The blood was crusting under Thakur’s eyes.

He could feel it hanging from his cheeks like scales, clinging to his skin, beading in large heavy lumps. Dripping from his eyes, continuously.

He sat on the floor of his cell, legs crossed beneath him and eyes closed, despite the weeping blood, and focused his breath on the wall in front of him. His mind and aura ached from constant use and his eyes stung, but it was nothing, nothing at all, in comparison to the pain he experienced each time he opened his meridians and let his breath slide freely through his body. Even using it to empower his limbs, to leap, to run like the wind, to kill… it came with agony.

So…

Thakur pressed his breath into the cement. Made black stains in the stone blacker. Avoided thought, avoided sleep, avoided anything that was not pushing his spirit away from his flesh in order to live just another day.

He blinked, and felt heavy tears roll down blood encrusted cheeks, and did not move to wipe them away.

The corroded hinges of his cell door screamed in protest and Thakur jerked in surprise. He snarled as his spirit flared and he whipped around to confront…

A babe, toddling towards him with one arm outstretched while she held onto her mother’s finger.

His snarl turned to strangled cry and he threw himself from her into the corner of his cell. “Stay back!” he croaked. He threw up an arm to ward her off. “Stay away!”

“Papa?”

He kept his eyes closed as he focused on his breathing. Drew the breath in just to make sure it was under his control before he let it back out through screaming meridians in order to press it back into the cement around him.

“Stay back.” He croaked again, but didn’t look at the woman standing in the door to his cell, blonde hair glowing in the pale light of the hall behind her, tremulous smile dying as she looked at him.

Not a babe. Not anymore.

He blinked more blood from his eyes as he pressed his forehead into corrupted stone. “You shouldn’t have come.” The blood crumbled away like clay when he swiped his fingers through it.

No one spoke for a moment, until his daughter chose to fill the silence. “Do they always keep you like this?” She asked. “In the dark?”

He grabbed at the rags he had on. New only that morning, and tore a chunk from them to wipe at what remained of the blood on his face. It crumbled away to powder in his hand and he felt more hot tears come as he ripped another strip from his shirt only to feel most of the shirt come away with it. He ignored it as he wiped at his eyes.

“I come out occasion.” Twice, in three weeks, each time to kill, and each time in some new part of the city where the Rose Adept’s men sent him. He wiped at his face again even though it was dry and studied the wall. “It isn’t safe.”

“Papa…” She let it hang, and he turned, finally, to look at her.

She looked nothing like her mother. Nothing like either of her parents, truth be told. Somehow she’d skipped the lineage that gave Thakur his once broad shoulders and black hair or her mother’s brown hair and brown eyes. Instead she’d taken after Thakur’s mother, or the pictures of her Thakur’s father had shown him before his death when Vasickni was only nine years old. She was tall and willowy with blonde hair that was almost white in the light from the hallway. Her eyes were dark though, not Thakur’s silver, with just a hint of blue or gold in them depending upon the way they caught the light. “Star child” was the word used for her in the pipes, one of those rare children among the dregs who was born looking more than merely human. She looked the way he’d once imagined adepts looked when his mother told him stories of the worlds’ creation and their place in them, beings of light and power that protected the order of the worlds, divine creatures, as he’d thought, before he’d become one himself.

Vasickni looked close to tears. “Papa, you look terrible.” She told him.

Thakur pulled what was left of his robes tighter around himself.

There’d been a mirror, in the last garrison he was sent to kill, floor length, running from one end of the room to another so that there was no way he could ignore his reflection before the glass began to fog and the foil behind it corrode at their proximity to his spirit. He didn’t even look like the dead piled at his feet. He’d looked more like a ghost, a wraith said to haunt the pipes while searching for little children far away from their homes to feed upon.

He combed one hand through what was left of his ragged beard and looked down at the floor.

“I know.”

There was no denial left in him, and when she took his bald statement of fact in silence, he realized that there was no longer any denial in her either.

He could remember when there had been, before he’d known, when he’d thought that he was the only one who was going to die.

It began as a burning in his chest.

