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You open your eyes for the first time and howl. Everything gets worse from there.
You are a child who doesn't belong. Your skin is too tight and your heart feels false. You are dressed in silks and velvets and they suffocate you. You squeeze your eyes shut and rip at your dress until it is nothing but shreds. Then you rip at your body. But it, stubbornly, remains.
You stand in front of a mirror and all you see is blood.
Something dead lays at your feet and twitches when you kick it. It used to be your maid, you think, but you don't remember. Your mind is a yawning void swallowing you up, whole.
They're scared of you and you know it. They shrink from you when you walk past like wilting flowers. How you wish to pluck their stems.
You blink and you're older. You wear men's clothes and you slump your shoulders forward. Your mother looks at you with bile in her throat.
His hands touch yours for the first time and your skin buzzes. You want to rip his white hair out and hold it when you sleep. He smiles and you think about pulling out his teeth one by one. He tells you that the spider goddess loves you and you laugh and laugh and laugh.
He says he's your father and he visits you in your dreams and you wake up covered in sweat with vomit on your pillow. They say you're sick and they lock your door and give you bitter medicine that makes you gag. When the medicine doesn't work they bind your wrists and whip your back to purge the corruption but they don't know that the corruption is you.
Your eyes are the wrong color but they decide that it is the spider goddess who has blessed you. They don't listen to you when you tell them about your red dreams or when you tell them there's a little man in the corner of the room who smiles and calls you master.
Your friend rejoices when you tell him what they've decided, he embraces you and you feel warm.
Later cold temple floors rise up to meet you as you are thrown to the ground again by the high priestess who spits on you and brands you abomination, mistake, waste of skin. He screams at them not to hurt you but it's too late.
You are just as out of place in the temple as you were in your home and the cold walls surround you like the prison they are meant to be. You know only darkness and absence. The spider goddess does not speak to you and you are punished for it. Your father speaks to you and you are punished for it. Your fingers are red and raw from scratching at the walls of the cell that is your room. They cannot kill you and they cannot let you go free and so you remain.
They cut your belly and pull out your womb, burn it over a fire. They think that this is a punishment and don't notice how your mouth waters at the smell, the wetness on your thighs from the exquisite pain that sears your nerves.
He visits you and speaks through the crack in the door, puts his hand through the slot where they serve you your daily rations and you hold tightly to his fingers, trembling with the need to bite them off.
They let you out once a month, parade you in front of the others like a warning. They bathe you, scrub your skin raw, cut your hair short to get rid of the fleas. They wrap you in an acolyte's robe that fits too loosely and tangles around your ankles.
You feel the sickening red pulsing in your stomach every day every minute now, your father demanding that you kill kill kill kill. But you cannot, trapped as you are. Like a moth under a glass you slam against the walls of your cell, rend at your flesh with the desperate need to draw blood.
You call it the Urge, this thing that gnaws on you and itches inside your skull desperate to get out. It eats away at your sanity like the rats eat away at your discarded bread at night, leaving nothing but crumbs and the memory of what once was.
You sit motionless and watch shadows dance on the wall. Your little butler tells you it will all be over soon. The next morning you wake to find a knife in your hand. You try to be patient, try to conceal it as best you can when they come for you, but the moment the door is opened you are on them, stabbing slashing ripping tearing laughing. Grey skin parts to reveal a sea of red, hot blood spurts onto your face. You are free, finally free.
Bare feet slap against the floor slippery with blood. You push open every door you find, looking for more bodies to butcher. You are rewarded with a bounty; never have you seen so much gore, so much fear, so much flesh to tear.
Your body pulses with joy as you lick your blade clean. They are piled in a heap in the center of the temple, their guts strung up like party decorations. You see him out of the corner of your eye, pure white hair pure white robes eyes wide with fear. You grab his face with both hands and kiss him, staining him red.
They come for you then, grab you both and drag you away. Your crimes are obvious. His crime is loving you.
You are a problem, a thorn in their side. They cannot hide you away and they cannot admit defeat by killing you. And so you are cast out, both of you, with nothing but the ragged clothes on your backs. He clings to you and sobs, lamenting the loss of his goddess's favor. No matter how much you deserve it, he stubbornly refuses to lay the blame at your feet. You resent his forgiveness.
The bright light of the surface burns your eyes and the sky seems far, far too big, yawning upwards into eternity. You live like animals in the woods for a time before the hunger and the cold and the craving for blood becomes too much.
A small village, a cluster of sagging buildings with a well in the center. Soon their bodies fill the well and you eat their food and sleep in their beds. You make love to him there for the first time, in the empty bed of a dead farmer and his dead wife. He gasps your name, your real name, and wipes the tears from your eyes.
You hear him beseeching his goddess for forgiveness when he thinks you're sleeping. You turn away in case she answers.
