Zukitsu

I don’t know much about my childhood, or where i’m from, what my birth name was, or whether i even had a birth name. From what i’ve been told, I was Abandoned as a child, and found on death’s door by a slave trader who felt that he could train me up to fight for coin. This man became my father. Since I could remember, i had a blade in my hand, and a quiver on my back. I wasn’t the only orphan there, there were weak and sickly children also being “taught”. They were beaten daily for their errors, denied food if they didn’t meet their training quota, and killed if a liability. Which only made it worse, I don’t know when I got used to it, I didn’t care, better them than me right? I always wondered whether there was a god up there, and why he was letting such cruelty happen, if there was a god, did he ever interact with people? Was he visible? Could i talk to him about my parents? A question best left to the philosophers I guess. There was a girl with me, around my age. Black hair, Slightly taller than me, highly proficient at archery. She could thread an arrow through a pelvic circle at 250 yards without a problem. How do i know this? she killed one of the children we were training with, our masters forced her to, those that couldn’t succeed would be killed by their comrade’s hands. She would help me practice on moonlit nights, we were 9 years old now, learning about reality, beginning to question it, is this all we are? is there no future for us except to become killing machines?

This girl and I were the prize of the crop for our “father”. He took every opportunity to show us off like some prized cattle, on a visit to another slaver, a meal that we were fed was poisoned, or so we suspected. We came home sick, couldn’t move, the poison mauling our insides, we refused to train, we were punished.Beaten. Starved. The wooden lance he used dislocated my shoulder, i cried in pain, noone was coming for me. it happened to me because i was not strong enough to stop it, the girl was forced to sleep with the pigs that night, she went there after pushing my shoulder back into place. We decided, enough was enough, this chain of treachery had to broken somewhere, and we could be the ones. We decided that it was our time to strike. the other children could die with them, if they were too weak to fight they could not survive out in the real world anyway. this would be a mercy i told myself. The girl i was with prepared to set the cabins on fire, we both got our torches and lit them ablaze one by one. We had rationed some food from our meals, earlier and packed them in burlap sacks. The horses were ready, the smell of burning wood thickened the air, it was our time to write our destiny. 

The horses galloped through the haunting forest, moonlight coming in and out of consciousness. The girl on my left rode along, smiling wildly. It was just us, some morsels of bread, some weapons and the world ahead of us. I could taste it, freedom. It tasted so sweet that i started crying, hoping for it to never fade. I couldn’t go back, not now. I don’t know what happened back at the camp, i really didn’t care. For once in my life, i was living for myself. Around 10miles from the camp was a small fishing village on the road to Helena, small in size, but it had it’s fair share of passerby’s. We thought we could get away as passerby’s but we were foolish, we were 11 year olds, in rags on horses. That was bound to raise some suspicion, the guards questions who we were and where we were from. We couldn’t answer either of those questions. We had to get out of there. Right then. The girl turned heel and rocketed with her horse in the other direction, she was always rash. I had to follow suit. The guards chased us, we had to split up. She screamed at me to go left at the fork, then we would meet up afterwards, i went left, then into the bush. She stayed right. They were around 20 seconds behind me, i ditched my horse and inside a hollow tree trunk. they discovered my horse, i had salvaged the food and the knife from the pouch, i sat there cowering with the resources i had, waiting for them to abandon their search and leave me alone. It felt like an eternity but eventually the fell back, i could escape. The girl i was with had disappeared, no trace of her, was she captured? killed? I had no idea. I was on my own again, like at birth. I learnt to live for myself, i concentrated on gaining strength, gaining power. everything that happened to me was because i was weak. If i could become all powerful, i could stop having the short end of the stick all the time. I spent my teenage years, wandering, stealing, learning. I taught myself how to read by observing people reading shop signs, the phonics were confusing but I got the hang of it. I started reading books, learning about the world. I honed my skills, looting people at knifepoint, taking contracts to kill orcs and dwarves, even assassinating other humans. I became infamous in the local area, “the urchin that got away”. Noone knew what i looked like, i had forgotten what I was too.

One day, I discovered a story about a man who spent all his life sailing the sea, following the sun, not realising it moved in the sky. When he found out, he smiled and said that his entire life had been one lesson, and that it wasn’t wasted because he had finally learnt it. The man’s name was Zirel. A name i adopted, my ignorance bred apathy, i wasn’t much different from this man. I named myself after name, everyone else had a name, why couldn’t I? We were two people who looked up at the same sky from worlds apart. I still wonder to this day, on my 19^th birthday, if the girl i was with had named herself too, if she was still out there, waiting for me to return, for me to go right at the fork, whether we were looking at the same sky from worlds apart.