“Down at the outskirts of Taratus you will find the most terrible and most courageous of men; what the cold and desolation doesn’t kill, the bandits do. And what kills the bandits are killed by fools – not by the enemy soldiers, but by monarchs that send them to their doom.”
-Unabridged journals of the Imperial Scribe; c.20 p. 31
Aster didn’t believe in an afterlife.
While he believed in higher powers, as most people in the Empire do, he didn’t believe in concepts of heaven or hell, as the mortal world had proven to be hellish enough. His mind simply couldn’t comprehend the idea of a worst place and reality coexisting with the one he just had.
As for the idea of heaven or paradise, it didn’t matter to people like him. Those who lived in the borderlands – right at the outskirts of Taratus – would never taste a bit of paradise or heaven in this life and the next, simply because they were born peasants. In the empire of Ambros, there was no need for afterlife: paradise existed in the inner city of Elyssia, limbo for the fields of Aphos, and nothing but hell and desolation for Taratus.
Aster was born in such hell. Brutal cold, scarce prey, and devoid of any arable land. When people didn’t die in the cold, they died in the hands of thieves and caravans, and if fate saw a more dramatic death – then they would be caught in war between Ambros and its neighbouring lands.
He hated this place. He hated how he remembered their little hut in stark clarity, with the bear figurehead hung across the wall as the sole decoration – the one and only bear that his father had caught in his lifetime. The rest was old pans, creaky wooden tables, and old animal pelts passed between generations, simply because their village had been too poor to acquire anything new.
It made sense if this place was Aster’s punishment. When he opened his eyes, he found himself lying in his old bed – nothing but a mess of furs laid across the floor but still more comfortable than any other bed he’d laid on. His mother and older sister slept a few feet away from him, snoring peacefully. He watched their figures inflate and deflate, breathing.
The last he’d seen them, their throats had been slit out. Their hut was burned down, and he was kept alive for the sole purpose of being exported as a slave.
A soft whimper broke the silence. Aster tasted something salty in his mouth.
His sister shifted at the sound, causing Aster to immediately wipe off his cheeks. She turned from where she laid and opened an eye – winter blue, just like Aster’s.
“What’s wrong?” She asked him.
This is wrong, Aster wanted to say. This was too cruel. He'd rather face a thousand deaths.
"You're acting strange, Aster. Did you eat those weird berries again?"
Aster didn’t think he’d ever hear her voice again, at least, not after he cut off her windpipe.
Kill us. Before they turn us into slaves. I’m so sorry, Aster.
She had been his first kill, then their mother. Everything else came easy after that.
What a cruel afterlife this is, he thought.
He knew he should say nothing, do nothing, and let this scene play out the way it was meant to. If his guess was right and he has been condemned to relive the night that turned from a hunter to a killer, then the screams should follow soon enough.
“I’m sorry,” he said. For the first time in a long time – not even when he was imprisoned – Aster let the tears fall. It came to him like knives to the chest, crawling up his throat and spilling out of him like shards of broken glass. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.
Dahlia only looked at him with confusion, until his sobs grew loud enough to wake up their mother. Whereas Dahlia had yet to shake the sleep off her eyes, their mother was alert as ever, crawling near to Aster to see what's going on. The sight of her was too much for Aster – her dark locks, the wrinkles around her eyes, her sunken cheeks. Her look of concern had overlapped with the image of her begging Aster to do the deed – to spare both women of the family from an undignified fate.
Then there was Aster, reflected on the beads of her eyes, obliging to his mother’s final request.
“Aster,” she whispered. “What happened?”
The words clumped around Aster’s throat. Look at him, the most renowned assassin in the empire, reduced to a crying mess at the mere sight of his mother and sister. But then again, where else could ruthless people come from, other than soft places and softer people that they couldn’t protect?
Back then, Aster had been a hopeless boy, whose hands shook at the mere thought of having to hold a knife.
