Chapter 7: The Cost of Protection (76 AC, Age 8)
The year Maric turned eight was the year the abstract calculations of power became a concrete reality, written in blood and shattered bone. His life had settled into a dangerously comfortable pattern. By day, he was Maric, the quiet, clever son of Lara and Borin, a boy whose strange insights had lifted his family from the brink of starvation to the relative stability of simple, grinding poverty. He was the silent partner in a surprisingly profitable enterprise with his friend, Finn, their ventures growing in complexity and cunning. By night, he was a creature of shadow and discipline, forcing his young body through a grueling, secret regimen. Push-ups in the dark until his arms screamed, squats until his legs trembled, a constant, silent war against the physical limitations of his age. The slivers of vitality he'd harvested from the city's vermin gave him a formidable foundation of health and stamina, but he knew true strength had to be forged, not just stolen.
The partnership with Finn had become the central pillar of his worldly operations. Finn was his eyes, his ears, his hands. He was the perfect field operative: loyal, resourceful, and utterly convinced that Maric was some kind of sorcerer who could conjure luck from thin air. The bond between them, from Maric's perspective, was one of pure pragmatism. Finn was his most valuable asset, the first true piece of his burgeoning organization. And it was an attack on this asset that brought Maric's carefully constructed world crashing down, forcing him to cross a line he knew he would one day have to broach, but had hoped to postpone.
It happened on a miserably wet afternoon, the kind where the rain wasn't heavy enough to wash the filth from the streets, but just persistent enough to seep into everything, making the world a uniform shade of grey misery. Finn had been on a solo mission—a simple task of trading a handful of scavenged copper wire to a tinker near the Dragonpit. It was a route he'd taken dozens of times. He was late returning.
Maric felt the first prickle of unease, a cold knot in his stomach that had nothing to do with hunger. He was waiting in their sanctuary, the damp but secure root cellar, cataloging their small hoard of coppers. Punctuality was a hallmark of their operation. Finn was never late.
When Finn finally stumbled down the cellar steps, Maric's cold unease flash-froze into a diamond-hard point of rage. His friend—his asset—was a wreck. One of Finn's bright blue eyes was swollen shut, the skin around it a blossoming purple. His lip was split, a line of dried blood tracing a path down his chin. His prized cloak was torn nearly in two, and his hands were empty. His knife, his coppers, everything was gone. He collapsed onto a pile of old sacks, his body wracked with silent, shuddering sobs.
Maric didn't rush to him. He remained perfectly still, his mind absorbing the data, the evidence of the attack, with a chilling detachment. This wasn't a random mugging. This was a message.
"Who?" Maric asked, his voice flat, devoid of any emotion.
Finn flinched at the sound, then slowly looked up, his one good eye swimming with pain and humiliation. "Weasel," he whispered, his voice hoarse. "And Harl. They caught me by the Eel Alley. They… they said our luck had run out."
The Dreg Rats. The thugs from the alley. They had been embarrassed, outsmarted by a child, and they had nursed their grudge. They couldn't get to Maric, the source of their humiliation, so they had targeted his most visible extension. They had waited, patiently, and struck Finn when he was alone. They hadn't just beaten him and robbed him; they had broken him. They had sent a clear message to Maric: Your words can't protect him. We can take what is yours whenever we want.
In his past life, Marco Bellini had a simple, inviolable rule: an attack on his people was a declaration of war on him. It was a challenge to his authority, a questioning of his power that, if left unanswered, would be perceived as weakness. And weakness invited ruin.
He looked at the broken boy sobbing on the sacks. He saw not just a beaten friend, but a damaged asset, a compromised piece of his foundation. His rage was not hot or explosive. It was a cold, pure, absolute thing. It was the rage of a king whose sovereignty had been violated. In that moment, a decision was made. A policy was enacted. An answer would be given. Weasel, the instigator, the greasy voice of the threat, had to be removed. Permanently.
"Stay here," Maric commanded, his voice leaving no room for argument. "Don't move."
He left the cellar and went to his family's hovel. He found Lara mending one of Borin's shirts. "Ma," he said, his face a mask of concern. "Finn is sick. The shivers. Can he stay in the cellar? It's dry there."
Lara, whose heart had been softened by their recent good fortune, readily agreed. "Of course, little one. Take him this old blanket. Keep him warm."
With Finn secured and his own absence accounted for, the Architect went to work. This would not be a crime of passion. It would be an execution. And an execution required planning.
