I was seventeen when they gave me my first name.
A name without attachment. A name that carried no warmth, no memory, no sense of belonging. A name that never made me think of anyone worth remembering.
Before that, I existed as a number in a ledger and a body in training halls. Numbers didn't ask questions. Numbers didn't hesitate. Numbers didn't wonder if they were ever loved.
This name was no different.
It wasn't real—just a designation, carved into a thin metal tag and pressed into my palm. The metal was cold, heavier than it looked. I remember thinking that it felt less like a name and more like a verdict.
Sometimes, when my fingers brush the back of my neck, it feels like something is still there.
A small, hard imprint beneath the skin. Too precise to be a scar. Too deliberate to be an accident.
Something implanted. Or something removed.
No one knew. And no one ever spoke about it.
Questions were a kind of weakness the Veiled Order didn't tolerate.
Asset R-17.
That was the name they gave me.
They said it had been more than two hundred years since my identity last changed. The words were delivered casually, as if they were talking about replacing worn-out equipment rather than a life.
People change their identities every day. Names are erased. Faces are replaced. Lives disappear behind black masks and false records. In the cities, it's called survival.
In the Order, it's called procedure.
I didn't remember dying.
No final breath. No fear. No struggle.
I only remembered becoming.
Becoming more dead.
The memories I did have came in fragments—never whole, never continuous. Sensations without context. Movements without emotion.
Blood. Steel. Hands tightening around a blade too small for the weight it carried.
At first, murder felt distant—like watching someone else breathe for me, like my body was only borrowing my consciousness for the act. I observed myself from somewhere far away, detached and untouched.
But training blurred the line.
Repetition wore down resistance. Correction erased doubt.
Killing stopped feeling wrong. It stopped feeling like anything at all. It started feeling necessary, like exhaling after holding your breath for too long. A pressure would build behind my eyes, a sickness curling deep in my gut, and only one thing ever made it stop.
Blood.
Some people crave pleasure. They chase warmth, touch, affection.
I was taught to crave release.
Sometimes, in the silence between missions, a thought surfaced—uninvited and dangerous.
In a world where parents abandon their children. In a city full of silence, where the muted cries of infants still manage to pierce it.
I wondered what it meant to be chosen by someone who wanted you.
Being born an orphan might have been kinder.
Death might have been cleaner.
Instead, I existed in between.
Not alive enough to belong. Not dead enough to rest.
Rest, after all, was never part of the equation.
Sleep was permitted only to maintain efficiency. Pain was tolerated only if it sharpened focus. Fear was corrected. Doubt was erased.
I wasn't alive.
I was operational.
A creature with no foothold in either world.
The Veiled Order called it balance.
I called it breathing without living.
At times, I tried to gather the fragments.
Loose pieces of memory. Sensations without origin. I would sit alone, away from the training halls and armories, and let my thoughts drift dangerously far.
I wondered if life had always been like this—if this emptiness was normal, if the silence inside my head was something everyone lived with and simply never spoke about.
Every attempt ended the same way.
A pressure would bloom behind my eyes. Not pain—something worse. A warning. A tightening that felt like invisible fingers closing around my thoughts.
My breathing slowed.
My vision narrowed.
My thoughts stuttered.
Then stopped.
Sometimes I would black out in the middle of the morning. One moment standing, the next opening my eyes to the pale light of dawn, hours already gone. No dreams. No darkness. Just absence.
Time missing like a wound that refused to bleed.
As if someone had reached inside my mind and turned a key.
I learned not to fight it.
Fighting only made the gaps longer. The punishments harsher. The headaches worse. Whatever was stopping me wasn't cruel—it was efficient.
Whenever my thoughts drifted too far—whenever I tried to remember a time before the Order, before the training, before the blood—something intervened.
Something patient. Something precise.
I never saw it. I never heard a voice.
But I could feel it watching.
Waiting for me to cross a line I wasn't meant to see.
The Order called it conditioning.
I suspected it was a lock.
The Veiled Order never believed in attachments.
Attachments led to hesitation. Hesitation got people killed.
I had never hesitated before.
The mission briefing was simple.
Target: Sovereign of the newly formed Principality of Arclune
Objective: Eliminate before dawn
Reason: Destabilization
No hatred. No justice. No ideology.
Just a contract written in blood and paid for in gold.
I accepted without question.
That night, I moved through the capital like a shadow stitched to the walls. Guards fell silently, their bodies guided gently to the ground to avoid sound. Locks surrendered beneath my hands. Wards thinned and parted, recognizing the elemental signature etched into my soul.
The seal burned beneath my skin—familiar, obedient.
This was what I was made for.
The sovereign's chamber lay at the highest point of the palace, shielded by wards meant to repel armies. They opened for me as if I belonged there.
He was asleep.
The man who would plunge the continent into war lay beneath silk sheets, breathing evenly, utterly unaware of the knife poised above his heart.
I stepped closer.
Moonlight spilled across his face.
I froze.
Because the man in the bed had my face.
Same scar beneath the left eye. Same bone structure. Same expression—even in sleep.
For a moment, I wondered if exhaustion had finally broken my mind. An illusion. A mental trap. Some last defense meant to stall my blade.
But the hesitation didn't fade.
It deepened.
My muscles locked. My breath caught.
Then the sovereign opened his eyes.
Deep blue.
The same shade as mine—rare enough to leave no room for doubt.
Shock rippled through me. My pupils dilated. My grip trembled.
He showed none.
He looked at me calmly—almost kindly—as if he had been expecting me all along.
When he spoke, it was in my own voice.
"You're late," he said. "I was beginning to think they'd stopped making replacements."
The world tilted.
For a heartbeat, it felt as though I had stepped into a mirror and forgotten which side I belonged to. Two of us. Identical. One standing. One ruling.
I didn't know who was real.
I didn't know who was expendable.
The knife slipped from my fingers.
And for the first time in my life, I did not know who the target was.