I didn't want to. I wish I didn't have to.
However, when the screams started, his body moved as if remembered it being a weapon. A defunct one, maybe, but a weapon, nonetheless.
“Hide!”
***
There wasn’t much space in the hut to begin with.
Aster smelt blood before he heard the men’s rowdy footsteps. Blades, spears, maces and wooden planks – the caravan of bandits held no regard for aesthetic when it comes to weaponry, so long as it struck fear. They were the nightmare of every village that dared to live in the outskirts, for there was no telling where they would strike next.
All they knew was that the caravan held no loyalty save for gold. They pillaged, burned, stole women and children as far as their horses could carry. They would wait a few months until the nearby villages let their guard down, and then they would strike again. They would almost always leave survivors to ensure that there would be something to return to. They made crops out of people, the villagers used to say.
Every once in a while though, they would splurge. This was one of those nights.
“Shhh,” Aster warned his mother and sister, who hid under the furs along with him. At this rate, only a dead man could sleep at the sound of screams and smell of burning flesh and wood. Playing dead was high risk, considering that the bandits could easily stab through the furs and be done with them.
In front of him, his mother covered her mouth and stifled a cry. At this point in the past, the men would have already grabbed her by the hair and dragged her outside, with Aster flailing in the background.
“And what do we have here?”
Not this time.
Fast as a viper, Aster sprung out of the covers, grabbed the nearest man by the neck, and swiped his dagger. It had been so easy, like taking candy from a kid, and Aster wondered, for the umpteenth time, why he hadn’t been able to do this back then. His build had been average. He wasn’t bulky, but he had strength built from chopping firewood and hauling blocks of ice. Surely, he could’ve put up a fight.
“Nobody move,” he ordered, pressing the knife at the man’s neck. His hostage wore a wolf’s fur – probably a high ranking member of the caravan. Not that it mattered.
“That’s some moves you got there, lad,” one of the men remarked, this time with a leather pelt. He was the one that held a mace, and his build covered up most of the entrance. A monster in size, he assessed.
Such a shame he’d picked the wrong weapon in close quarters.
“Dahlia, get mother. Stay behind me,” he gave a little kick underneath the covers. His sister’s head finally peeked out, her face white as a sheet and her lip trembling. Fear.
“Aster, you–”
“I said, get behind me.”
“Is that your sister?” The hostage in his arms quipped, seemingly unbothered by the knife around his throat. “Oh, and the mother’s looking quite young too! We’ve got quite the catch–”
Aster dug the knife around the man’s throat, drawing blood. “Shut up!”
“--they’d fetch a high price, especially if they arrive in good condition.” The hostage continued. As he talked, Aster noticed the other bandits surrounding them, inching closer and closer. “Say, boy, why don’t you put your skills into good use and bargain with me. We could use a hand–ahh!”
“I said, shut up, you dumb fuck,” he hissed. There was a moment of silence before he heard his mother and sister scream behind him, and a moment more before the bandits recognized the lump of meat that had just fallen on the floor.
“There. Use your own hand,” he says, kicking the offending limb towards the bandits. The hostage was squirming and writhing and bleeding in his grip, but this Aster had years of experience holding down targets, despite his youth. The blade had returned to the hostage’s neck like it never left, while the bandits were left staring at their comrade’s hand and the bleeding stump.
“Kill him!” The hostage shrieked. “Kill this motherfucker, flay him–”
In the past, Aster had been helpless against this man, until someone saved him.
This time, though, Aster was willing to make the most out of hell.
“What a whiny bitch,” he sighed. With a flick of his wrist, the man’s head had lolled to the side, blood spraying out of his neck. Aster had enough time to wipe his face off and toss the body to the side, before he faced the rest of the bandits.
“I hope you brought everyone,” he told them, revelling in their awestruck expression and shaking knees. “I’d hate to leave some members out of the party.”
That night, he was proud to say that his kill count had risen to seventy.
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