For the next three days, Maric was a ghost. He shadowed Weasel with a single-minded, terrifying focus. He already knew the man's habits, but now he studied them with a predator's intensity. He confirmed that Weasel, after an evening of drinking at a foul tavern called The Soggy Eel, would often stumble back to his doss house alone, using a series of narrow, winding alleys to avoid the main thoroughfares and the attention of the City Watch.
He identified the perfect kill zone: a tiny, claustrophobic passage between a derelict tannery and a crumbling tenement, a place so choked with refuse and shadows that even other slum-dwellers avoided it. Crucially, the tenement wall overlooking the passage was a mess of loose, crumbling brickwork, a testament to years of neglect.
The method was an escalation of his previous successes. A deadfall trap. But not with a crate. With half a wall.
The logistics were a supreme test of his abilities. He was eight years old. He couldn't climb the tenement and start dislodging bricks. But he didn't have to. The third-floor landing of the tenement was accessible from the rear, via a series of rotting wooden staircases. Under the guise of "exploring," he found his way up. The landing was a death trap of rotted planks and missing railings, overlooking the alley. And right at its edge was a section of parapet so decayed that the bricks were held together by little more than stubbornness and dried mud.
He found his tool nearby: a long, thick piece of iron rebar, likely salvaged from some long-forgotten construction. It was heavy, almost too heavy for him to lift, but his essence-fueled strength gave him the edge he needed. For two days, during the quietest hours of the afternoon, he worked. He used the rebar as a lever, painstakingly, silently, loosening the mortar, shifting the bricks, creating a precarious overhang held in place by a single, key section of masonry. It was exhausting, dangerous work. A single misplaced sound, a single slip, would mean his own death. But his focus was absolute.
He engineered the trigger with a length of rope he'd "found" near the docks and a heavy, discarded beam. It was a simple lever system. When he pulled the rope from his hiding place across the alley, it would knock the beam into the weakened wall section, sending a cascade of heavy bricks and mortar into the narrow passage below.
On the third night, he knew it was time. He went to the cellar to check on Finn. His friend was sleeping fitfully, the bruises on his face turning a sickly yellow-green. Maric left a small cup of water and a piece of bread by his side. It was a gesture of… something. Not affection. Maintenance. An owner seeing to his property before a vital task.
He took up his position, hidden in the deep shadow of the tannery wall, the trigger rope clutched in his hand. The night was cold and moonless, the air thick with the smell of pig shit from the nearby pens. He waited. He became part of the darkness, his breathing slow and steady, his mind a crystalline void of pure intent. This was the part of the job he'd always hated in his old life—the quiet, tense moments before the violence. The waiting.
Hours passed. Finally, he heard them: stumbling footsteps and the slurred, drunken singing of a man who thought he owned the world. Weasel appeared at the mouth of the alley, a bottle dangling from his hand. He was alone, just as Maric's intelligence had predicted. He staggered into the passage, directly into the kill zone.
Maric did not hesitate. He pulled the rope with all his strength.
There was a loud CRACK as the beam struck the wall, followed by a low, grinding roar. For a heartbeat, the section of wall seemed to bulge outward, and then it gave way. A shower of bricks, stone, and mortar weighing hundreds of pounds crashed down into the narrow alley.
Weasel had just enough time to look up, his drunken eyes widening in confusion and terror. The avalanche hit him with the force of a battering ram. There was a series of wet, sickening crunches—the sound of a skull collapsing, of a spine snapping. The man was driven to the ground, vanishing beneath the rubble. A cloud of choking dust filled the alley.
Silence.
Maric's heart was hammering against his ribs, a wild, frantic drumbeat. He had done it. But he had to be sure. He forced himself to move, creeping from the shadows towards the pile of rubble. The dust was settling, revealing a nightmare. A hand, bent at an impossible angle, stuck out from the bricks. A leg, twisted and broken. There was the glint of a belt buckle.
A low, gurgling moan came from beneath the pile. He was still alive.
A wave of nausea and ice-cold dread washed over Maric. He couldn't leave a witness. He couldn't leave him to suffer and perhaps be found. The job had to be finished. This was the part he hadn't fully anticipated, the part that his traps for animals had never required. The hands-on, intimate conclusion.
He picked up one of the fallen bricks. It was heavy, rough in his small hands. He moved to the source of the gurgling, his feet unsteady. He saw Weasel's face, or what was left of it. It was a mask of blood and dust, one eye staring vacantly at the sky. The man's chest hitched, a ragged, dying breath.
Maric looked down into the eyes of the man he was about to murder. He felt nothing. No pity. No remorse. Only a grim, cold necessity. He raised the brick high over his head and brought it down with all his force onto the man's temple. There was a final, soft crunch. The gurgling stopped.
