The winds were strange at the edge of the Old City.

They blew from too many directions at once, carrying the scent of salt and dry metal. He'd gotten so used to the symptoms of the Ruination during his years in the Old City that uncanny sensations that put most people on edge were familiar, even comforting to him.

Alarion paused beneath a sun-faded warning placard—Vitrian script written above Ashadi, Imurian, and a half dozen other languages—and pulled the cheap map free of his pocket.

He had been master of his domain, aware of every nook and cranny, every hidden passage and blocked alley. But that domain had been small, only a few city blocks. He had always scrounged or stolen what he needed to survive without venturing into unfamiliar territory, which made it tricky to find his way back.

The map was pre-war, showing the layout of Ashad-Mundi as it was three years before Ruin had obliterated it. As such, it lacked many of the landmarks—the toppled buildings and gaping craters—that Alarion was most familiar with, but it wasn't useless. He had marked out five possible locations; small clusters of houses arranged together in a way that looked familiar.

ZEKE could have found his old home in a matter of minutes, but Alarion had left him behind. He needed to be alone for this. Without him, Alarion ended up visiting four of the five before he found what he was looking for.

The Vitrians had spent years tearing down the Old City one street at a time. Originally one of the largest cities on the continent, there was a lot to tear down, and due to the Ruination, it was work that could only be safely done by the Awakened. It made for slow progress, and to Alarion's relief, the crews had come nowhere near his former home.

It was a dismal street in the lower quarter, far enough away from anything that mattered that Vitrian patrols were scarce. Smugglers and thieves were more common, but if any were skulking about, they gave him as wide a berth as the animals. He had dispensed with his uniform, dressed instead in casual whites and grays hidden beneath a light cloak, but the way he looked and the way he walked marked him as a threat.

Too clean, too purposeful for the Old City.

A strong sense of nostalgia mixed in with sorrow as Alarion laid eyes on his old home. The years had not been kind to it, and it had never been structurally sound to begin with. The roof had caved in fully, as had the stairwell, but peeking in through the open hole in the main floor showed that the basement was still mostly intact.

He spent half an hour clearing the stairwell, more for an easy way up than for a way down. At least, that was what he told himself.

The basement was smaller than he remembered, and not just because he'd grown. Alarion had topped out at five and a half feet, respectable given his malnutrition, but hardly an outrageous growth spurt. No, it had always been this small, but it had been his whole world back then.

A team had come through after the Vitrians found him, looking for clues to his origin. They'd found only bodies. Fitting.

The dead were gone now. They had pulled Val from beneath the ceiling that had crushed him. They had collected what remained of Erda and her daughters, and the Butcher as well. But the blood remained. A stain where he had beaten Val to death. Spatters on the wall from the Butcher's knife. Sunlight streamed in through the half-collapsed ceiling, shedding light on the worst of what he had done here.

He wondered what had happened to the bodies. Had they given them a proper burial? A cremation? Or had they thrown them out like waste? Val's body had been fresh. Had it been stolen like so many others, given to Centre, and brought back as one last indignity?

Alarion shook away the thought. "Kotone, my setup, please."

"Yes, Miss! Yes, Miss!" his familiar chirped as she dropped a chair at his feet.

He took a seat as she set about her business and reviewed the notification for the hundredth time in the last two days.

You have recognized your flaw!

Fated to Fight, Fated to Live, Fated to Lose

Description: Bestowed with glorious purpose upon your birth, and upon a promise to the moon, your fate is not easily altered. Destined for conflict, the very strands of causation bend to ensure your survival. But this comes at a cost.

Requirements: None.

Type: Flaw, Passive.

Severity: Moderate.

Effect: When faced with death, you involuntarily burn the fates of others with whom you share a sympathetic connection, ensuring your survival by condemning them to death. This flaw will not prevent serious, even crippling injury, but guarantees your survival so long as you have others to sacrifice. This flaw will utilize those with whom you have the weakest connections before moving on to those closer to you.

The inscription on Sierra's knife had been the final piece of the puzzle, solidifying a vague feeling that he'd had for years into true comprehension. He was cursed, or blessed, or both, and the System recognized him as such.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

He was walking plague, a disaster for anyone who knew him. Lily's grand idea of a speech had put hundreds or thousands of innocents in his crosshairs, just like his sister, like Elena and Sierra.

The worst of it was that the power was opaque. A blade rushing for his throat did not bounce off an invisible wall; it missed. But did it miss because he dodged, or because reality redefined itself to ensure his survival? His victims did not drop dead unexpectedly; they did not fall ill and waste away. Had he cursed Elena by staying too long in the challenge dungeon, or had her decision to hide the hidden city from her superiors been what led to her demise?

Had she made that decision of her own volition, or had he burned her fate without ever realizing it, causing her to act recklessly?

The thoughts were maddening. The 126th were killed during a subjugation gone awry. Was that his fault? He didn't recall any life-or-death struggles during that period, but even that was not proof positive. If Sierra's father had chosen to kill him, did the flaw wipe out that intention and take the life of another? If a few died in an active unit, did that cascade to others when the line broke? He didn't know everyone in the 126th, after all. Did some of them die by proxy?

