaves. After running the numbers, they realised Mason’s presence harmed their operation’s profit margins. They ruled he would be more useful being slaughtered as food for the better slaves, but Mason learned of this plan and fled. However, between his distinctive foreign appearance and the bounty on his head, it would not be long before someone saw him and turned him in.

Now consider last Jacklyn’s mother, the matron Desiree Blackthorne. A former prostitute who appeared out of the tunnels into the unremarkable vault of East Welding, still under construction at that time as a residential zone for factory workers, she negotiated her way with sex, love, and blackmail into the meeting room of Seacrest Enterprises, the billion-dollar company that owned most of the underground. Allying with them as a supplier of exotic drugs, beautiful slaves, and information on enemy corporations, she was granted amnesty to operate out of East Welding and secure Seacrest more of her product, which she enthusiastically did.

She invested her massive profits right back into East Welding. By nurturing the city’s infrastructure, enticing aspiring merchants to establish themselves there, and hiring workers at unimaginably high wages, the city transformed into a rich and quite comfortable harbour among otherwise unremitting poverty. Though underscored with vicious crime as a side-effect of Desiree’s work, and moreso as a side-effect of her enforcers, the gang Black Thorns, punishing cheats and offing competitors, none could argue with the dollars. Daily murders, ruthless loan sharking, and rampant sex trafficking were simply what one accepted should one accept life in East Welding, and consequently life under Desiree.

She also had a fetish for handsome exotic men, meaning foreigners like Mason. She squirrelled him away from the authorities and into East Welding, where she took him as her concubine, landing him in a position barely any better than where he started. In exchange for more freedom, Mason offered her surprisingly in-depth knowledge on running high-scale criminal enterprise, the worth of which Desiree acknowledged. She begrudgingly agreed to keep Mason as a business partner on a leash, rather than a sex toy, and by their collaboration Black Thorns’ scope swelled immensely to secure it as a pillar of the Ordish underworld.

These are parents, the environment, and the circumstances into which Jacklyn and his elder twin sister, Jayden, were born.

Desiree and Mason were terrible parents. With Mason fundamentally uninterested in rearing kids, and Desiree too careless to do so herself, the twins were handed off to Desiree’s friends in the Thorns. But between frequent arrests and various internal dramas, they wound up being passed around many different homes and parental figures, while only seeing either one of their real parents maybe once every few months. Instead of any particular adult, they latched onto each other for security.

Being twins, they were compared to each other relentlessly. Jayden was loud, bold, tough, aggressive, and self-assured. She was the one people accepted and praised. Jacklyn was quiet, sweet, emotional, pacifistic, and easily coerced into bitchwork. He was the one people bullied and exploited.

Jacklyn envied Jayden, for how she stood up to adults and shooed scary strangers like gnats, but prided in her too. Jayden scorned Jacklyn, for sobbing constantly over everyday conflicts and letting himself be used, but babied him too. She was strong, he was weak. That was the fundamental takeaway, reinforced every time Jacklyn, unsure about exiting the house alone, or too scared to stay in the same room as their caregivers’ toked-up friends, or bawling into a pillow as furniture smashed downstairs, automatically turned towards Jayden for rescue.

Any prospect of Jacklyn growing to emulate her, though, was eliminated by age seven. That was when Jayden joined some uncles in a gang brawl gone wrong, where people died, uncles died, and Jayden, too, almost died, but survived with just a missing eye. More horrified over Jayden’s near-death incident than she even was herself, Jacklyn obeyed when Jayden forbid him from ever touching the dirty side of the Thorns. He was plainly too weak to make it. Rather, he should focus on his real wants and hobbies, while she took on the gang. Seeing her confidence as she proposed this, the terror she might die in the Thorns shifted into the realisation that she was, in fact, not like him, and thus, would be totally fine.

And indeed, as their teens came and went, Jayden came to thrive in East Welding. The money she made in contribution to the Thorns, administering its operations directly under Desiree, had already secured her in the local consciousness as the city’s next don, though nothing formalised that claim except the knowledge that any challengers to it would promptly find themselves in the obituaries. Her reputation was brutal, and fully deserved, as not a single threat, whether upon disobedient gangmates, loaners shirking their debt, or children of fee-dodging shopkeepers, had ever gone unfulfilled. Everyone knew her, and everyone feared her. In her mercenary way, she just seemed kind of invincible.

But Jacklyn saw the Thorns had changed her. Beneficiary as he was to her intimidating reputation, which in itself eliminated the harassment he had feared when he was young, to see her come home covered in blood again, or decorated with new scars, tired and curtly unwilling to talk, worried him. And though she would laugh or smile again when the topic shifted off of work, she had also become frankly mean. The way she regarded Jacklyn was no longer that he was weak, and thus needed help, but that he was weak, and thus helpless, and damn fucking lucky he had her.

Jacklyn agreed with that sentiment, truly, 100%. Jayden’s blood-money breadwinning enabled not just his comfortable lifestyle, of good food and good clothes and good fun and good everything, but the absolute freedom he had in East Welding. He could rely on her utterly. Anything he wanted was simply a matter of asking for it through her, and unless it was blatantly stupid, she would make it work. All he could or really had to do was house chores. The rest of his timetable was eternally open to just hang or go out or whatever. He could even meddle with the Thorns without consequence. Frankly, he was spoiled.

For it, he could feel himself stagnating. East Welding, with all its delights of gourmet restaurants and casinos and gamerooms and brothels, each seeping with a foundation of bloody rape and murder, strangled him like a cage many sizes too small. Everything he saw seemed somehow corrupt, but he could not think of any way to change it. Though sheltered and smiling under the wing of Jayden and Desiree, more and more, he began to feel sick.

He didn’t belong here.

Or so he would think, but then Jayden would flop to the couch exhausted and lob her coat into the hamper like garbage, and Jacklyn would know his place was beside her.

Or so he would think, but then Desiree would summon him again to her tower, and—and, well.

She never had stopped hankering for that exotic concubine, of hers.

And apparently she figured he’d grow to be outrageously hot by the time he was still a toddler. He wasn’t going to whip useful knowledge on running a criminal syndicate out of his ass, either. Of course he needed to ripen, but the absolute control she had over him thrilled her. What were these years of interim, but her chance to prepare her young lover? Get him all cute and seasoned. Get him sweet and obedient.

Jacklyn resigned quite quickly that he had no place, but beneath her.

Given how submissive he was to her from the outset, though, honestly, it barely seemed necessary.

That was Jacklyn’s life. He was still luckier than most. For allowing him to live with the vast privileges he had and keeping him out of death in the gutters, though underscored with frustration, his gratitude for his situation ran deep.

Still, he had fantasies.

Two stupid, recurrent ideals.

In one, he was a prince. The offspring of Asphodelean nobility, with a retinue waiting to accept him back home. The obscurity of his father’s past, which he never divulged, fuelled the fantasy well. Though he knew his father was probably just a dishonourable crook, Jacklyn couldn’t help but romanticise his ties to a land of tradition, nobility, and majesty.

In the other, he was Jayden. Invincible, untouchable, strong enough to do whatever he wanted, powerful enough that nobody would think of pushing him around. Everyone respected him. And he could rock short shorts like woah. His idolization of her had never faded, though it was what she represented, rather than what she did, that transfixed him.

Two dumb power fantasies of an ineffectual boy whose only strength came from nepotism. Baseless, outlandish, no chance of ever happening.

Until the day that that marbled letter came, penned in its gold-leaf calligraphy, stamped in wax with an unfamiliar seal — that of the royal house Asphodel.