story

Under the ground of the tundra in the south, there sprawls a network of tunnels. Hollowed from subterranean rock, they connect expansive iron-wrought chambers, host to industrial cityscapes teeming with thousands upon millions of people. Most of them, destitute. Day after day, they toil — children and elderly, healthy and sick, man and woman alike — in mines, in gutters, in factories, for a pittance of a wage that might, after paying for tithes of water, food, heat, air, and rent, and after a month of saving, possibly buy such a luxury as an egg.

Poverty scours the individual soul of most settlements. So it would’ve been for the unremarkable town of East Welding, were it not for the arrival of a mysterious woman named Desiree Blackthorne.

A prostitute by trade, Desiree slept, bribed, and blackmailed herself up East Welding’s chain of administrators. To minor officials she offered sex, love, and money. To higher officials, it was secrets, information, beautiful slaves, exotic drugs. Reputable merchants and good businessmen cracked to her coaxing, tapping her into more and more lucrative buyers. Her escalating negotiations soon bewitched representatives of Seacrest Enterprises, the owners of the vault of East Welding, who, conceding the vault held little of interest but more housing for workers, permitted Desiree sanctuary to procure more product for her wealthy clients aboveground. Desiree delivered more — much more — and soon amassed a fortune larger than most vault-dwellers would attain in their lives, or even in five lives, or ten.

All of that money, Desiree invested into East Welding.

She bought aspiring merchants and opened them platforms for business. She chartered construction projects and civic expansion, offering attractive wages to workers. She opened sites for games, recreation, gambling halls, brothels, all decadences rare in the underground that exhausted overseers gladly travelled for. Then she upscaled her existing enterprises, extorting valuable information from enemies of Seacrest, securing her partnership with them. And she spent. Dear lord, she spent.

East Welding soon thrived. It had organic business. It had an economy. People lived and succeeded there in relative comfort, peripheral beneficiaries of the monetary teat that was Desiree’s black market. And she protected that market ruthlessly. Competitors? Gone. Turncoats? Gone. Dissidents? They’re gone, honey. Her operatives were the Black Thorns, a gang of fall-guys, street thugs, teenagers, drug peddlers, prostitutes, hirelings, spies, hitmen, and occasionally higher administrators, drawn to Desiree’s banner by promises of belonging, protection, civic pride, wealth, freedom, excitement, and tail.

Their rule was status quo. The shady dealings, retributive violence, rampant extortions, and sex trafficking pervading the background of daily life was simply what one accepted should they live in East Welding. Life, for most, was decent — and for Desiree, was grand.

One day, Desiree took a dedicated concubine.

He was an exile, turned criminal, turned slave from the Western Kingdoms, a highly exotic flesh for the vaults. His name was Mason Whitewood.

He was hot. He was foreign. Desiree’s libido devoured him and the rest of her gave barely two shits.

And that is the unromantic story of how Raum Whitewood and Reyl Blackthorne, the twin son and daughter of one of the most powerful moguls of the Ordish underworld, came to be.

Raum and Reyl endured a chaotic upbringing. Too careless to raise them herself, they were passed around from household to household of Desiree’s associates in the Thorns. Without any one single guardian to consistently rely on, they latched onto each other instead.

Reyl, bold and adventurous, typically endeared her guardians. Raum, gentle and tender, typically got saddled with their bitchwork. He cried under pressure, she didn’t. Conflict distressed him, but not her. He was weak, she was strong. They grew up barraged by such reminders, subtle and not: every time uncles oohed at young Reyl’s cigarette drags then laughed when Raum tried and choked, every time Reyl approached strange houseguests like they were insects while Raum trembled in the hall like they were lions, every time Raum sobbed in bed at the screams from downstairs while Reyl, ushering him quiet with a click of the fingers, stoically prepared a reversi board.

She would protect him, she less decided than simply accepted. Her mother encouraged it, at least. Always, “is everyone good to him?,” or, “just keep him safe,” or, “don’t damage his face, but keep him in line how you have to.” Then, “oh, have you been well, also?”

Reyl savoured that acknowledgement. Desiree’s slightest glances, smallest comments, and lightest attention exuded an intoxicating kind of affection, indeed love, irresistible to a young child. She praised Reyl for the smoking, the backtalk, and for sheltering Raum, then would hug her and kiss her and tell her to leave. The next time, Desiree would slap Reyl across the face and, ecstatic at her lack of reaction, hug her while crowing: that’s my girl! Then it was kicking her down stairways. Beating her with a cane. Making her ferry drugs, steal from strangers, beat people, kill animals, and execute the Thorns’ prisoners. That’s my girl! Desiree crowed.

