Wren thought today would be a tough day, but he didn't expect to get murdered.
He and a few hundred other freshly turned sixteen-year-olds were lined up in Eisenwall's Grand Hall, waiting for the Brand Stone to tell them what they'd be for the rest of their lives.
The Hall was built for war councils, not ceremonies, and the stone walls threw every sound back twice.
"Yay!! We can get a house now!" a boy near the front screamed after touching the Stone.
The light had come up green, C-Rank, which meant military service and a stipend that could feed a family of four.
His parents grabbed him before the announcer finished reading and the three of them stood there hugging and blocking the stairs until a guard moved them along.
The boy next to Wren watched this with his thumbnail between his teeth.
"C-Rank from that guy. You believe it?"
"People get lucky," Wren said.
"I'm Stellan. You nervous?"
'Very.' "Not really."
"Liar." Stellan grinned.
"My dad says anything under D-Rank and I'm working the tannery. You know what that smells like? Someone boiled a boot in piss. So yeah, I'm motivated."
He glanced toward the platform. "What about your family? They in the crowd?"
"My uncle's back there somewhere."
"Just your uncle?"
"Just my uncle."
Stellan had the good sense to stop asking.
The girl in front of them turned around. "Do you think it hurts?"
"Probably," Wren said.
"My sister got A-Rank last year. She said it feels warm but she lies about everything, so..."
"A-Rank?" Stellan's eyes went wide. "And she said warm?"
"She says a lot of things." The girl turned back around and wiped her palms on her trousers again.
Three more kids went up.
Two F-Ranks and a D-Rank Ironblood.
The F-Ranks meant civilian labor and nothing else, and neither kid looked at anyone on the way down.
The D-Rank Ironblood had hands shaking so hard the announcer had to say his name twice.
Wren noticed the hands because he always noticed hands.
It was a forge habit.
Gerold always said, "You can tell what a man's about to do by watching his fingers before his face."
Wren was counting the rhythm without meaning to, about two minutes per kid, when Gerold appeared at the rope barrier.
He had his forge coat on, the heavy one with burned patches on the sleeves, and his knuckles were black at the creases where the pork-fat soap never reached.
He'd come straight from work because he still smelled like soot and hot iron when he leaned over the rope and put his hand on Wren's shoulder.
The weight of it was solid and too warm, the way forge hands ran even hours after the fire went cold.
"Doesn't matter what rank you get," Gerold said. "You come home tonight and we eat."
"I know."
"I'm making the stew."
Wren looked at him. "You killed the goat?"
"This morning."
That goat was the only thing of value they owned.
It gave milk, which Gerold traded for bread and salt.
Killing it meant no milk tomorrow and no bread next week.
"Gerold, that goat was worth more alive than cooked."
"The goat was old and mean and it bit me twice last week."
"It bit you because you pull its ear when you milk it."
"I pull its ear because it bit me first. We'll eat it tonight either way."
He squeezed Wren's shoulder once, hard, and stepped back behind the rope.
He didn't say good luck.
Gerold said things with his hands, with food and with showing up in a forge coat to a room full of lords, and that was enough.
More kids went up.
A girl with copper braids got B-Rank and her father started shouting
"That's my girl!" before the announcer could finish.
The girl who'd asked about pain went up and got B-Rank, Pale Cleric, and her family made a sound that took up the whole room.
"B-Rank twice in a row," Stellan whispered. "This is a good year."
"Good year for them," Wren said.
Stellan went next.
The light came red and the announcer called "C-Rank, Iron Hide" and Stellan spun around with his face split open in a grin.
"No tannery!" he shouted, and someone in the crowd who had to be his father whooped loud enough to bounce off the back wall.
Stellan caught Wren's eye on his way down and gave him a thumbs up with both hands.
Wren almost smiled because the kid had been chewing his thumbnail thirty seconds ago and now he was strutting.
Two more kids.
Then the announcer said, "Wren Steinbach."
The line was empty behind him.
He was the last one.
He turned back once before climbing the stairs.
Gerold was standing at the rope barrier with his arms at his sides, his back straight and his burned coat pulled closed at the front, and he gave Wren a single nod.
◆ ◆ ◆
The platform was six steps up and the Brand Stone sat on a pedestal of old iron.
It was smaller than he expected, about the size of a man's fist, rough and dull.
Up close it looked like something you'd find in a riverbed, not something that decided the rest of your life.
