[The God of Death has turned His gaze upon you.]
[Class Acquired: Death Knight]
The text finished writing itself, and for a moment, the hall was silent and confusion settled upon every single person.
Then someone gasped.
It was a god’s gaze. It wasn’t just a common draw, but a named class. The dark light, turning statues and the drop in temperature.
Every person’s instinct in the room had spent the last minute screaming that something enormous was happening on that altar, that this ragged low district boy was about to pull something none of them had ever seen.
They had been right about one thing and tey had never seen this.
They just didn’t understand what they were hoping for. "Death Knight," someone whispered near the front. Their words echoing through the crowd like a draft under a wooden door.
The excitement died first on the commoners side, where more than one of them actually knew what it meant. It curdled into something worse than disappointment. Pity and under the pity, the small ugly relief of people glad it wasn’t them.
Nathan looked at the words hanging in front of his face.
[Death Knight.]
He didn’t feel like he had been cursed. But he felt cold, and a little tired, maybe annoyed that he was still standing on a stage while a hall full of strangers stared at him.
’Well,’ he thought. ’That’s a name.’
He didn’t know why it didn’t scare him.
Somewhere very far down, under everything, something did.
Elder Morran came over slowly.
The old man had been sharp and impatient all morning, cracking children off the back of the head, moving the line along like a man clearing a drain.
Now he moved like his knees hurt and stopped beside Nathan and looked at the glowing text for a long moment, and the tired lines of his face pulled down into something Nathan hadn’t seen him wear once all day.
"Death Knight," Morran said quietly his voice laced with regret.
"Is that bad?"
The old man let out a breath through his nose.
"Boy, a Death Knight is a soldier of the dead. The class isn’t made for the living. Every skill it grants runs on death itself, the kind of power a corpse can carry because a corpse has nothing left to lose."
He tapped the air near the text, gently, the way you’d touch something already broken. "You’re not a corpse. You put a single one of these skills through a living body, and the body pays for it. Do you understand what I’m telling you?"
Nathan looked at him.
"I’d die."
"You’d die," Morran agreed. "The first time you tried to use what you were given. Maybe the second, if you were weak enough to only half do it."
He said it flat, but not unkind, the kindness was in the flatness. He wasn’t going to lie to make it prettier.
"I’ve stood on this altar forty years," Morran said. "I’ve failed thousands of children and watched it break their hearts. And I’m telling you, and I never thought I’d tell anyone this." He met Nathan’s eyes.
"You would have been better off if the light had stayed dark. A failure walks out with nothing. You’re walking out with a mark."
The God of Death had reached down out of two centuries of silence, past every noble in that hall wearing their gods like jewelry, and He had put His hand on a boy from the gutter.
Across the gap, the noble side had stopped celebrating entirely.
They were looking at Nathan the way you look at a rat that’s wandered into a banquet. Frowns, drawn brows, a few of them shifting back as though the mark might be catching.
Keres stared at him with an expression Nathan couldn’t read.
Frederick, the crowned king, did not frown at all.
The king simply watched, very still, with the crimson eyes of a man doing arithmetic.
Nathan shrugged, It was not a dramatic thing. He rolled one shoulder, let the glowing text fade, and stepped down off the altar toward the only face in the hall that mattered to him.
Jerry was already losing it.
"Nathan." He was gripping his own knees, shoulders shaking. "Nathan. You had a whole god turn the lights off for you and you got a class that kills you if you use it."
"I’m aware."
"The lights, Nathan." Jerry wheezed. "The statues turned. I nearly fainted. I thought, this is it, my best friend is about to become a legend. And you pulled the one class in the world that’s worse than failing."
"Are you finished."
"Don’t worry." Jerry threw an arm around his neck, grinning through the tears. "I’ve got a Support class now. I’m basically a healer. I’ll take care of you. I’ll keep you alive so you can enjoy the rich, full life of a man who legally cannot fight."
"Get off me."
"I’ll carry your soup."
"Jerry!"
"Cursed by the God of Death and looked after by a discount farm-witch. It’s a beautiful story."
Nathan elbowed him in the ribs, and Jerry doubled over laughing, and for a second the whole thing almost felt like a joke and nothing more.
Two low district boys who’d walked up a hundred stairs and walked back down with a bad class and a mediocre one.
He let himself believe that, It was easier and much more simpler to do.
They found a spot at the back of the hall and waited it out.
The ceremony continued with more names, more failures, a scattering of small recognitions.
Nobody looked at Nathan the same after his turn, but the crowd was thick and people had their own futures to be terrified about, and soon enough the morning simply moved past him the way mornings do.
When it ended, the two of them slipped out into the daylight with the rest of the emptying crowd and started down the long stairs toward home.
Neither of them looked back.
Which was a shame.
Because someone was watching them go.
In a private room above the temple hall, King Frederick stood at a tall window and watched two boys grow smaller on the steps below.
Elder Morran shut the door behind him and did not bow. He was too old and too tired for kings.
"You wanted me."
"The last boy," Frederick said, without turning. "The low one. Tell me again what he drew."
"You heard it same as I did. Death Knight."
"The mark of the God of Death."