Under the weight of her admiration for Desiree Blackthorne, that invincible woman who built an empire from nothing, Reyl convinced herself to feel proud, every time.

When Reyl was six, she and Raum formally joined the Black Thorns.

At seven, she forbade him from ever involving himself in its activities again.

The story was this. A fight broke out on their street between one of their guys and a couple turncoats. Some visiting uncles left their house to join in, as did Reyl. The fight escalated, rivals got involved, things got wild, the turncoats died, the rivals died, an uncle died, Reyl took a bottle to the face and almost died on the operating table after. Though the surgeon removed the glass, that side never regained feeling, and neither was her mangled eye salvaged.

It was a stupid altercation that didn’t need to get hot. It wasn’t poetic nor was it unique, but it did christen Reyl to the reality of the Thorns. People died and got hurt all the time for stupid reasons, petty reasons, cruel reasons, no reasons, there was nothing sacred about anyone. Nobody was special, nobody was immune, nobody ever cared to make them so. Those who stuck to it better pick themselves up when, in just one unpredicted instant, something important disappeared.

Raum was neither resilient enough to cope with frequent death nor was he tough enough to survive any deep underworld involvement. Those axioms never changed in Reyl’s mind, even as the two, with age, changed as people.

Reyl become violent. Ruthless, cutthroat, mercenary — she cultivated a reputation for such fierce cruelty that even the threat of her retribution dissuaded meddlers. Though some of her nastiness was performance, most wasn’t. Deep cynicism, rage, and contempt for the very concept of goodness seethed through her blood like a poison, concentrating more and more with every battered shopkeeper, every teenage junkie, every impossible loan, and every pretty new slave on their market. Then she’d open her pocketbook and laugh at all the fucking money it made.

Raum became listless. His helplessness and dependence on blood money sickened him, but he hadn’t the room to struggle and grow into anything he could be proud of. He feared people less as he became more charming, more conciliatory, and more manipulative, but always remained almost childishly idealistic and good-hearted. Still, East Welding pressed upon him like a prison, a place he could never mature in, but that he was too spoiled, weak, and greedy to leave.

And to Reyl, that was fine. He didn’t need to mature. Just exist, as himself, still alive and unbroken by their abhorrent surroundings.

They stabilised. At thirteen, they moved to their own apartment. Reyl had been climbing the Thorns’ hierarchy since childhood, and was now fully patched, initiated, and tatted. She toiled for the Thorns, day in, day out, following every racket, overseeing the big transactions, administrating supply chains, maintaining relations with the authorities, maintaining relations with clients, enforcing punishments, removing competitors, harvesting secrets and rumours, all while keeping a presence on the ground as Reyl Blackthorne, the batshit bitch with a hair-trigger who wore sanguinary chic at least three days a week.

She would inherit the Thorns and the city should Desiree ever die. Though nothing yet formalised it, everyone knew it. Because everyone knew, should anyone challenge her implicit claim, that formalisation would promptly appear, in the form of her knife through their neck.

And that was the ceiling of her aspirations. If she could live and die as the don of East Welding, that was perfectly fucking enough. Not a sparkly mansion, but fucking enough. She was on track for it. Her future felt clear.

Until her family got that fucking invitation, with its subtle off-white marbling and swooping gold-leaf calligraphy.

To the funeral of her paternal grandfather, Faron Whitewood Earl of Daversham, R.S.V.P., His Royal Majesty of the Throne Efflorescent, King of the West, Aquila Asphodel.

You didn’t refuse summons from kings, and Reyl’s name was on the damn paper. The enviable opportunity to leave Ordanz for a holiday in the Kingdoms of Asphodel elicited no excitement from her, just an itching sense of foreboding. When she left the vaults, and felt the bite of chilled air, and saw the grey sky stretch like concrete from horizon to horizon, she immediately wished to return underground.

They didn’t, of course. She, Raum, Mason, and Desiree boarded a train and off they departed.

The most remarkable thing about their journey, Reyl found, was their escort: a witch named Trivia Venn.

She was remarkable for this thing of hers, called magic. With a swoosh of her hand, she could stop a guy’s heart, calcify their lungs, hex their bones with multitude cancers. The reality of magic stunned and intrigued Reyl with its possibilities. All Trivia conceded on the topic, though, was that she received her powers from her country’s god.

