I huff a laugh at their back-and-forth, continuing on my lonely adventure past their room.
Sephania is busy commiserating their losses with the Chained Sisters, Vallan and Garroway are moping for failing her, and Lukain has wandered off with an old man I recognize fromsome of the shadowgalas. The newest leader whose name I keep forgetting.
I let out a tuneless hum as I hear swords clanging. Naturally, I gravitate toward the sound, and come to an open door leading into some type of sparring room. A bevy of boys and girls are haphazardly swinging swords with a young man at the front going through patterns to teach them. This looks like a young group, but I’m impressed with their diligence.
In fact, looking around . . . I find myself impressed with a whole lot here. Despite the fixings being subpar and quite dingy and nasty, the people seem . . . content. Happy, even, if it’s to be believed. They eat together, fight together, work together.
Lukain did all this,I think as I continue on.He set the foundation, at the very least.
It’s a thought that keeps coming back to me—when I see girls at an underground river, working with fabric, or a mixed group scavenging for fungi in the fuzzy corners of the hold, and deciding which ones are poisonous or not, or the ladies and their interfolk comrades hammering away at tanned hides. The thought keeps coming back to me.
Lukain did all this.
While I was living a life of splendor as a nobleblood in Manor Marquin, with white-robed servants at my beck and call, a coven of hungry vampires to do my bidding, Lukain Pierken was down here struggling and fighting in squalor.
He turned an indigent, rancid place into a home. It’s quitehumanof him, I must say, but the ambition is clearly there.Perhaps we’re truly brothers after all, if ambition is the only thing we share. Maybe we’re more alike than I thought.
Of course, we could never beequal.He was born from a blasphemous Silverknight, an original sinner who sought the end of the Damned and all the demonic vampires I call family.
I was born from a noble father and a noble mother. Raised for a life in court, whereas Lukain was raised on the streets because of his twisted bloodline.
It isn’t my fault, but it’s the way it is. The way of life in Olhav, which is equal parts unforgiving, treacherous, and difficult to navigate.
Now, if I think on it, we’re more alike than ever. It turns out my nobleblood state wasnotpreordained or a right gifted to me by deities and malevolent spirits. It was a privilege that could easily be snatched away from me by any of the Five Ministries.
They had no reason to hold me to account because I was a well-paying, well-to-do member of the vampiric aristocracy, who caused little problems. Sure, I could be a pain in their ass with my flamboyance and ludicrous demands, but even as a lord, I was not taken too seriously by the Five Ministries. Or at least not seen as much of a threat.
Everything has changed. Now I’m digging my heels in the shit just as deep as Lukain is. The only thing different, I recognize, is my half-brother has actually created alegacyfor himself. One I hardly knew about, or hardly believed.
I’m seeing it firsthand. Seeing the conversations slipping through the walls, the awe on the faces of the boys and girls when Lukain walks down a corridor. The transformation of this subterranean cave to a living space called the Firehold.
The Grimsons look at me with curiosity and suspicion, and nothing more. Yet they gaze upon Lukain like he’s a god reborn. A martyr, perhaps, or a true legend in the flesh.
It’s something Lukain has never bragged about. He’s hardly mentioned his past life, probably because his past life changed and veered off course so frequently. From Olhav as a bastard, to Nuhav as a leader, to Olhav as a jailer. He’s had many transformations in his life—more than I can say even for myself.
I chance upon the man in question half an hour later, as I’m finishing my pensive stroll. I had not expected to find any likeness or kindness toward my brother, yet here we are.
As I’m heading for Sephania’s location where the Chained Sisters have been holed up, I catch Lukain out the corner of my eye, leaving a small dwelling and closing the door behind him. The room is one of the only ones with a door.
Rather than duck away from him so he won’t see me, I keep walking, knowing we’ll run into each other in a few more steps. We’re converging on the same larger room that narrows into a hall neither of us can avoid.
He catches me out his peripheral and gives me a curt nod. Cautiously, he starts heading toward me, and I have half a mind to curse and spin around to leave.
“Brother,” he says, standing before me in front of the corridor entrance.
“Lukain,” I reply.
We stare at each other. The silence becomes deafening.
“We need to get Palacia back,” he says at last. “That was foolish of us letting her decide her own fate like that.”
I frown, firming my lips. “You’re the last person I expected to steal someone’s agency, given what you’ve started here.”
His brow furrows, confusion spilling across his face. “I was a slaver, Skartovius. Nothing more.”
I let out an incredulous snort. “You were much more. If you can’t see what you were to these sorry people, then you are blind.”
His head tilts, more confounded than before. Probably because I’ve given him a compliment and a backhanded slap at the same time. He should be used to that by now from me.