Pain.
That was the first thing I felt when I woke up.
I sat up and saw that I was in a dark, damp place that smelled of wet earth and something rancid, like sour wine or rotten wood. There were no windows. A couple of half-melted candles stuck in bottles on the floor were the only source of light, making shadows dance on the stone walls. It wasn't a nice place, to be honest. It seemed forgotten, as if no one had been down here in years.
But the basement wasn't the strange thing. The strange thing was the red lines, apart from the ones on my arms and legs, crossing my stomach.
They were on the walls. On the floor. Marked on the wood of some broken boxes in a corner. They were like... dots. They weren't just anywhere. They were clustered together. Where the wall had a big crack, there were more. Where the floor was sunken, the earth was darker.
Curiously, where the place looked worst, where the cracks were deepest, where the damp had rotted the wood, where the dust was thickest, that's where there were the most red lines. As if... it preferred places that were already damaged. As if it were looking for the wounds in the place to get into them.
Creeeek.
The sharp, plaintive sound cut through the thick silence of the basement like a rusty knife. It snapped me out of my contemplation of the red lines.
Upstairs, at the bottom of the stone staircase, the closed door was opening. A rectangle of dim, yellowish light, an oil lamp or a candle, stood out in the darkness. And in that frame, the silhouette of a man appeared.
He descended the steps calmly, dressed in a long black tunic, worn at the edges. He wore something around his neck. A shiny crucifix. His face was in shadow, but the light caressed a gray, unkempt beard and eyes that reflected the flickering flames.
He looked like a priest... well, more or less. He had the appearance, the worn clothes. But something was missing. The only priest I ever knew smelled of incense and had a weary smile. This man smelled of basement dampness. And his face did not inspire confidence, only caution.
"Rejoice, boy. The Lord has given you another chance."
Well, that confirmed it.
Now, what was he doing here?
"Who are you?"
A thin smile, which didn't reach his eyes, appeared on his lips.
"A question that smells of desperation and new blood," he said, his voice like the rustling of old parchment. "To those who still pray in the chapel upstairs, I am the Father who prays for their souls."
He paused. His eyes fixed on him.
"But for you, I am not a savior. I am the one who collects what the wolves leave behind and decides whether it is worth dissecting for study or whether it should be thrown into the pile from which neither the Church nor the Association can learn anything."
I didn't understand a word he said. But it didn't sound like anything good.
"You who survived the dark side of the moon..."
The moon. The last clear image before the void and the fall here. Its insulting beauty. That glow over the courtyard of the massacre. Was there a dark side? To me, it was beautiful.
"I ask you: do you want to be my apprentice?"
Apprentice?
"I offer no comfort," he clarified, his voice losing its old parchment tone and taking on a more direct one, like unpolished steel. "I offer no home. I offer a trade. The trade of walking among what others do not want to see."
He paused, letting the weight of the offer, and of his knowledge, fall on me.
"Or you can refuse it. And then you will be exactly what the vampire told you: cattle."
Cattle...
The word stuck in my mind, rough and ugly. I didn't like it. Not at all.
Like sheep bleating confusedly before shearing. Like rabbits always scurrying away, always on the defensive.
No.
Denial was not a thought. It was a fire that arose from the very snow of shock that covered me. A small fire, weak, trembling like my hands, but mine. It was not the heat of courage. It was the heat of rage. A silent rage, still without direction, but fierce in its rejection.
I looked the priest in the eyes. I was looking for the tool. I was looking for the edge I could use to cut that word, to tear it from my skin, to burn it from my destiny.
"No," I said, and my voice was not a whisper this time. It was flat. Clear. Like the click of one small stone against another. "I am not that."
He did not smile. He did not nod in approval. His expression became, if anything, more severe, more focused. Like a blacksmith who sees the metal finally turn red-hot at just the right moment to begin striking.
"Prove it," he said, and his voice was the hammer against the anvil. "Words don't tear out fangs. Controlled fear does. Knowledge does. The willingness to stain yourself with blood other than your own, that does."
The first step in ceasing to be cattle, it seemed, was to accept becoming something else. And the man in the black robe, in the basement filled with silent screams, would be my forger.
But before that, I had to ask him.
"What are these lines?"
"Lines?"
