ZEPHYR: Reborn With A God System

"Useless. That is all you have ever been to this family."

I stood at the long table and waited for it to be over. Lady Vessral did not even look up from her cup when she said announced my insult… That was the worst part. Sixteen years of that word, and to her it was just regular now.

The household ate around me. Steward, mark-keeper, guards, none of them looked at me. In this house, looking at the markless boy was not worth the trouble and my father sat at the head of the table, cutting his meat.

Lord Draven Veyne. The golden lion. Head of Clan Obsidius. He heard his wife call his only son useless and he had never looked up at me.

"Do you hear me, boy?" Vessral said. "Today your cousins receive their marks. Nyra will be blessed before the whole clan. And you will stand in the crowd with empty wrists, embarrassing the blood that feeds you. Do us one useful thing in your life. Stand where no one can see you."

"Yes, my lady."

"Do not call me that."

"Apologies. My…" I closed my mouth before the wrong words could come out then I looked at my father one last time. I don't know why I still did that. Sixteen years of waiting for one morning when he would set down the knife and say something. Anything but his eyes stayed on his plate, that was always the answer.

The Academy of the Five Clans was full by the time we arrived. Banners of the five great houses hung from the vaulted ceiling: Obsidius in black and gold, Vorthak in grey, Infernis in red, Abyssarine in blue, Grimmort in brown. Sixteen-year-olds of every clan stood in rows on the arena floor, waiting for the Awakening Tournament, where they would fight before the elders and awaken their birthright marks.

I signed my name into the bracket with a stolen quill, and the clerk laughed in my face.

"A markless cannot awaken. That is the whole point of today."

"Put my name in."

He only did because the old statutes say any child of the five clans can enter, mark or no mark. I had read them all. Reading was the one thing this family couldn't take from me.

By the time I reached the group where my clan stood, half the hall was whispering, and Nyra's laughed as I passed by.

"The stray wants to fight," she called. "Careful, the stone might get embarrassed."

Sylene said nothing, she just stood with her hands folded, with a small smile on her face, her rosary wound twice around her right wrist. When my eyes passed her, she inclined her head to me, someone who didn't know her like i did would probably think that was the lmost kind ever but not to me… kindness from Sylene never came without a bill attached.

High in the stands, beneath the black and gold banner, my father sat with the elders. I felt the weight of that seat from the arena floor, and I hated myself for still searching for his face in crowds.

If I had looked twice, I would have seen the elders leaning close behind their hands. I would have seen my father's face change for the first time all morning but I didn't.

My first match was the third fight of the day. Dren Holt of Clan Grimmort, the strongest boy their clan had produced in a generation, built like the walls of this fort. When I stepped onto the sand across from him, somebody groaned out loud, and the laughter rolled down the stands.

"Stay down fast, Veyne," Dren said, almost apologetic. "I don't want to hurt a crippled dog."

The bell rang, and he hit me the way a wall falls on you. Here is what nobody in that hall understood: I had been beaten my whole life. Quietly, in training yards and corridors, in places no elder ever saw. I knew the choreography of losing better than any boy there. The first blow, the fall, the blood in my mouth, the moment the other boy got bored.

I stayed down for exactly one breath, then I got up again "Stay down," Dren said.

I spat blood into the sand and raised my fists.

The second hit put me on one knee but I got up. The third put me on my back, I still got up. Something was changing in the stands by then, a low confused sound, because the markless boy would not finish the choreography. The fourth time I went down, I caught Dren's ankle on the way, and the biggest boy in the hall stumbled, and the crowd made a loud cheer nobody had ever made for me.

Eleven minutes. Dren Holt, who had never been taken past the third, won on points, barely, and stood in the middle of the arena breathing like a drowning man while I dragged myself up one more time.

Nobody cheered this time…The silence was worse than cheering. It was the silence of people recalculating.

I walked off the sand with my face swelling and I had lost every fight of my life. For the first time, losing felt like a beginning.

I should have watched for the second knife. In Obsidian Fort, the second knife always follows the laughter.

The passage behind the arena was empty when Nyra stepped out of the alcove with her practice steel already moving for my head. Blunted, but heavy, and she swung it with her full strength and hatred.

"You made us a joke," she hissed.

I got my arm up and the blade put me into the wall. She came again, fast, and I understood with a strange calm that this was not a match. She was trying to finish a problem.

So I stopped being a fighter and became the thing this household had made me, something that survives. I slipped in front of her, took the hilt on my shoulder instead of the edge on my skull, and held on. We crashed into the stone. Her fist found my eye and my hands found her throat, only pushing, until we rolled apart and I was on my feet with her blade in my hand and Nyra flat on the floor, looking up at me with fear. I dropped the blade to the floor like it burned me.

"This changes nothing," she spat, backing away. "Markless filth."

It was a lie and we both knew it, I turned towards the hallway someone in the family colors turned and left quietly, having seen all of it.

I decided between the last fight and the stairwell. The words arrived in my head fully formed, the way decisions do when they have been waiting years to be spoken: I was done. I would walk out of Obsidian Fort tonight, and the markless boy would embarrass the blood that fed him no more.

The old east wing still smelled of dust and cold ash. My feet knew every stair. I had been hiding up there since I was six years old, and I was climbing them now with a packed bag on my shoulder when I heard her voice behind me.

"You could have run, Zephyr."

Sylene said standing at the bottom of the stairs with her sword drawn. The rosary hung loose from her other hand, and her soft smile was gone.

"Now you will see why I never needed to."

I backed up the stairs and she came after me, the way she had been gentle my whole life.

"That was the one use you had," she said. "Running. Why did you have to make them look at you?"

I tore the iron candlestick off the wall. It was a stupid weapon and we both knew it. She knocked it aside with a sound like a bell, and the fight went up the stairs, and it was nothing like the arena. It was close, dark and quiet, two people who had shared a table for sixteen years trying to end each other on a stone landing.

I lost, of course. I was bleeding in three places when the wall met my back, and Sylene stood over me with the sword rising for the final stroke, and she was smiling again.

"How strange," she said. "I always thought I would feel something."

My palm braced against the stone and began to burn, as if something had been waiting in the markless boy for sixteen years for exactly this moment, and had finally decided the family had given it permission. Then the blade came down minutes later the world went white.

[ GOD SYSTEM ]

Dying condition met: betrayed by blood.

Five bloodlines detected. Awakening authorized.

Godspark: 0 → 1

Warning: [The clans are watching.]