Unsatisfied, Reyl researched this ‘magic’ and these ‘witches’ once they landed in Asphodel, where such phenomena were well-acknowledged. Although unspecific, she gathered information enough to know anyone could become a witch, without any godly blessing, and without even much effort. It required the murder of a close-held relation, remorseless and utterly self-interested, to sever that relation from — well, the jargon intensified near incomprehensibly from that point, but Reyl understood it had something to do with souls and the self and yadda-yadda, something something.

Whatever. Reyl filed these fresh occult learnings away in her mind, satiated for now.

Perhaps this knowledge merited the trip, after all.

The funeral proper unfolded some weeks later. Her deceased grandfather, she learned, was a hero of a recent civil war that had almost destroyed the Western Kingdoms. It all popped off when some evil prince took the throne and went crazy, killing and resurrecting whole towns as his slaves, blah blah, bloodsoaked fields, cities burning down, real bad shit, not Reyl’s business. But apparently her family, already minor nobility, greatly serviced the true crown in the aftermath, quelling subsequent wars and restabilising the country. Between that service and the deaths of many established nobles, the Whitewood bloodline rose as the second-strongest in the West, below only the monarch, with every second cousin being some Duke or Viscount.

Her dad, exiled only months before the tyrant Phoenix Valens took power, had missed the whole thing. The fucking chances, huh.

Either way, the funeral mattered. So it mattered when the cathedral burned, the roof crashed down, and everyone attending died except Aquila, Raum, and herself, who all escaped into the tunnels that led to the crypts. Her father died then, but Desiree survived, as she hadn’t attended.

Newspapers blamed the arson on terrorists; stragglers from cults of Phoenix. Raum and Reyl, through some months of hijinks and dodged assassinations, realised terrorists had nothing to do with it. In fact, for whatever motive, the culprit behind the Whitewood massacre was none other than His Majesty Aquila.

More than past time to stick around, Reyl reckoned. This was some high-class foreign political shit they needed to extricate themselves from, pronto.

But before they could run, Aquila confronted them personally. He claimed things had changed and that he would protect them. He offered them the riches, prestige, and power indebted to them as the last surviving Whitewoods. He would make them royalty, though he refused to divulge his plans further. He would not pursue them if they returned to Ordanz.

Reyl neither wanted nor trusted Aquila's offer. She refused.

Raum accepted. Aquila sold him as a hero who vanquished the terrorist cult and whisked him away to the capital. Reyl, fuming amid public celebration, was gobsmacked.

The betrayal stung, first of all. But moreso did Raum’s stupidity for sheltering under their would-be assassin. The West had bewitched him with its pretty castles and smiling populace, all these fanciful pretentions of fairness and goodness, as if Aquila’s scheming didn’t expose the place as just another rotten shithole. Raum would enslave himself and die for some cute stranger’s promises of comfort. Because he would rather kill himself entertaining a pleasant fantasy of a future in Asphodel, than accept the bare-faced, pragmatic evil of Reyl, the world, and Ordanz.

Well fuck that.

Some pretty talk from a poncy king would not bereave Reyl of her brother. She would abduct Raum from his glimmering new mansion and drag him, hogtied if she had to, back to the four squat walls of their East Welding apartment, confined and safe.

But, how?

She was doubtless a fugitive, stranded abroad without connections or resources. Her mission required she sneak into the nation’s most protected building, in its most protected city, to steal its second-most protected man, then retreat across a whole continent while ferrying a hostage. She knew the roads and towns only by mapmakers’ vague abstractions. Moreover, in visiting any locale, not only authorities but civilians would recognise and confront her undoubtedly. Raum was too high-profile and Reyl was too damn distinctive.

Then there was Aquila himself. Even if Reyl murdered her way across Asphodel, only by aligning every minute advantage would she ever, even possibly, defeat Aquila in a potential fight. He was immortal, he had an army, he could fly, and he had a gun. Ignoring everything else — everything else — Reyl couldn’t dodge gunshots.

Every minute advantage, she needed. Off-balance and desperate, Reyl decided:

Time to become a witch.

She located Desiree and killed her without fanfare. Get this bitch outta me, she told herself. Make her not part of me, as the ritual demanded. Pain ripped through her chest as her arms viced around her stomach, doubled-over on the floor. Poorly-suppressed wails slipped through her teeth, clenched so hard her jawbone crunched as molars cracked against molars. Her essential core was shattering, splintering along hairline fractures like a glass orb disintegrating in chunks. Sweat sliced down her arms in cold trails that burned like daggers. But through it all, she grinned, and let excitement swallow her terror.

It was working. She could do it. She could save Raum from Aquila.