The word came out of his mouth in a flat tone, almost one of confusion. He stared at me, as if my question had been in a language he only half understood.
"Lines?" he repeated, more to himself, and a deep wrinkle formed between his bushy eyebrows. His gaze shifted from my eyes to my outstretched arms, where I was pointing, and then to the basement walls, following the trail of my fingers pointing at the dark shadows.
There was a long silence. The crackling of the candles seemed to grow louder.
Slowly, he shook his head. It was not a gesture of denial to my question, but of incomprehension.
"I don't see any lines, kid," he said at last.
"You don't?" I murmured, the word coming out like a sigh of disbelief. How could he not see it? It was so clear, so obvious, so... overwhelming.
My eyes, without my directing them, fixed on him. And then I saw it.
"But... you have lines too. All over your body."
The priest stood completely still. It wasn't a theatrical freeze, but the sudden stillness of a predator who has felt the point of a rifle sight on his skin. All his small movements, the blinking, the slight swaying, the breathing ceased.
"I see."
Then he smiled.
It wasn't a warm smile, or even a friendly one. It was a cold, precise curve of the lips, an expression that didn't reach his gray eyes, which remained like two flints.
"It seems," he said, his voice lower and heavier than I had ever heard it, "that you will become a great Executioner."
XXX
A month has passed.
A month since the smell of blood and damp earth was replaced by the smell of sour sweat.
The day after my acceptance, hell began.
I suspect that priest has... particular tastes. Maybe I shouldn't have accepted.
But that thought is useless. What's done is done.
Day 1
The priest forced me to work with those red lines. I could see them everywhere. I could cut them. All of them. Without exception.
It was as if they were simple sheets of paper and I was a pair of scissors created solely to cut through them.
He made me try all kinds of weapons: from a huge, heavy sword
to a small knife that barely fit in my hand.
The size didn't matter. The lines always gave way.
That was the most unnerving and wonderful truth of the day. Whether it was the thin strand of grass or the thick trunk of the old tree in the corner of the yard, the result was the same: my perception, focused through intention and guided by the blade, found the breaking point. And as I passed over it, crack! Its integrity vanished. The grass turned to green dust. A section of the trunk as wide as my body was instantly transformed into a pile of dry, lifeless splinters, as if all the time and sap that had once sustained it had been a dream from which it had just awakened.
The priest watched each demonstration with an intensity that bordered on the religious.
His eyes, usually gray and opaque, glowed with a fire reflected from the red flashes that only I could see. After the olive tree partially collapsed, he stood still for a long minute, staring at the dusty stump.
Then he began to murmur.
"...unheard of... they weren't myths... those eyes."
He didn't look at me like a child. He looked at me like one looks at a dangerous tool.
Maybe I was a prodigy after all. Not just any child could do something like that... or could they?
Day 2.
Hell showed no mercy at dawn. The priest woke me up not with a word, but with a bucket of ice water that shook me. It wasn't the first hour of the day; it was still dark, and the basement air was as sharp as knives.
"Get up," said his voice, a block of ice in the darkness. "Pain is a luxury. Weakness is a death sentence."
What followed could not be called training. It was a massacre. The "training" of the previous day, with the lines and the knife, had been a test, a fascinating and terrifying experiment. This was different.
He made me run around the courtyard, over the uneven stones, until my lungs burned and I vomited the little water I had in my stomach. Then push-ups. Not until muscle failure, but beyond, until my arms refused to respond and my face hit the ground. Stone lifting, not to strengthen, but to test the exact point where the body gives way and the mind wants to surrender. And he was there, always, with his monotone voice, pointing out every tremor, every gasp, every tear of frustration and pain that I couldn't hold back.
"That pain in your side is a line," he said at one point, as I doubled over, gasping. "A line of weakness. If I were a vampire, I wouldn't kill you there. I would lean on you, with my weight, until an organ broke. Get up."
Child abuse. The words, precise and bitter, rolled around in my mind as I tried to push a rock that was too heavy for me. It wasn't discipline. It was dismantling. He wasn't looking to strengthen me; he was looking to identify and break every breaking point my body offered him, so that I would know them before any enemy did. It was cruel.
