Two years ago.
The land in the far north of the Kingdom of Asgard was as stubborn, cruel, and barren as the people who clung to it in a vain attempt to survive. It resisted every strike of the hoe, as if it consisted not of fertile soil, but of compressed icy stone, frozen clay, and centuries-old human pain. The wind coming from the distant fjords carried the scent of prickly salt and approaching winter, drying the skin until it cracked.
Sixteen-year-old Kain, with a hollow, animalistic groan, plunged the rust-eaten iron tip into a dry, cracked clod of earth. The sound of the impact echoed with a dull, aching pain in his shoulder joints. Cloudy, acrid sweat flooded his eyes, stinging them with salt, and on the young man's broad palms, bloody blisters had long since burst and festered, turning the skin into something like coarse, tanned parchment.
The village of Oxen, lost among the cold, windswept hills a few dozen miles from the restless border, knew neither the wealth of Valois, nor the holidays of the Empire, nor the mercy of the old northern gods. Here they knew only one thing: if you stopped swinging the hoe, you would starve to death in winter. Kain leaned heavily on the sweat-slippery handle and wiped the dirty ichor from his forehead with the sleeve of a linen shirt that was once gray, but was now blackened by ingrained dirt.
In the distance, beyond a ridge of bare, ugly hills, the sky always seemed heavy with lead. It was there, somewhere beyond the horizon, that Ancient Trinity lay, from where, with every gust of the icy wind, fetid rumors of raids from the wild wastelands increasingly arrived. They spoke of gray non-humans—monsters the color of wet granite, whose fangs were capable of biting a spear shaft in half.
"Kain!" a thin, breaking little voice rang out, sounding like the chime of a cracked bell. The young man slowly turned around. His stern face, sharpened by constant malnutrition and smeared with soot and road dust, twitched, letting through a faint, almost painful smile.
Along the edge of the plowed field, stumbling over hard clods of earth, ran Mia, his eight-year-old sister. Her thin, scratched bare feet sank into the gray dust, and her once blonde hair was tangled into stiff mats. She wore a baggy dress, roughly altered from her mother's old rags. In her thin hands, she carried carefully, like the greatest treasure of the Empire, a chipped wooden bowl covered with a dirty rag.
"Mom said you should eat," the girl exhaled, stopping nearby. Her narrow chest heaved heavily. "Otherwise, she says, you'll fall right into the furrow, and who will pull the plow then?"
Kain reached out a heavy, dirty hand and affectionately tousled his sister's crown, leaving a gray ashen mark on her light hair. He took the bowl. Under the rag, there was a cloudy, watery broth with a few bluish pieces of overripe turnip floating in it, and a tiny, stone-hard scrap of stale bread. This was almost all their food for today. Kain's stomach clenched in a painful, twisting spasm, and hungry saliva gathered in his mouth.
He broke off half of the crust—exactly half, no more and no less—and shoved it back into his sister's small, dirt-stained palm. "Eat. I'm not hungry. I found some berries in the forest this morning."
Mia wanted to object, pursed her pale lips, but the hungry, almost wolfish gleam in her sunken eyes gave the girl away completely. She didn't argue and sank her teeth into the stale bread, eagerly swallowing pieces almost without chewing. In one gulp, over the edge, Kain drank the warm, cloudy water with the taste of earth and rot, swallowed the pieces of turnip, and looked toward their hut. The rotten straw roof had long since sagged, resembling the broken spine of an old dog.
Their mother, Martha, in her early thirties, looked like an ancient, withered old woman. Heavy, animal-like labor in the meager field, constant pregnancies ending in stillborn children before Mia's arrival, and the primal fear of every approaching winter had drained all the life from her. Her hair had turned gray, her back was permanently hunched, and at night she coughed up blood agonizingly into a rag, naively thinking the children couldn't hear her death rattles.