With that one thought, that one passing image, everything faded to normal. All pain eased as if balmed. Every loose section of that glass orb merged back to the centre, pristinely smooth from surface to core. Her visualisation of her soul then faded, as she would fail to visualise any unstressed, functioning organ. Her heart still pumped adrenalin and her breathing remained ragged. With only the twitter of birds through the window and the blood dripping off Desiree’s bed contesting her, Reyl, by her frantic pulse, was the loudest thing in the room.

She snapped lucid, hands scrambling across the floor for any properly severed fragments of soul. But her palms slid over only smooth stone. She swore, beating her fist on her thigh.

She’d failed the ritual. Though she tried to resummon the feeling, nothing came. She chopped again at Desiree’s throat, but nothing happened.

Furious, miserable, defeated, she departed the building.

Leaving behind one tiny fragment, barely more than a fleck, still on the stone floor, unnoticed.

Over the following weeks, she contemplated a big question. Why did she give such a shit about Raum?

He was her brother. But so what? That didn’t intrinsically make him worth anything. In fact, what worth even was he? He survived nothing alone or by his own merit. He simply appealed to peoples’ emotions, if not that then to their wallets, if not that then to their crotches. If Reyl had inherited Desiree’s ruthless practicality, Raum had inherited her success as a whore.

Reyl wasn’t looking for her brother to suck her off, thanks. So then what? Lipreading? Codebreaking? A hand for forgery?

A moral touchstone?

Please.

She’d cared about him because Desiree had told her to. Because she’d been a child desperate for constancy. Because she’d incestuously conflated his comfort with hers. Her continued attachment to him represented only a lingering weakness, manifesting itself past its expiry date.

She survived well enough on her own. She didn’t need anybody.

It was the right way to be. Use people as they’re convenient. Discard them. Succeed. Raum wasn’t special. Nobody was, as she always claimed.

So.

Proof of concept, she thought, as she slid her thumb over the flat of her knife. Raum did offer her one final thing. With it, she would close and bookend this chapter of her life. Definitively.

She would reattempt the ritual. And this time, she’d get it right.

The media often discussed Raum. A radio alone exposed his general doings. Raum too owned a radio. Knowledge of specific bands and access to specific receivers unveiled his more specific movements, which he broadcast daily.

One day there came a frantic transmission. On public channels: someone had attempted to assassinate Aquila, and Raum had taken the blow. On private ones: The injury would kill him within the day, if he failed to personally receive a panacea from the haunt of Phoenix Valens. Reyl knew exactly the route he’d take, through the quiet, lonely crypt-tunnels.

She went, and waited. He arrived already half-rotten, with glossy black feathers jutting from under his sleeves and smooth, curved claws for fingernails. Bloodsoaked bandages peeked from between his clenched fingers. As her silhouette fell over him, projected by the sun behind her, he stumbled back and raised his hands. “Rey, wait.”

Her knife stuck in his chest. Pain ripped through her heart equally, as it had with Desiree, when she ripped the blade out.

Red light crackled, and then—

—her straw clinked against the icecubes at the bottom of the glass, half-melted under the beaming sun. The white-brick plaza bustled with people, cradled all by the elegant facades of hobby shops and eateries. Workers attending their lunch break, couples scoping the cafes, children chasing doves around the fountain. Street musicians, a violinist and a trumpeter, cast pleasant music into the air. A boy darted out of the onlooking crowd to toss a coin into the box at their feet. The trumpet tooted a flourish of thanks.

She tilted her head. Mundane as the scene was, something about it all felt — different.

She swished the straw vacantly, palm to her cheek. The musicians bowed to applause and packed their instruments away. Sighing, she pinned a tip under her crumb-strewn plate, scooped her binder from the table, and rose from her seat. If she failed to settle on one of these proposals soon, she mulled as she flipped through the plastic sleeves, each fat with papers dense enough to strain their staples, her boss could very well demote her. She’d already procrastinated so much.

A snort pealed from the back of her throat. Again she flipped through the sleeves, then snapped down her thumb on a random page. This would do, she nodded after a skim. Problem solved.

Nothing to it. With a light roll of her shoulders, she tucked the binder under her arm and departed down the garden pathway out of the plaza. Over the raised beds of tulips and roses, she soon felt a gaze latch on her back, hanging persistent as taut fishing wire.

Anybody who could send a gaze that tangible had to be a creep. She pivoted on her heel to confront them, only for the culprit — a primly-kept, quite pleasant-looking young man, with his hands in his pockets, his shirt tucked in, and his face clean shaven — to call first: Hey.

The familiarity in his tone disarmed her. He approached, continuing in Ordish, for quite a long time, and quite passionately, his arms whizzing about in wide gesticulations.