Your hair grows longer and falls into your eyes. You stay in the dead village for a time and play at domesticity. Then winter comes and the meager stores of food spoil and you are starving. You wake up from hunger pangs and you are in your father's temple. His cold stone visage regards you with neither love nor malice. He shows you a vision of a tower stretching into the sky, surrounded by a blanket of shadows. An army grows around the tower like fungi around a rotting tree and something stirs underneath the ground.
You are told that within that tower lies your destiny.
You leave the village and its frozen corpses and empty houses, not in pursuit of your destiny but in pursuit of a warm meal and shelter from the cold. You huddle together for warmth at night in makeshift tents, eating acorns and shoe leather to stay alive. His face is gaunt and his red eyes sunken inwards, but he still looks at you with adoration. You feel sick with guilt.
You reach the shadowlands and the darkness almost feels comforting. You no longer see the stars or the sun and you can pretend for a moment you are back underground. He lags behind you, tired so tired. His weight crushes you as you walk. Voices in the dark call out to you, different than the usual ones. You do not even have the strength to will them away.
A single light in the distance gets closer and for a moment you think you are dead. White white light surrounds you and you are dragged upwards. Someone speaks to you in a language you don't understand and a lantern sways overhead. Through your delirium you realize that they were expecting you. You fall unconscious with relief or maybe with resignation.
A man stands over you with dark hair and darker eyes, his face smeared with soot. He smiles at you, his face contorting like a mask. You are pinned under his gaze as he speaks to you in your language. He tells you a great many things that are beyond your understanding and you half listen, drifting in and out of consciousness, feeling unmoored. His face swims out of focus and when you awake again you are alone.
Hours days weeks pass and your belly is full and your hands no longer tremble. Your lover lays beside you and talks in his sleep, his words half formed and discarded too quickly. He does not belong here, even less than you do.
You are incorporated into the Plan like a cog in a well oiled machine. You do what you're told, go where you're told, kill who you're told to. You learn fragments of the surface languages: "Stop." "Go." "Dead." You are given heavy metal armor that covers your body in comforting weight, a warhammer, and a purpose.
Your lover flounders, lost without his goddess, lost above the surface but unable to return below. It eats away at you until you feel a hole form in your chest that will never close.
The Banite leans close to you and wraps his hands around your throat his breath hot on your face his body on top of yours. You feel sick with guilt with lust with the need to Hurt. He is consuming you.
He calls it an opportunity and smiles that cold smile that warps his features and stretches his skin too tight against his skull. You prefer him when he is snarling at you. He's given you an opportunity for your lover to prove himself, to gain a Purpose, as you have. And it is your duty to convince him. The responsibility falls on your shoulders and you feel as though you are going to buckle under the weight.
When you tell him what he has been chosen to do he falls to the ground and wails. He clings to your legs and begs you with trembling breaths to save him. You feel the Banite's hands close around your throat. You hold him close and promise he will be safe and that you will see each other again. Only one of those statements comes true.
You are in the Banite's cold stone office when they tell you. The hole in your chest rends you in half. You are alone.
(A lifetime later and you stand in a different office, in the city on the coast. A corpse of great importance lies at your feet. You kick it once just to be sure it's truly dead. You hear a satisfying crack of ribs. One of your companions hands you a piece of parchment that you cannot read. You see your name, your dead lover's, and the name of your birth city, made ugly in the unpleasant shapes of the surface language. You learn how he was betrayed, how you both were betrayed, how it was planned from the start. You kick the corpse again.)
You do not return to your quarters again. You cannot sleep in sheets that still smell of him, look at the chair he used to sit in, his clothes strewn on the floor, packed in a hurry. He is gone, gone, and you remain. Your room lays dormant with a thin patina of dust, preserved eternally in the last moments you ever saw him as he was.
You sleep in the bowels of the tower, in the kennels, where at least it is warm and quiet and the dogs paw at you and nibble on your fingers, sleep next to you as though you are one of their own.
The Banite mocks you and calls you a mutt, strips you and ties your leash to the wall. You accept his vitriol because you know it is what you deserve. You crave the punishment he provides you, swallow it greedily like wine, bitter poison on your tongue.
You do not dream of redemption, of absolution. You cannot conceive of forgiveness for there is no one left to forgive you. You let yourself slide away, loosen your grip and give in. To temptation, to the endless pursuit of pain and pleasure. You become the miserable feral creature they all think you are because that is all you can ever be. Your world is red and black and caked in gore.
You leave the world much as you arrived- in blood and pain, howling at the unjust agony of it all. The world grows darker at the edges until it melts into a pool of inky blackness. You close your eyes for the last time.
Finally, you wake up on a burning ship with only your name and an incessant pain in your head and your life begins anew.