Kain knew almost nothing about his father. In their wretched home, there were neither his old things nor his tools. His mother never spoke of him. At any mention, her face turned to stone, her lips pressed into a thin white line, and a mixture of deep-seated hatred and panic-stricken terror appeared in her faded eyes. His father was simply a void, a torn-out page, a black hole in their lives. The only thing Kain knew for sure was that the coward had simply walked off into the night when the boy was still a baby, leaving them to flounder in this shit.
And Kain hated this shit. He hated the smell of pig manure ingrained in his skin, hated the eternally gnawing, maddening hunger. But most of all, he hated the chilling fear of the chainmail-clad tax collectors—the lapdogs of the local thane and the arrogant Crown sheriffs from the Center, who rode through Oxen once a season. These bastards could take the last skinny goat or beat someone half to death with whips for a single insufficiently respectful look. He hated the absolute, humiliating powerlessness of a commoner. He refused to rot here.
Therefore, every night, when his mother and Mia, exhausted by the day's hard labor, fell into a heavy sleep on creaky cots stuffed with rotten straw, Kain silently slipped out of the hut into the cold gloom of Asgard. Deep in the forest, behind the remains of an old mill that had burned down many years ago, he had his secret place. There, among the centuries-old northern pines creaking in the icy wind, the ground had been trampled by his bare feet to the state of monolithic stone.
While the other peasant children slept so they could take up the plow again at dawn, Kain took his only "relic" into his hands. It was a piece of heavy, massive iron crowbar covered in red rust, which he had dug out of the mud on an old ruined imperial tract a few years ago. He dreamed of becoming someone greater. In the smoke-filled roadside taverns, where he sometimes dragged firewood for a couple of worn copper coins, drunken mercenaries and wandering merchants chattered about all sorts of things.
They told tales that the true warriors of Terra were capable of cleaving a rock with one careless swing of a sword. That their bodies in battle were enveloped in an invisible, impenetrable armor, while primordial energy raged inside. Here in the North, this power was reverently called the "Blood of the Gods." Legends said that it granted the fury of a berserker and made a man equal to a troll.
But the local jarls and konungs jealously guarded their secrets behind the high stone walls and heavy oak doors of their halls. They passed the secrets of training and opening the channels only to their pure-blooded sons. The northerners had a simpler attitude towards the rabble: a peasant who awakened the power could be taken into a regular warband. But into the elite squads of the Aesir, the invincible force of the North, entry for the likes of Kain was tightly sealed. And those commoners who dared to spy on the secret training of the lords were hanged in the squares.
But Kain refused to put up with this. Not knowing the noble methods of training, having not the slightest idea about the structure of internal channels and the soft circulation of mana, he used the only method available to him. Brute, destructive force and absolute, all-consuming pain. He swung the iron crowbar in the dark until his muscle fibers literally began to tear under his skin, and the small blood vessels in his eyes burst, flooding the whites with red. He instinctively believed that the human body was just a vessel, a piece of dirty ore. And if you struck this ore with the hammer of unbearable pain, if you pushed the body to the absolute, critical limit beyond which only death loomed, then the hidden "Blood of the Gods" was bound to awaken on its own.
There was simply no other way out.
"Once more..." he wheezed in the pitch-black darkness of the forest, spitting viscous, salty saliva onto the frozen ground and swinging the heavy piece of iron. The muscles of his back burned with fire, as if they had been doused with boiling pitch. "More... Bitch, come on, one more strike!"
Crack! The crowbar smashed with terrible force into the trunk of a dead oak wrapped in old rags. The recoil was so monstrous that it jolted the bones of his arms all the way to the shoulder joints, knocking all the air out of his lungs. Kain growled, gritting his teeth until they ground, and struck again. And again. The wood cracked, the iron hummed, spewing the sound of human despair into the darkness.
That night, at the very end of the ruthless Asgardian winter, when the icy frost still mercilessly bit at bare dirty heels, Kain felt it for the first time. He landed his thousandth blow. His physical strength was completely exhausted, his mangled fingers unclenched of their own accord, dropping the heavy crowbar with a clatter, and he collapsed to his knees like a shapeless sack straight into the freezing mud. His chest was tearing apart from the inside; he began to cough up blood terribly, his whole body shuddering from the monstrous overexertion. Black circles swam before his eyes, dragging his consciousness into oblivion. His heart beat as if it wanted to break through his ribs and burst out.
