Redemption
copyright 2012 Faeriemage
Redemption is just another word for nothing left to lose.

        My earliest memory:
        I’m looking around at all the other children. Some of them are eager for what is to come. Some of them are already getting sick. The smells of bile and ammonia mix in the air with other less identifiable smells. My present mind replaces this remembered smell with blood. I now know the smell of blood so well that I could never mistake it for anything else.

        I read a book once, long after this memory took place, where a vampire told a human that humans aren’t able to smell blood. I was punished severely for that, but I’ve never forgotten that moment. It was a conceit by the author trying to make a greater difference between humans and vampires.

        I know vampires and they don’t sparkle.

        One of the other little boys has fainted. Another has collapsed to his knees and is retching again into the sand. It’s not me. I won’t allow my captors to get the satisfaction. Some of the others have already forgotten that we were taken, but not me. That could be because I was the oldest in my group. The other children were surprised when I was brought into the group.

        It had been over a year before that the previous child had been brought in. At six, I was the same age as these children, but I was emotionally much older. It seemed as though they were stuck at the age when they were taken. A number of the other kids looked to me as an older brother.

        The only light in the natural cave came from the torches on the walks. It was a flickering light which I allowed to distract me for a while. Fire is the reason that they picked me so late in the cycle. Somehow I set fire to my parent’s home and didn’t get burned.

        That is what the old guys tell me anyway. The folks at the orphanage told me it was an electrical fire. Me, I remember the man who came through the flames and took me out of there. He was wearing a cloak, which became singed a little, but nothing else.

        I didn’t tell anyone about the man.

        They stake out a wolf in the center of the ring. The Rector is walking out into the center of the ring. He turns slowly so that he can look each of us in the eye. The retching boy is dragged to his feet by one of the Hands who stand around the ring.

        The unconscious one is thrown into the ring with the wolf.

        “There are only two choices here: You kill or you die. Our war is too important to coddle you. In ages past, only one of you would graduate. In this age we need soldiers too much. Realize though, that if we lost all of you to your training, I will not shed a single tear. If you are too weak to kill, you are dead to me already.”

        As he was spoke, he raised his voice to be heard over the sounds of terror from the boy and they sound of the wolf attacking.

        “We must be strong in order to save the weak. You were chosen for your strengths.”

        The boy begins to scream as the wolf tears off his arm. The scream doesn’t last long.

        “One of you versus a wolf is not fair. Many versus a wolf is using his own tactics against him.”

        I feel a knife pressed into my hand. We’ve had talks like this in the past and we know what we need to do. The wolf is still busy with the other little boy; I think his name was Albert. We kill the wolf.

o-|===>
        Whenever I get a new diary I make sure to write this down as my first entry. At the time it wasn’t my earliest memory. I remember thinking back to the orphanage, and my parents, as I stood there in the ring with the other boys. I still wonder at the cruelty to let six year olds try to kill a wolf with just a knife.

        It was, of course, training for the war. Much like a six year old alone is no match to a wolf, a human is no match for the spawn of Satan that run around in the shadows of this world. They call themselves Unseen.

        It almost makes them seem…nice, doesn’t it?

        I mentioned the vampire book before. The reason I was punished is that we are here to fight Vampires, and Weres and Witches and whatever else Satan himself spits upon us. We are here so that the normal people are able to read books about Vampires and think them romantic.

        I’ve never been to school. The only learning I received was how to kill efficiently and cleanly. That was the entire goal of our training after all. We were raised to the absolute best that a human being could possibly go.

        I’d just received a new diary, as I did every year. I’m not sure why they gave us a new one every year, but they did. I’d just received my tenth diary. I knew that it was my tenth because I would soon be sixteen. I received my first just after I arrived before my sixth birthday. This was just before my sixteenth birthday.

        “I looked around me at the other boys who were still with us. Two had somehow failed their coming of age ceremony. Fourteen had died, including Albert, during the course of our training. There were only three others left in my dorm room.

        You don’t try to learn the names. None of the three were with me on that night almost ten years ago when I assisted with my first kill. I didn’t even know if any of them would care if I died during my own coming of age.