The pain of the previous day, the mental pain, the pain of using my eyes, was now a distant memory, drowned out by the immediate and total physical pain. Every muscle screamed. Every bone seemed to rub against another. The fresh red lines of my original wounds opened up, oozing a little. He saw them and did nothing. He just nodded.
"Blood attracts. So does pain. Learn to ignore both. To contain them inside. A moan is a beacon. A sob, an invitation."
When finally, under a sky that was just beginning to lighten, my body refused to move and I collapsed like an empty sack, he approached. He didn't offer me a hand. He threw me a piece of stale bread and a dirty rag.
"Clean yourself up. Eat. In an hour, perception work. You have to learn to see with a broken body. Because in the field, there will be no time to rest."
I crawled into a corner, shivering from cold, exhaustion, and something very close to hatred. I couldn't sleep because of the pain in my body. It was a sea of dull agony that flooded every thought. But even in the midst of that sea, a cold, new part of me was watching. This was the real lesson of Day 2: familiarity with the limit.
Yesterday's "prodigy," the child who could undo realities with a knife, was today a wounded animal, gasping on the ground. And maybe that was exactly the point. To remind me that, no matter how powerful my eyes were, my body was still fragile, mortal, and full of red lines that anything could explode. Before I learned to cut the lines of others, I had to learn to protect my own. By force of blows, hunger, and ice-cold water.
The hour passed in a blink of painful semi-consciousness. Then, his voice again, just as clear, just as relentless:
"Get up. It's time to learn to see without the pain clouding your vision. Or I'll break a finger to give you a specific point of pain to focus on."
Hell, I realized, had no floors. It was a bottomless pit. And we had only just begun to descend.
Day 3.
Dawn arrived with the echo of every shattered muscle screaming in rebellion. The priest didn't use water this time. He simply kicked me out of bed.
"Your body cries. Ignore it. Get up. Pain is information, not an excuse."
The routine of Day 2 was repeated, but intensified. The runs were longer, the stones heavier, his criticism sharper, cutting into my weaknesses as I had cut the lines. It was the same systematic abuse, but now with a clear goal: to normalize suffering. To turn pain into background noise, into just another fact of the environment, like cold or humidity. I was the object to be hardened.
But after breakfast of stale bread and dirty water, everything changed. He didn't take me to the pile of inanimate objects.
"Today," he said, his voice flat, "you work with the ephemeral. With what trembles."
He took out a wicker cage, inside which something was moving with small, nervous noises. Mice. Three of them, gray, with black eyes like shiny beads filled with instinctive terror.
My stomach twisted. "No." The word formed on my lips, but it didn't come out. He saw the refusal in my eyes.
"It's not a question," he said, placing the cage on the patio floor. "Your power doesn't discriminate between a stone and a life. You must. But to control discrimination, you must first know its scope. You must see what happens when it is applied to something whose existence is a thinner thread."
He placed the same kitchen knife in my hand. The metal was cold.
"Don't look at the animal," he ordered. "Look through it. Look for the line. Not the line of the body, not the line of the bones. The line of being alive. The seam that holds that sack of fear, instinct, and heartbeat together with the fact of being a mouse."
One of the rodents was pressed against the wicker, its little sides rising and falling at a frantic pace. And then, against my will, my vision focused. Not on the fur, not on the whiskers. It slid back, toward the abstract layer where the lines glowed.
And there it was. It wasn't just another red line. It was... different. Apart from the lines, there were several dots. They had a stronger, more tremulous glow, like the heartbeat of a firefly trapped in a jar. It snaked through the small form, a complex and dynamic skein, much more intricate than the simple, rigid line of a stone. It was beautiful. And it was terrible.
"No," I whispered, backing away.
"Yes," the priest's voice was a wall behind me. "Cut it. One stroke. Clean. It's not murder. It is seeing what happens when the conceptual support of a life is removed."
My hands were shaking. The knife weighed like a slab. The mouse, as if sensing the threat on a primal level, let out a high-pitched squeak.
"Do it!" roared the priest. "Or I will lock you in with them in the darkness until hunger makes you see lines in your own flesh!"
My fear of him, at that moment, was greater than my pity. With a groan that was half sob, half choke, I forced my arm to move. I didn't aim at the mouse. I aimed at that trembling, beautiful spot in my vision.
