Aleswyr
Birth of a Revenant
Section titled “Birth of a Revenant”The last thing Aleswyr remembered was warmth. Not heat. Warmth. The kind that soaks into your bones and makes you heavy, and at peace. His mother’s hand had been in his hair, slow, steady, like she was afraid he might vanish if she stopped touching him. Her voice had been close to his ear. Aleswyr hadn’t known the words, only the shape of them, the way they folded over him. Sleep had taken him easily that day.
That was what hurt the most, later. That it had been easy.
When Aleswyr woke, there was no light. At first, he thought he had gone blind.
He opened his eyes. Closed them, opened them again. Nothing changed. There was no difference between blinking and staring. Panic rose in him, fast and sharp. Aleswyr flailed, his hand slamming into something hard and wet.
Stone.
He pulled his hand back and sucked in a breath that tasted like rot and screamed. It bounced back at him like a wall. Too close. Too loud. He scrambled, crawling, his knees and palms scraping against uneven ground. He hit a corner. Then another. Then another. His head struck the wall and stars burst behind his eyes, useless and imaginary.
He curled into himself and sobbed, with his memories of home softly tormenting him.
Time became an illusion after that. Sometimes Aleswyr slept. Sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he dreamed he was still home, and waking was worse than the hunger. His body became light in the wrong way. Not floating. Hollow. He crawled across the cell, and over what felt like months learnt every crevice by touch.
Water came from the stone. Not enough. Just enough to keep him from dying. He pressed his mouth to the wall like an animal, waiting for dampness, tasting nothing but dirt and the grime of this abyssal coffin.
Food did not come. The dead lichen was an accident. He found it by texture after what felt like weeks. He scraped it free with weak, broken nails and shoved it into his mouth, gagging. It stuck to his tongue. It tasted like bitterness and dirt.
He ate too much the first time, and his body rejected it violently. He retched until his throat burned, until there was nothing left but dry heaves that made his vision blur. He lay there afterward, shaking, humiliated by his own weakness. After that, he learned to eat in pieces.
Moths found their way into the cell sometimes. He did not know how. He caught them when he could. He chewed slowly, carefully, forcing himself not to swallow too fast. Sometimes he vomited anyway.
Aleswyr was twelve summers old, and Nyl blood ran rampant through him. His emotions did not come gently. They came in floods or not at all. Some days he felt nothing, a thin and distant quiet. Other days he was so full of grief and rage that he bit his own arm until he tasted blood, just to make it stop. He hated the hunger. He hated the thirst, the constant burning of it. He hated his own weakness. He hated that he could still remember his mother’s voice.
The lichen ran out. He hadn’t caught a moth in days. Relief washed over him when Aleswyr found a mushroom. It grew near the wall, soft and fleshy. He found it by accident, crawling, his hands almost too numb to feel it.
Aleswyr knew some mushrooms killed you, and sat with it in his hand for a long time.
His stomach ached constantly now, a sharp, gnawing thing. His head felt light. Sometimes his thoughts slid away from him before he could finish them.
“If it kills me,” he whispered, his voice barely working, “that’s fine.”
If it didn’t, maybe he would hurt less. Aleswyr ate it. It did not taste bad. That should have scared him. The sickness came slowly. First, his stomach cramped. Then heat spread through him, wrong and uneven. His skin prickled. His mouth filled with saliva. He gagged, coughed, retched. His thoughts started to smear.
Aleswyr lay on his side, shivering, his limbs twitching. The dark pressed in on him. His heart beat too fast. His breath came shallow.
He was dying. That thought landed with strange calm. Then something else followed it.
Ren.
He knew the word. Not the rules. Not the techniques. But he knew what it was. People talked about it. Whispered about it. Argued about it. He had heard stories. He had heard that it was something you could do. Something you could reach. He had never thought it would be him.
His vision went strange. Not blacking out. Folding. Warping. Aleswyr clenched his hands in the dirt.
“No.” he whispered, with the determination of a fortress.
He didn’t know what he was talking to. The poison. His body. The dark. He did not want to die here. He pushed his desire out into the world. Not a light, not a voice. It was like trying to grab a thought before it slipped away. Like trying to hold onto a dream while waking.
Aleswyr felt something. Not a presence. Not a being. A pressure. A subtle feeling in the world, like pushing against thick air. He pulled. His body convulsed. Heat surged through him, sharper now, clearer. His heart hammered and his breath deepened. The fog in his head thinned.
Aleswyr pulled again. It felt wrong. Not painful. Just not natural. Like trying to drink through your skin. His nausea spiked. He vomited again, violently. Then lay there, panting.
He should have passed out. He didn’t. His thoughts were too clear. He became aware of his body in a way he never had before. Every tremor. Every ache. Every pulse of his heart. He was still sick. Still starving. But he was here.
He pulled again. The pressure thickened. Not inside him. Around him. Like the dark itself was heavier. His mind sharpened. Aleswyr could think in full sentences again. He laughed once, weakly, because it startled him. He did not know how he was doing this. Only that he was.
Hours passed. Or minutes. Aleswyr couldn’t tell, but he kept pulling. The sickness receded. Not gone. But manageable. The cramps dulled. The dizziness softened. He was still weak, but not collapsing, yet he drifted off into sleep.
When Aleswyr woke, he was still alive. That should not have been possible. He sat up slowly, testing himself. Hunger still gnawed at him. Thirst still burned his throat. But they were quieter. Aleswyr closed his eyes and pulled. Ren answered. His thoughts snapped into focus. He felt more here than he had in weeks. Not stronger. Clearer.
He did it again. And again. And again. He began to understand, dimly, that he was not pulling something from himself. He was pulling it from the dark. From the world. From this hellhole.
It disgusted him. It also made sense.
The door opened three days later. Light tore into him and he screamed. Hands grabbed him. Voices spoke. He couldn’t understand the words. Something struck him in the ribs. Then his face. Then his side. He curled into himself, instinctively pulling, holding. The blows hurt, but they were dull.
They left a loaf of moldy bread on the ground before they closed the door again.
Aleswyr did not eat right away. He sat there, shaking, breathing, aching. His hatred found a direction. He ate slowly. He trained. Not in any way he would later recognize as training. Aleswyr kept feeling for Ren. Moving it within himself. Gathering as much of it as he could.
His hunger and thirst faded further into the background.
His thoughts kept growing more clear. His body changed. Slowly. Painfully. Methodically. He stopped losing weight, and quietly, he began to gain it. Muscle came first, thin and wiry, like rope. He had no explanation for it. Only the certainty that he should not have been able to do this.
The beatings and feedings grew more regular, but he was not dying anymore, and in the dark, in that coffin of stone, he began his journey with Ren.