'Breathe.'
Wren pressed his palm flat against it.
It was warm, and for a second nothing happened.
He could hear the crowd behind him, the rustle and murmur of families waiting.
Somewhere in that noise Gerold was standing with his arms at his sides in a coat that didn't belong in this room.
Then the light came up black.
It poured out of the Stone and up his arm, and the warmth turned to heat turned to something past heat that had no name.
Every torch in the Grand Hall died at the same time.
The Stone cracked under his palm with a sound that went deeper than it should have, then his hand was burning because his skin had fused to the surface and something was writing itself into his palm in lines that went all the way to bone.
For half a second, text appeared in front of his eyes.
[Class: Aschenschlund (SSS) — FORBIDDEN]
Then it was gone.
Wren didn't know what that meant.
He'd read every Class manual Gerold had paid for and this word wasn't in any of them.
The highest rank was supposed to be S.
There was no SSS.
There was no "Forbidden."
But the crowd knew.
The announcer's voice came out of the dark, and the flat rehearsed cadence was gone, and what replaced it was the sound of a man who wanted to be anywhere else in the world.
"A-Aschenschlund."
The Hall went silent.
Not the quiet of surprise but the silence of a room that has just recognized something it was told to fear.
Then it broke into screaming, and Wren could hear chairs scraping and bodies shoving and somewhere a child was crying because the dark had come on too fast.
He could hear the sharp sound of metal clearing leather, which meant swords, which meant guards coming from different directions.
'Shit! This is serious.'
His hand came free from the Stone and he stumbled back two steps and the Brand was glowing on his palm.
A guard stepped onto the platform with a spear leveled at his chest, and then a second guard, and then a third.
More text, flickering at the edge of his vision, too fast to read:
[Talent: Devour — Consume the skills of anything you kill.]
[Soul Integrity: 100%]
[WARNING: Erasure protocol—]
Gone again. The guards were still coming.
"Get away from the Stone," the announcer said, and his voice broke. "Guards, remove the..."
He didn't finish.
Wren heard boots behind him, heavy and fast on the stone, and he was already turning when the spear went through him.
It came from behind and to the left.
The point entered below his shoulder blade and came out through his chest just under the collarbone, and Wren saw the metal exit his own body before he understood what it was.
There was a sound, wet and deep, that he realized was coming from inside his own chest.
That gap between the event and the understanding where the brain hasn't caught up yet.
Then the pain arrived, and it was real and heavy with a temperature of its own, and his legs quit and the guard ripped the spear back.
He hit the stone floor with his Brand hand flat against the ground and his blood making a sound as it spread.
More system text, but broken now, stuttering across his fading vision:
[Host damage: critical]
[Soul Integrity: 100%]
[Host status: termina—]
His hearing was going.
The crowd was a roar getting further away, through the blur he could see shapes moving and torchlight coming back in pieces with one shape bigger than the rest shoving through the bodies between the barrier rope and the platform.
Gerold.
Wren could see his mouth open and knew he was screaming but couldn't hear the words.
Two guards had him by the arms and they looked small against him, and Gerold was reaching over one of them with the same forge-black hand that had been on Wren's shoulder five minutes ago.
The knuckles that the soap never reached.
The fingers that were still trying to get to him even as everything else went soft and grey.
'He's going to get himself killed too.'
Wren tried to say something and what came out was air and copper.
He wanted to tell Gerold to stop, to let go, to go home, eat the stew because the goat was already dead and somebody should eat it.
Gerold's face was the last thing with any detail, then the Hall dimmed, blurred and drained away until there was nothing left to see.
◆ ◆ ◆
There was no floor, no pain and no air to breathe or body to breathe it with.
There was just a dark that wasn't the kind you see, because seeing was something you did with eyes, and Wren didn't have those anymore.
He was a point of notice floating in a nothing so complete it didn't even bother being cold.
He waited in it because there was nothing else to do.
He didn't know how long.
Then text assembled itself in the emptiness, carved into the inside of his skull.
[SYSTEM: Host deceased. Forbidden Brand detected. Aschenschlund Protocol activated. Reinitiating host.]
[Talent: Devour — Consume the skills of anything you kill.]
[WARNING: Each Devour accelerates Soul Erosion. At 0%, the host ceases to be human.]
[Resurrection in: 72:00:00]
The numbers began to count down.
'Damn. I really wanted to eat that stew.'
[Soul Integrity: 100%]