Morran clenched his jaw, "The class of the God of Death. There’s a difference, and it’s the difference that matters. That boy can’t use a single thread of it without dying. He’s not a threat, Your Majesty. He’s a tragedy, let him go home to his mother and live whatever life a cursed commoner gets to live."
Frederick finally turned.
His crimson eyes were very calm, and that was the part that made Morran uneasy.
"You are a good priest, Morran," the king said. "You have spent forty years thinking about children. I have spent forty years thinking about the nation. So let me tell you what I heard, standing in that hall."
He crossed to a side table and poured himself wine he did not drink.
"For two hundred years, since the war in the heavens, the gods have marked our young. Every god you can name and a hundred you can’t. And in all that time, in all these ceremonies, in every temple across the empire, do you know how many souls the God of Death has ever reached down to touch?"
Morran said nothing.
"None," Frederick answered. "Not one. The other gods play their games with us. They hand out their fragments and their legacies and they watch us fight. But that one has never once looked at this world. Not in two centuries."
He set the cup down, "Until today. In my capital. In my ceremony."
"That doesn’t make the boy dangerous," Morran repeated. "It makes him unlucky."
"You misunderstand me." Frederick’s voice didn’t rise. It never needed to. "I don’t fear the boy. I fear the god who chose him. The old stories are very clear on one thing, priest, and the stories are all we have. Every pantheon feared the God of Death. Not hated. Feared. They loathed Him and they kept their distance, because whatever He was, He was the one thing even the immortal ones could not be sure of surviving."
He looked back to the window, to the empty stairs.
"And now, after two hundred years of silence, that god has planted His mark in my land. I will not stand in my own hall and wonder what it means. I will not wait to find out whether it is an accident or the first move in something older than my throne."
Morran felt the cold come back, the same cold that had rolled off the altar.
"He’ll die the moment he uses the ability," the old man said again, quieter now. "You don’t have to do anything at all. The curse does your work for you."
"Then it costs me nothing to be certain," Frederick said, "and it costs me everything to be wrong."
He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t send for a general. He simply spoke to the air, to the men who were always standing just out of sight in rooms where kings made decisions.
"The boy from the low district. The one the God of Death marked. See to it before nightfall. Quietly. A cursed commoner dying young surprises no one."
Somewhere behind a curtain, a shape peeled away from the wall and was gone before Morran could turn his head.
"He was just a boy," Morran said, to no one
"They usually are," the king replied indifferently.
____
The low district smelled like home, which was to say it smelled like smoke, cheap cooking oil, and the river when the wind came the wrong way.
Nathan liked it, he would never have said so out loud, but he liked it.
Jerry peeled off at the fork with a promise to come by tomorrow and gloat some more, and Nathan walked the last stretch alone, up the narrow lane where he’d learned to walk, to the crooked little house wedged between two others exactly like it.
He wasn’t upset about the class, he’d noticed that about himself and found it strange.
He should have been, awhole future had opened and closed in the space of a heartbeat this morning, and everyone kept looking at him like he’d been handed a death sentence.
But Nathan had never wanted this.
He was one of the only people in that entire hall who had walked up those steps hoping the light would stay dark.
His father had been an awakened, a strong one.
People in the low district still lowered their voices a little when they mentioned him, still told stories about the things Aldric Avenworth could do, the things he’d fought, the places his strength had carried him.
His strength had also carried him into a grave before Nathan was old enough to remember his face.
That was the thing nobody put in the stories, strong awakeners didn’t die of old age. They died because being strong meant the world came looking for you, again and again, until one time you didn’t get up.
His father had been powerful, and admired, and marked by a god, and none of it had kept him alive long enough to teach his son a single thing.
So Nathan had grown up quietly deciding he wanted none of it. No mark, power or stories.
Just a small life in a small house, and a mother who came home at night.
His mother had wanted the opposite for him with every bit of her heart.
"A mark is a door out, Nathan," she’d said, a hundred times, in the same warm stubborn voice. "It’s the one door people like us ever get. Your father hated a lot of things about being awakened. He never once hated what it gave us."
She’d wanted the door for him so badly.
’Well, Mom,’ he thought, pushing open the crooked gate. ’A god opened a door today. You’re not going to like where it goes.’
He’d tell her, when he figured out how to say it so it didn’t land like a stone.
She’d cry, probably, and then she’d get that stubborn set to her jaw and start figuring out how they’d make a life out of it anyway, because that was what she did.
He almost smiled.
As he stepped inside the familiar homely dimmed house and went to his room to change out of the stiff ceremony clothes.
He’d gotten one arm out of the tunic when he realized the house was too quiet.
No fire crackling, no pot Nd there was no sound of his mother, who was never, ever silent when she was home.
The window latch, which he always kept shut, was open.
Nathan froze.
He was still standing there, half out of his tunic, when the two men came out of the shadows of his own room, moving without a whisper of sound, one from either side, blades already low and turned flat to catch no light.
They were professionals, fast and quiet, in and out before the neighbors heard a thing. A cursed commoner dying young, surprising no one.
Nathan’s body reacted before his mind did. Something old and cold and far too calm woke up behind his eyes and started measuring the room.
The two men and the exact worst moment they’d chosen.
The nearer blade came for his throat and the door to his room swung open.
"Nathan, are you home? I thought I heard the ga—"
His mother froze in the door way.