The knife passed through the air, an inch from the wicker. It touched nothing physical.
There was no crack.
There was silence. A sudden, absolute silence that fell over that corner of the courtyard. The squeaking stopped. The frantic movement ceased.
The mouse did not die. It did not bleed out. It did not convulse.
It simply came to an end.
Like a snowflake on a warm palm, like a chalk drawing erased by a sponge, the little gray shape simply... stopped moving. For a fraction of a second, I saw the lines and the bright spot fade away, and with it, the idea of "mouse" that surrounded it. There was no blood. There was no violent death. Life, nullified not with an ending, but with a denial of its premise.
Violent nausea rose in my throat. I doubled over and vomited, again and again, only bile and water, as sobs shook me.
The priest looked at the little pile of mouse with an inscrutable expression. Then he looked at me, writhing on the floor.
"Good," he said, and the word sounded obscene. "Now you know the true weight of your gift. It is not a weapon. It is a verdict of non-existence. And every time you use it, you will carry that burden. Get up. Touch what remains."
The priest did not give me time to sink into despair.
"Now we will go to the forest."
It wasn't a suggestion. He didn't wait for a refusal, a protest, and with a gesture he ordered me to follow him. My body, aching and heavy as lead, obeyed out of pure survival instinct in the face of his authority.
The forest that bordered the village was not the one from my childhood memories of exploring with Alma. In the gray light of the afternoon, it was a labyrinth of damp shadows and hostile whispers. Every creaking branch was an omen, every movement in the undergrowth a potential threat.
He wasn't looking for trails. He was looking for life.
And he forced me to hunt it. Not with traps, not with stealth. With my eyes.
"There," he pointed, his voice a metallic whisper. A rabbit, motionless under a bush, its ears tense. "The line."
That clearing. A fawn, drinking fearfully. "The line... Focus."
Among those bushes, the bright eyes of a wild cat. "Quick. Before it runs away."
It was a silent, grotesque slaughter. There were no shots, no roars, no struggle. Just me, trembling, focusing on a vision that now felt like a vomit-inducing curse, searching for that trembling, beautiful glow that meant being alive. And then, the brief gesture, almost a tic, with the knife or sometimes just my outstretched finger, tracing the cut in the air above that line.
Silence. Always the same dreadful silence after the gesture. Each time, a part of me shrank and died. Each time, the priest nodded coldly and pointed to the next target. There was no verbal lesson. The lesson was repetition. The normalization of the act of ending their lives.
By the end of the day, I had killed 5 deer, 3 wild dogs, 4 rabbits, and 1 cat.
The numbers stuck in my mind like the headlines of a report of atrocities. They weren't prey. They were exercises. Practices of a conceptual executioner. My hands weren't bloody, but I felt them dripping with that peculiar emptiness, that nothingness left by my gift.
That was the lesson of Day 3. Hell was no longer just physical. It was moral. The priest wasn't just hardening my body. He was tanning my soul in the acid of my own power, forcing me to look into the abyss I could open, so that the horror would become familiar to me, and not paralyze me when the time came to truly use it. The "prodigy" now had hands stained with a kind of death so clean and absolute that it was, in itself, the dirtiest of all.
Day 7
The week had dissolved into a fog of pain, fatigue, and the perpetual echo of silences created by me. The "training" had continued, a varied hell that oscillated between physical torture to identify every breaking point in my body, and trips to the forest to "practice" the verdict of non-existence on increasingly larger, faster creatures, whose lifelines became, to my growing horror, more beautiful and complex to contemplate before I extinguished them.
But today was different. After the morning routine of physical breakdown, the priest did not take me to the woods. He sat across from me in the basement, in the candle-lit stillness, and looked at me with that constant assessment that was already familiar to me.
"You have become accustomed to ending them," he said, not as a compliment, but as a statement of a necessary step. "Or, at least, you have learned to act despite the disgust. That is enough for now."
He took a handful of cold ashes from a small brazier and dropped them onto the dirt floor in front of us, forming a rough circle.
"Today," he continued, his voice taking on a more serious tone, "you will learn the first principle of what neophytes call magic, and the unwary confuse with miracles. It is sorcery. Do not confuse the two. Magic is a dream of magicians. Sorcery is a technology. It is the manipulation of reality with will, knowledge, and a price."
