Nathan’s mother froze in the doorway, still holding a dish towel in her hands as Nathan watched her face change.
He watched her see the two men in his bedroom, the low flat blades, and his own body half out of his tunic with a knife already pressed to his throat.
Her eyes went wide, and her mouth opened, but before she could utter a sound, the man in front of Nathan said, "Kill her," without even looking over.
"Mom, run!" Nathan urged.
The words came out of him hard and fast, yet far too quiet because the blade at his neck had already pressed in and taken the air from his lungs.
"MOM!!! RU—"
She did not run, and that was the thing he would carry forever.
She did not run because she had spent her whole life running toward him, and her body simply did not know any other direction.
She took a step into the room toward her son while her mouth was still shaping the beginning of a scream that never came out.
The second man crossed the floor without a sound and moved his arm just once.
It was such a small, almost lazy motion, a short flat arc no wider than a man reaching to pull a curtain, and her scream stopped instantly.
Something warm sprayed across Nathan’s face, landing on his cheek, his mouth, and his open eye as the room went completely quiet.
He stood there, unable to move or react.
His mother sank against the doorframe as her hand came up toward her throat, though it never made it.
The towel fell from her fingers first, and then her knees gave way, causing her to hit the floor of the hallway where she had once taught him to walk.
She was looking right at him. Her eyes were wider than he had ever seen them, yet they were not filled with fear; she was looking for him, and even as the light was already going out, her eyes searched the room for her son just as they had every single evening of his life when he came through the door.
Nathan could not move, and as the world went slow and soft at the edges, everything past the doorway seemed to stop existing.
He was no longer in a room, but rather trapped in the two feet of space between his eyes and hers.
He wanted to say ’Mom’, but he could not speak or do anything at all.
He was still standing there when the first man’s blade went across his throat.
It was fast, faster than Nathan could turn and faster than his body could think, delivered in one clean, practiced motion by a man who had done this many times and had somewhere else to be.
There was no pain, which genuinely surprised him.
There was just a line of cold followed by a great heat pouring down his chest, and then the floor came up to meet his shoulder.
He landed facing the doorway, directly facing her, but his body would no longer answer him.
He lay on his side in a spreading warmth with his cheek against the boards, unable to lift his hand, close his eyes, or crawl the six feet to his mother, which was the one single thing he wanted in the world.
He had crossed that six-foot hallway ten thousand times, running in from the street, dragging himself in at night, half asleep, sick, or laughing, yet now, those six feet might as well have been the sky.
Above him, the men were talking, though their voices came to him strangely, sounding thin and far away like audio passing through deep water.
"We shouldn’t have done the mother," the younger one said, and Nathan could hear something unsteady under the words.
"The order was the boy. Just the boy."
"And she’d have had the whole lane awake in four seconds," the older man replied, his voice never changing pitch because he was already moving and working.
"This is the low district, where the walls are like paper. Do you want to fight thirty neighbors in a street this narrow?"
After a brief pause, the younger man replied, "No."
"Then it was the right call," the older man concluded. Something heavy dragged across the floor,.a piece of canvas, followed by the wet snap of a sack being shaken open.
"Bag them both, and we’ll take them out to the treeline."
"And say what?"
"We don’t say anything because they’ll say it for us," the older man said, sounding almost bored.
"The boy awakens, and then he goes out to test his new class in the woods like every idiot his age, but he doesn’t come back. The mother goes looking for him at dusk, and the beasts do the rest. By tomorrow night, half this district will be telling that story like they watched it happen."
"That easy?"
"It’s always that easy, because people would rather have a story than a question."
Hands took hold of Nathan’s ankles, but he heard them lift his mother first.
’The king,’ the thought arrived in the dark of his mind, cold and complete. ’The order was the boy.’
Someone had given a direct order; someone had sat in a clean room above a temple and decided, before Nathan had even finished walking down the stairs, that a low district boy with a bad class was worth taking two lives and spinning a lie about beasts.
Because there was only one man in the entire empire who gave orders like that, it had to be the king.
Something rose in Nathan then.
It was not grief, for grief was slower and softer and would have taken days to set in, but this came up out of him all at once, a black tide so complete that for a moment it pushed even his own dying out of the way.
It was pure hate.
He had never hated anything before, having only been annoyed, irritated, tired, or dry about things his whole life, so he had never once felt this in his sixteen years.
He wanted the king to bleed.
He wanted the man in the crown to lie on a floor in his own house with his throat open, six feet from someone he loved, while being completely unable to reach them.
His body kept dying anyway as the light in the room thinned out and his fingers stopped being his.
Yet, the thoughts kept coming, dragged up from somewhere underneath the fading one after another, refusing to let him go quietly.
An awakened swore loyalty to the crown, which was the whole arrangement and the single thing every child in the empire learned before they could even read.
The gods mark you, and in return, you serve the throne so that your strength holds the nation up while the nation keeps you fed.
That was the deal, and that was the very door his mother had wanted for him so badly.
What kind of king murders the people he is supposed to be protecting?
She had believed in that system with her whole stubborn heart, wanting him marked so that he would be safe, so that he would matter, and so that the empire would have a reason to keep him alive.
Instead, the empire had heard her son’s name for the first time that morning and sent men to his house before dinner.
And she had walked right into it while carrying a simple dish towel, just because her boy was home.
Nathan’s eyes were still open, though they were not seeing much now.
He could only make out the faint shape of the doorway, the darker shape where she had fallen, and the men’s boots moving through as they took her away.
’I’m sorry,’ he wanted to say, but he could not utter that either. ’I’m sorry, Mom.’
Then the doorway went away, the sound vanished, and there was nothing left in him to hold the world up with, so his consciousness finally let go.
He went down, sinking slow and heavy through something with no water in it and no bottom under it.
The last of the pain came off him like old clothing as the heat left, and the room, the house, and the six feet of hallway all thinned out above him until they were gone.
There was no light here, nor was there any anger, which he hated because he desperately wanted to keep the anger.
He reached for it as he sank, but it slipped right through him, and everything he had ever been slipped away with it until there was only the sinking, the dark, and the last dull ember of a thought that had no words left in it.
He was aware of himself for one final moment. In that exact moment, in the black sea where the last of Nathan Avenworth was going out, something turned on:.
A screen displaying pale green, blocky, and jagged letters whose shapes were older than any font the temple system had ever shown a single soul.
It burned brightly in the dark, and it was not asking for permission.
[Arise Death Knight!]