Alarion had barely slept for days, and when he did, the nightmares were almost as bad. There was no escape into slumber, and if the flaw was to be believed, perhaps not even in death.

Would it even let him kill himself? Or would some quirk of fate intervene? If he tried in this basement, would someone arrive to stop him, or would the flaw change his mind and take a life in the process?

Had he already tried?

Alarion didn't think so. He wouldn't take that risk, not with others' lives on the line. Relative strangers were bad enough, but losing ZEKE, or Bergman, or Lily was unacceptable. Besides, nothing had changed. This curse had hovered over his head for his entire life, if the flaw were to be believed. If anything, it should strengthen his resolve. He wasn't just fighting for himself. Not anymore.

His eyes lingered on one passage, as they had so many times before:

And upon a promise to the moon.

The System rarely gave information for free, and those words were important. So why had it done so? Were they something he'd forgotten? He was certain that they were his mother's words, ones she'd spoken time and again in his youth. Whenever glorious purpose the flaw spoke of, Nessa would know more.

If she were still alive.

His mother and his sister were his only connections during the desperate years in this basement. Had he survived on the back of his Awakening? Or had he spent their lives as well?

Still, his mother wasn't the only one who knew; the knife was proof of that. Somehow, Syrus had learned Alarion's secrets, even before he did. The gift had been an insult, a way to break his spirit without ever laying a hand on him. Or maybe not. Perhaps it was an olive branch, a chance to absolve Alarion of his guilt over Sierra's death.

Alarion snorted. The two days he'd spent running on [Valentina's Energetic Embrace] were starting to get to him.

"Thank you, dear," he told Kotone as the buzzing creature handed him his bow and popped out of existence.

He had been planning a trip to the Old City even before the disastrous interview, but the week's events had made it a necessity. There would be no solace here, no graves for him to place flowers upon, but it didn't matter. This place had shaped him as much as the Trinity Isles or the orchard by Redburn. It was a place where he could centre himself and leave behind that which troubled him.

Alarion stood and drew the knife from inside his cloak, then paced forward a few steps and drove it into the dirt. A scavenger would find it eventually, drawn in by the enchantment lingering within the metal. But that wouldn't matter. It would stay here in his memory, a tribute to the lost glimmering in sunlight.

That done, he gathered some of the loose stones the Vitrians had displaced when they removed the bodies, and patiently rebuilt the cairns they had knocked down, even the Butcher's. He built a fifth for Val, and another for Elena. It was not enough, not nearly enough for those who were gone, but nothing could have been. He might've built a palace with a thousand mourners crying their names on every hour, and it would not have been enough.

He would leave them here, for good this time—if he could. But he would send them off with a song.

Alarion returned to his seat and took up his instrument. Sierra's instrument. He leafed through the sheet music and began to play.

Time had given him talent, or if not talent, at least skill enough that his notes were not an insult to the departed. He was far from perfect, but he played from the heart; his eyes closed and his thoughts on the lost. He played a song for the family who had loved him and one for the men he had slain. He played for Elena, wondering what she would have thought of him.

He played twice for Sierra. Once for his guilt, and another for his memories of her.

With each song, with each note, he felt his burden lessen. He clung to that feeling, to the loss of loss. Alarion watched the dying sunlight glitter off silver and thought of the knife in his belly, and the woman who had wielded it. And he let go of everything he could. He pushed it away.

He left it there.

"That was beautiful."

Alarion was up in a heartbeat, Echo already in his hand before the cello had even struck the floor. He drew back his arm and threw without hesitation the moment he saw her face.

Sierra ducked behind the ruined wall, narrowly avoiding Echo as it plunged into the masonry behind her.

"Alarion! Are you out of your mind?!"

He flickered, the sword growing in his hand as he yanked it free and swept it through the empty space she had occupied only a moment before. There was nothing, no resistance, and no Sierra.

"What has gotten into you?" she demanded from the other room.

Alarion ignored the question and probed the room around him with [Unraveller's Sense], terrified by what he expected to see. Was this some revenge attack from the True Heart?

Had he beaten it at all?

The air around him was rife with magic, most of it the dirty remnants of the Ruination. A few strands reached out from Sierra's knife and his cello, but nothing from the imposter herself. If anything, it was as if she weren't there at all. She wasn't even displacing the ambient energy.

He delved deeper, pushing past magic into the realm of connection. There she was lit up like the sun, her entire body an ever-shifting mass of sympathy. Strands connected her to the knife on the floor and the cello beside it. Thin lines stretched out through the ceiling and disappeared into the sky to parts unknown, but the strongest by far was a thick tree trunk connection, a sympathetic umbilical, intrinsically linking the two of them together.

It was all too familiar, a pattern he'd seen once before. But where?

"Where are we?" Sierra asked as his hostility waned. "Why do you look… older? Wait, is that my cello? How did you-"

Then it clicked.

"Kotone," he said.

"Yes, Miss! Yes, Miss!"

"Kotone? How did he-?"

He ignored them both, focusing on the similarities. Like her former master, Kotone glowed in his sympathetic vision—as was to be expected. After all, Kotone wasn't real. His mana gave her a physical form, but at the core, she was a sympathetic being, the will and desires of another made manifest into an independent, conscious being.

A Thoughtborn.

Just like 'Sierra'.

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