He’d been a hero, after the powder adept. In pain, certainly, every one of his bones felt as fragile as glass after getting blown off the water tower, but a hero none the less. As the Eight Pits Sect refortified and rebuilt what was lost Thakur and his family were moved, with immense ceremony, from the maintenance shack where he’d hidden them, into one of the wealthiest homes to survive the war. A home all made of plastered wood and framed in steel, one with a kitchen in a separate wing from the dining room and a walled yard for bonfires and social gatherings without an inch of binding wire visible or chinks between pallet siding to let the noise of the pumps through. It was quiet as a castle inside, or, later on, a grave.

For all the ceremony, nothing made him feel like a hero the way his wife’s expression did as she wandered through their new home a cycle before they moved in. She drifted through the halls with her hand on the walls, looked around the kitchen with her mouth half open in astonishment, and surveyed wide open rooms as though she couldn’t imagine how to fill the vastness of their new lives.

“Do you like it?” He’d asked her, when they ended their tour in the highest and largest room in the house, one with windows that looked out at the sparkling lights of their subterranean city. She’d stood at one of those windows looking out while he leaned on a cane he’d received from Aizadudeen when the newly minted sect-head arrived from the bottom most layer of the Eight Pit’s operation. The cane came with his promise “Your family is mine, until they hooks haul me out of me own pits in the quiet deeps”.

“It’s like, something from the surface.” She said. She turned to him but looked around at the room. “Solid walls? Light, everywhere?” She looked up at the lights strung across the ceiling like hundreds of familiars seen moving through the cistern at a distance. “It’s like something from a story.”

“Our story now.” Thakur agreed. He hobbled into the room but he didn’t survey it the way she had. He studied her, memorized her look of joy, before he looked away. “It may, be a shorter story, than I would like.” Then he told her.

She knew about the gunpowder adept and what he’d done, she’d been scared when he’d limped into the utility shed to collapse on their bed shortly after scouring himself in the decontamination showers of his actual work station. When he finished, they wept together in the big empty house and made plans for a future in which all that would remain was his legacy.

But he didn’t die.

He, his wife, and his daughters were carried in procession to his home on the back of the armored car that had brought him the explosives that nearly broke every bone in his body as he killed the Adept. Anand waited for him at the house, along with a band of soldiers. They fired beams into the ceiling and let off fireworks that filled the cavern with haze and many of the men who’d come to welcome them to their new home shook Thakur’s hand and thanked him, leaving money in his palm, or tucking it into his pockets until his jacket bulged with their gifts and rang like bells whenever he took a step.

“This house, it’s a very big house, my brother has a little furniture shop he can fill your rooms, I will introduce you. He will take good care of you.”

“That adept, dark below, I saw him at the start of the whole thing. Took a shot at him when he was burning the barrel district, thought I was going to die. This coin, it’s a poor thanks, but my wife makes a fine benon, let me bring you some and perhaps my wife can share the technique with yours.”

“You should have a servant to fill that kitchen. I know a woman, my sister, she cooks meals will make you think she’s made an icon of them. You won’t regret hiring her, and she won’t try running off with those daughters.”

“You saved more than the sect when you killed that bastard. Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

When he finally escaped into their new home, weeping and jingling as he swayed through the door wearing a fool’s smile, the greatest gift still waited with Anand.

“A promise.” He said, when he’d followed Thakur and his daughters into the house. They stood around the sect-head to listen as he met each of their eyes. “As part of the sect you have always been family, but I make you my own family now. Sisters, daughters, brother, as I promised to Thakur.”

He put a hand on Thakur’s shoulder that made his bones twinge and gave a gentle squeeze. “The sect is saved because of you. Ask anything of us, anything, and we will do what we can to provide it.”

Weeks followed, hectic, in his memory, with work at the Eighth pit, cleaning up the sludge spill and managing the decontamination as he’d done before, busy with helping Mayanna move their family into their new home and getting them settled, with searching for an apprentice to marry one of his daughters and take his place when the poison in his chest did its work. When it didn’t kill him immediately within the first week of his victory over the adept, his frenzy calmed, and when a week turned into weeks, turned into months, he began to think that he might not die after all. He called for one of the sect’s medics only twice in all their story as he’d called it when he told his wife how short it might be, once, to confirm that there was nothing they could do when he thought he had days instead of weeks, and once more, at the last, before hope died without him.