        There were still five from that first group I was in. They’d all survived their coming of age, but they were no longer my friends. They were cold. Something had gone out of them even as they became faster that they’d ever been before.

        I was, by far, the best fighter in our group, but now, when sparring, I couldn’t even get in a single strike, and they would cut my sparing clothes to ribbons.

        We always trained with naked blades any more.

        After writing my first entry in my diary, I went outside the compound for a walk. They never feared that we would run. I used to wonder why that was before I realized that we really had nowhere to run to. I didn’t even know where we were.

        I finished my normal run and made my way back to my rack where I lay down to try and get some sleep. Sleep never came easily to me.

        It was the memories that kept me up:
        I sat in the classroom. It was the only word I had for it, and I’m not sure where I heard it first. A lot of my life is like this. I don’t know how I know what I know.

        The Rector is in front of the class. It is always the same man, always the same droning voice. The Hands stand around the back of the room. They are there in their white cloaks with the black gloves. I only know they are alive because they move slightly every now and then. It is frowned upon to stare at the Hands.

        “Gideon started our order. He stood between humanity and the darkness, but then he was gone.”

        “Very good, Michael. Does anyone else remember what came next?”

        I raise my hand. We are punished if we fail to answer.

        “Yes, Seth?”

        “An angel of god came to the first Rector and told him a better way. If we perfected ourselves as much as we could, then we could be lifted up by the angels and made into weapons to destroy the spawn of Satan.”

        He smiles at me, slightly, but it is a smile. I’ve put a little passion into my speech. I don’t feel it, but it pays to let them think it.

        I fall asleep before the end of the memory. It’s okay. I never enjoyed remembering the beatings, even if it was someone else. If you weren’t fast enough to answer before the end of the class, then it was as bad as not trying to answer.

o-|===>
        I woke the next morning crying. Michael was killed by our first Unseen. She was sixteen and had only recently changed. She tried so hard to live that she almost got me. Michael threw himself between us and took her claws to his throat. I repaid him by taking off her head. The Hands who were there to observe the ‘hunt’ if you can call the execution of a chained animal a hunt, were angry at the loss of another of my brothers.

        They let me out of the punishment because I was the one who killed her.

        I still see the fear in her eyes in my dreams.

        It was two days before my sixteenth birthday, and I was ready to get it over with. I was excused from training because I was “the most promising pupil in sixty years,” or so the Rector told me. I can’t look at the skulls on his lapels without gagging. He beat me half to death with his heavy leather jacket once, and the last thing I remember from that beating was the sight of those silver skulls slamming into my face.

        I hate him more than I hate the Unseen.

        After breakfast, I left the compound again. It was a deviation from my normal routine, but I was tired of the stares of envy from the other students. The forest cleansed me. Whether it was nature herself, or the fresh air, or the illusion of freedom I still don’t know, but I loved to be out in nature.

        Sneaking up on a wild animal is a combination of a couple of things: You can’t be heard, and you can’t be smelt.

        Sneaking around will become second nature to anyone who goes through the order’s training program. The Sacred Heart does not suffer failure well. If you fail to sneak…no, you don’t want to know what they do to you.

        You don’t fail a second time unless you have a death wish.

        Some of the other boys gave up and let the Hands kill them. Not me. I wanted to live too much for that.

        The cool air had a slight tang to it that morning. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I was guessing that there was an electrical storm the night before. The walls of the compound are thick enough that it could survive a nuclear blast.

        I wondered, that morning, if they could survive Dragon fire. That is what they were designed for, after all. When the compound was being built, no one knew that the dragons were dying out in the world. Well, dying out isn’t the proper term for it.

        They were leaving.

        The only thing they’d done in the last four hundred years, as far as I’m aware, was kill us. I didn’t know why at the time, but I have a pretty good idea now. I think that Dragons are the reason that people believe in angels.

        It’s just a theory, mind you, but I really think that Dragons are forces for supreme good in the world.

        So, I was wondering if dragons could have destroyed the compound. St. George aside, I knew of no true stories where anyone had killed a dragon in one on one combat. I’m not even sure if St. George really did it.