The silence that followed was absolute. And then it began.
It was a tidal wave. A supernova. The combined life force of a grown man, a life of thirty-odd years filled with violence and struggle and petty triumphs, slammed into him. It was a thousand times more powerful than the essence of any animal. It was a torrent of pure, blazing energy that threatened to overwhelm him, to burn him out from the inside. It was not the gentle warmth of a rat or the fizzy lightness of a bird. It was a roaring, white-hot forge of pure vitality. The aches in his muscles from his nightly training vanished. The slight chill of the night air was replaced by a profound, internal heat. He felt, for the first time in this life, truly, fundamentally strong.
With the power came the skills. It wasn't a clean download of knowledge. It was a chaotic, brutal flood of muscle memory and instinct. He felt the phantom sensation of his knuckles connecting with a man's jaw. He suddenly understood the heft and balance of a short-bladed knife, the precise, dirty way to use it in a tight space—not with elegant parries, but with vicious, sawing slashes and deep, twisting thrusts. He knew the sweet spot behind the knee to kick to make a man fall, the sickening vulnerability of a throat to a well-placed elbow. It was the crude, effective, and ugly knowledge of a street brawler, pouring into his mind and body.
Then came the memories. They were not his own. They were a chaotic, non-linear slideshow of another man's existence, stripped of all emotion, presented as pure, raw data.
A flash of a large, calloused hand striking his face as a boy. The taste of blood. The word "useless."
A memory of stealing a warm loaf of bread, the sheer, triumphant joy of it.
The face of a pox-scarred whore in the candlelight, her laughter hollow.
The feeling of winning his first real fight, the crunch of another boy's nose beneath his fist, the surge of dominance.
A memory of kneeling before the Dreg Rats' leader, swearing an oath.
A flash of Finn's terrified face, the satisfying thud of his fist connecting, the feeling of power over the weak.
It was a deluge of another man's life—his fears, his shames, his cruelties, his pathetic moments of pride. It was junk. It was garbage. And it was now inside Maric's mind, a foreign contaminant in his pristine, ordered mental palace.
He stumbled back from the body, gasping, his mind reeling from the psychic onslaught. This was the cost. This was the price of the gift. To take a man's life, you had to take all of it.
He leaned against the cold alley wall, forcing his breathing to steady. He was Marco Bellini. He was The Architect. He would not be overwhelmed by the psychic refuse of a dead thug. He began to compartmentalize, to take the chaotic flood of Weasel's memories and skills and file them away. He built a new room in his mind, a dark, locked chamber, and shoved all of Weasel's life inside it. The fighting skills, he extracted and placed in his mental armory. The rest was baggage. He was the master of his own mind. He would not be a vessel for ghosts.
When the chaos finally subsided, he was left with a cold, hard clarity. He looked at the mangled corpse, now just a pile of meat and bone under a pile of bricks. The act was necessary. The result was beneficial. He was stronger. He had new, useful skills. And his primary asset was now protected. The moral calculus was simple, and the outcome was positive. There was no guilt. There was only the unpleasant, lingering sensation of having waded through a sewer to retrieve a diamond.
He slipped away into the night, a ghost leaving a ghost behind. He returned to the cellar. Finn was awake, sitting up.
"Maric? Is that you?" Finn whispered in the dark.
"It's me," Maric said, his voice steady. He lit a small tallow candle. In the flickering light, Finn could see that something about him had changed. He seemed… taller. More solid. The shadows clung to him differently.
"I heard a crash," Finn said. "From a few streets over."
"A wall collapsed," Maric said, his face impassive. "It happens." He looked at Finn's bruised face. "Weasel had an accident. He won't be bothering you again."
Finn stared at him, his one good eye wide. He didn't ask how Maric knew. He didn't ask what happened. He didn't need to. He understood. A profound, bone-deep fear mixed with an unshakable sense of loyalty settled over him. Maric wasn't just a clever boy who could talk his way out of trouble. He was a force of nature. He was a protector who eliminated threats with an absolute and terrifying finality.
Maric felt the phantom echo of Weasel's brawling skills in his own muscles, a restless, ugly energy. He had crossed a line. He was no longer just a planner, an observer waiting for his moment. He had taken a human life to protect what was his. He had harvested his first soul. And as he looked at the fear and awe on his first soldier's face, he knew, with absolute certainty, that it would not be his last. The game had changed. The cost of protection was blood, and he was now willing, and able, to pay it.