“Look,” she interrupted. The guy quirked his brow and struck a cigarette. “I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”

He nodded, as if this made sense, and continued in a relaxed, reassuring tone.

“I don’t speak your language,” she clarified, enunciating each syllable.

“It’s your language, Rey, what the hell. Sure, we can do this way if you want, eh,” he said in fluent Asphodelean. “Anyway, so that wouldda been what, fifty years ago, now? And I know it all sounds like hottest load of diarrhoea what ever sloshed out a cow’s ass end, but that’s how things’ve been sitting. All this crap with gods and people dying, y’know, like us, heheh. Not forever, though, ey? Fuck, I’m glad you’re back.”

She raked her hand through her hair. “You’ve got the wrong person.”

“Ah shit did I fucking—ah, nah,” he glanced upwards, as if remembering something, and smiled. “Yeah. Reyl.”

And he talked, prattled really, about this godforsaken Reyl person. He recounted scenes of some gangbanger thug in a corrupt Ordish city, of a terrible home life, of a horrible mother and an absentee father, of beatings and butchery in a tone brimming with misplaced admiration. The more he spoke, the more it revealed this ‘Reyl’ as an irredeemable monster. Worms writhed under her skin with every implicit comparison between her and this criminal, until such sickness weighed in the pit of her stomach, she vomited up pointed corrections.

“Listen. I’m Ianna Petrova. I’m a sales consultant for Wessenbach, I was born in Daversham, and I have an older sister. That’s it. Who the hell are you?”

“Wh—I—It’s me, Raum. Uh, this body’s a new thing, so disregard the drapery, eh.”

“The crown prince, Raum? The Archon, Raum?”

“Yes,” he strained in reply. “And you’re my sister, the toughest bitch what ever ran the East Weld, most ruthless enforcer the Thorns got, hustling Seacrest, the city’s tsarevna, Reyl Stix Blackthorne. Holy, oh my god,” he whispered, “why don’t you remember?”

“Cause it never happened, creep. And you’re not any god, you’re just crazy.” She readjusted her grip on her binder and, with her departure, spat a final remark over her shoulder. “Follow me and you’ll wish I called the police.”

Indeed no footsteps echoed behind her. Her harsh tongue had subdued the stranger.

Really, though, the poor guy belonged in Nine Columbines.

Hopefully someone he knew could get him the help he needed.

But none of that, she thought, flipping again through her binder, was any of her business.

The stranger had spoken true about everything.

He was her brother. He was a god. And she was Reyl Blackthorne.

She just didn’t realise it.

Some fifty years ago, damage incurred by a failed dark ritual severed a minuscule portion of Reyl Blackthorne’s soul. This sliver, it happened, regulated the connection between the memories in her soul, and those stored in her physical body. Nothing she ever thought or experienced since ever reached her soul, and nothing already in her soul could she recollect.

But her brain could compensate. It was not a major disability. Normally.

Some fifty years ago, Reyl Blackthorne drove her knife into Raum Whitewood’s chest. The injury should have killed him — if not for divine intervention.

Something of a pet project of Aurholm’s deceased Demiurge, Camellia, dissatisfied with Raum’s miserable life and doubly miserable death, offered Raum godhood and immortality that he might, with extra time, achieve personal fulfilment and happiness. Raum accepted the offer. He was promptly resurrected as an Archon, and one with uniquely great powers, at that.

Those powers revolve around the manipulation of memories, souls, and what bodies souls inhabit. The second he died, his soul transposed itself into Reyl’s body, supplanting and erasing hers. She, naturally, died when this happened.

Though that specific transferal occurred automatically, Raum can also consciously transpose the soul of any living or dead individual into any living body. This way, by stealing the body of someone living, Raum can resurrect the dead. As he had, finally, after decades of hesitation, done to Reyl.

The preexisting damage to her soul keeps her from remembering herself as Reyl Blackthorne. She can only access the memories encoded physically, in her brain, of these bodies that are not hers. She utterly believes she has always owned these bodies, that she has lived the whole lives of the owners of these bodies, and that she fundamentally is the owners of these bodies. Her personality, though, remains that of Reyl Blackthorne. Raum knows it’s her.

Tens of times, hundreds of times, he has tried to convince her of her real identity. She never believes him. Or perhaps, finds it better not to believe him.

Over the centuries, his hopes of reconnecting with her have dwindled. Though he still searches for some workaround, he no longer contacts her directly. Just continuously resurrects her somewhere, in some body, whenever she dies.

Who knows where she is, or what she’s doing now.