        I do know he was real. He was part of the reason that I tried my best not to become the center of the Rector’s anger.

        There was a slight smell of ozone in the air and a small crack of thunder. I turned to the sound and saw a naked woman standing in the forest.

        I’d seen women from time to time. We did not live a Spartan existence. Even the Rector brought in his prostitutes upon occasion.

        The sight of a naked woman would normally have set my teenage hormones racing, but mostly she just terrified me. Somehow she was completely clothed in her contempt for me.

        “Well, let’s have a look at you.”

        “Who are you?”

        Her eyes glowed for a moment, and that was all the answer I needed. My sword jumped into my hand, or so it seemed to me at the time, and I lunged at her. Her eyes widened slightly before she went into motion and leapt out of the way. My left hand was already releasing the throwing knife that I held there.

        It was a little trick I figured out while sparring with one of the instructors. I hated to lose, so I made it my task in life to find ways to win. The instructor called me a cheater as he pulled the knife out of his shoulder. The Rector stopped him before he could do me any harm.

        I drew another knife from the bandoleer across my chest as I went after her again with the sword. She’d seen the knife coming so I would have to look for it after I killed her.

        “That was an unexpected move. I didn’t think a novice could focus on two things at once. Limitations of a human mind and all.”

        “Don’t let me change your mind. I enjoy being underestimated.”

        I drew back my arm as if to throw my sword at her, and release. I never let go of the sword, but she flinched away from it. I made sure to telegraph that throw so she ended up in the path of the knife I’d released a moment later.

        It nicked her on the outside of her arm. The blood was off, somehow. The color was too black. The slight cut only bled for a moment though, because when she wiped the blood away the cut was already gone.

        I telegraphed both my sword throw and my knife throw this time, timing it so that it would release the moment she opened her mouth to speak. She stepped directly into the path of my sword, expecting me to keep it in my hand.

        “It never pays to underestimate me,” I said as I walked up to her. The sword had gone cleanly through her heart and impaled her to the tree behind her. The dark red blood oozed from the wound as I worked the blade around a little to free it from the tree. I twisted it for good measure as I removed it.

        She let out a slight gasp as I did so.

        “I’ll remember that for next time, Seth. You would do well to remember that it is the beings that are immune to silver from the beginning that are your true enemies…not that the warning will do you any good.”

        She laughed at me as she disappeared.

        The first knife I found in no time at all. That was the one that I’d nicked her with. The other flew a lot further than I expected. In fact, I doubt that I actually threw the knife that far. The woman seemed to have a sadistic streak in her, and she might have moved it to make my life more difficult.

        “You’re late,” said the Hand at the door.

        “I had an encounter in the woods,” I said, showing him the blood on my knife. I’d cleaned the sword before sheathing it.

        “The Rector told me to send you to him as soon as you finally showed up.”

        I felt a sinking in my stomach at the mention that the Rector was waiting for me. It wasn’t unheard of for a novice to have a one-on-one meeting with him, but I dreaded them none the less.

        The door was slightly ajar when I reached the office. I could hear voices on the other side of it.

        “He is more than ready, Paul. I want to feed his soul to my minions. If I could, I’d take his meat suit for my very own.”

        “It must be on his sixteenth birthday, My Lady. You know that: Three fours plus one is the magic number for a full possession.”

        “I told you that, so don’t get uppity, my little minion. Perfection plus one times perfection plus one.”

        “And I always thought it was seven that signified perfection,” the man said with a dark chuckle.

        “One for beings of light, one for beings of dark, one for mankind: Three races given this world as a battlefield.”

        “I still say we must wait until his birthday if you want to completely subsume his will.”

        “I don’t think that will be necessary. I think that Seth is strong enough to be the next Rector.”

        “My Lady…”

        “I’m not replacing you yet. Seth hasn’t yet been fully corrupted. His first impulse was to kill me after all.”

        “As you wish, My Lady. What do you think…”

        I didn’t stay to hear the rest of their conversation. I had to figure out what I was going to do. Apparently the woman I had fought, the woman talking to our Rector, was one of the very beings that we were supposed to be fighting.