My first reaction was a hint of childish skepticism, quickly stifled by everything I had seen. Did it exist? Of course it existed. I had seen the ruby eyes of a vampire. I had wiped animals from the world with a gesture. Why wouldn't sorcery exist?
He proceeded to place his hand on my shoulder.
It was an almost paternal gesture, so out of place in the brutality of the last few days that it paralyzed me for a second. There was no pressure, just the dry, calloused weight of his palm through the thin, dirty fabric of my shirt.
And then...
"GAAHHH!"
A heart-wrenching scream erupted from my throat before my mind could process what was happening. It wasn't ordinary physical pain. It wasn't the sharpness of a broken bone or the sting of a cut.
It was a burning sensation that sprang from the exact spot where his hand rested and spread like lightning through every nerve, every vein, every strand of my being. It shot through my shoulder, cascaded down my spine like acid, exploded in my ribs, ran down my legs to the soles of my feet and up my arms to my fingertips. It was instantaneous and total.
I collapsed, writhing on the floor, unable to make a sound other than a choked gasp. My eyes, wide open, did not see the basement. They saw a blinding flash of light that was not light, but the pure sensation of being dissolved.
The priest withdrew his hand. The fire extinguished as quickly as it had come, leaving behind an agonizing tingling, an echo of agony etched into every nerve. I lay trembling on the floor, feeling my body like a freshly ravaged battlefield.
Then his words fell upon me, cold and clear, cutting through the gasps of pain:
"I have just awakened your magical circuits. With this, you will now be able to perform sorcery."
The meaning took a moment to sink in, pushing through the shock. Magical circuits.
I looked at my hands. They felt... different now. Not stronger, but more connected. As if I had been trying to listen to music with my ears covered, and suddenly, someone uncovered them. A low hum, a barely perceptible vibration, ran through me, following paths I could now feel: lines of a ghost map beneath my skin, running from the center of my chest to my extremities, coiling around my joints. It was the circuits. Newly activated, raw, sore from the violent awakening.
"Try to activate them. Think of your trigger," said the priest, his voice echoing in the heavy stillness of the basement.
My trigger? The order was absurd. How do you "think" of a switch you don't know? But he didn't give orders in vain. I closed my eyes, pushing away the echo of the stinging burn, and immersed myself in the new sensation.
It wasn't a switch. It was more like... a wound that wanted to be used. The spot on my shoulder where his hand had burned the inner lock still throbbed, an epicenter of that strange vibration. I focused there. Not on turning it off, but on following the vibration, encouraging it.
And then, without meaning to, my mind, searching for a "trigger," latched onto the brightest, most painful image I had: the trembling, beautiful line of life in the forest deer, just before fading it away. The memory of power, of absolute annihilation.
A violent cramp, like an electric shock, shook me from my shoulder to my fingertips. The circuits beneath my skin lit up.
It wasn't a metaphor. It was a catastrophic mapping of my own interior. In the blinding flash of pain and power, I didn't just feel the energy moving; I felt every path it took. And I counted them, driven by a panic-stricken instinct to bring order to the chaos.
Forty.
Forty lines of potential agony carved into the map of my flesh and spirit. They weren't uniform. Some, the main ones running down my spine and legs, were wide and deep, highways of pain. Others, in my hands and feet, were fine as hair, intricate and fragile networks.
The number stuck in my mind with the precision of survival data. Forty circuits. I didn't know if it was a lot or a little, if it was normal or monstrous. I only knew that each one burned, demanding attention, clamoring to be used or to explode.
The priest's question broke the silence charged with my inner amazement.
"Well? How many do you have?"
His voice wasn't curious. It was a demand. A test to see if my internal perception, that new and painful sense, was as accurate as my "eyes."
I opened my mouth, the certainty of the number in me contrasting with his opacity.
"Forty," I said.
His narrow eyes, always evaluating, fixed on me with renewed interest.
"Forty," he murmured. "Interesting. That's not the average number. Although its quality remains to be seen."
His tone made it clear that the quantity, impressive as it was, was only the first piece of information. What mattered was the caliber.
Without giving me time to digest the implication, he continued, his voice taking on the practical, dry tone of an instructor.
"Now I'll teach you a spell: Reinforcement."