And suddenly, at the very peak of this bottomless agony, right in the center of his chest, near his heart, something else was born. It was a tiny, pulsating, alien warmth. It was faint, barely perceptible, the size of a smoldering coal, but it was crystal real. Kain did not know the Runic words from the tomes of the imperial mages, nor how to properly call the Aura. To him, it was just warmth in the icy night. But instinctively, like a drowning man clutching at a thrown rope in a stormy sea, he latched onto this sensation with his mind. This faint burning inside became his anchor. His only proof that he wasn't just a piece of talking meat, born to die in a field.
The ringing of the cracked village bell tore the chilly morning silence of Oxen three weeks after that night in the forest. This sound always meant only one of two things: either monsters had appeared on the horizon, or the tax collectors had arrived. The peasants, dropping their hoes and baskets of manure, trudged in a sullen, gray crowd toward the central square, sinking ankle-deep in the icy spring mud.
Kain walked apart from the rest, feeling that same tiny, barely awakened warmth still pulsating under his ribs. It echoed with a faint dull pain with every step, but it was the best pain of his life. When he stepped onto the square, he realized that these were not the tax collectors of the local thane.
In the middle of the destitute, cattle-stinking village, towering like gods descended into a cesspit, were six riders. Their massive, steel-armored warhorses stepped disdainfully with their hooves, splashing mud. The riders were clad in flawless plate armor polished to a mirror shine. And at the head of the detachment sat a Royal Emissary in a heavy, fur-lined cloak the color of caked blood. On his chest fiercely grinned the Red Dragon of the Avalon Empire, cast in gold. Here, at the very edge of the continent, people saw the envoys of the Center only when the Emperor needed fresh meat for his endless ambitions.
The Emissary looked over the huddled, shivering crowd of commoners with undisguised, deep disgust. He covered his nose with a perfumed handkerchief to avoid breathing the smell of unwashed bodies and pig manure, and with a careless gesture unrolled a thick parchment sealed with a heavy wax seal.
"In the name of His Majesty, Emperor Alucard Pendragon, Lord of the Continent of Terra!" the Emissary's voice, amplified by weak magic, thundered over the square, echoing off the wretched hovels. His speech was laced with that prim, arrogant accent of the capital. "Listen, subjects of the north!"
"In connection with the increasingly frequent attacks by beasts on the Village of Trinity and the eastern steppes, the Crown announces the Great Conscription."
A frightened murmur rippled through the crowd. Women instinctively pulled their sons closer.
"Shut up!" barked one of the royal guardsmen, striking his iron-bound shield with the shaft of his halberd. The murmuring instantly ceased.
"The Academy of Aetheria, the forge of Avalon's elite, opens its gates," the Emissary hissed, looking with contempt over their heads. "By decree of the Crown, the right to undergo the Trials of Blood is granted to everyone, regardless of origin, title, and wealth." "If in any of you filthy pigs miraculously smolders a spark of hope to escape the mud, if anyone is ready to prove themselves for the good of the empire—the Academy will accept you." "You will receive food, armor, and a chance to become a squire, shedding blood in the name of the Empire."
The Emissary paused, smirking mockingly. "Of course, this is merely a formality dictated by law." "I highly doubt that among you shit-diggers there is even one bastard whose capabilities haven't rotted from cheap ale." "The gathering will last until the onset of winter at the main gates of Aetheria in Avalon. The survivors will find the way themselves."
The envoy rolled up the parchment, tossed it disgustedly straight into the mud at the feet of the village elder, and, yanking the reins, turned his horse around. The steel-clad squad trotted out of the village, leaving behind only silence and deep hoofprints in the rutted track.
None of the peasants even twitched to pick up the decree. What Academy? For them, these words were an empty mockery, a fairy tale for the lords of Asgard feasting in their warm halls. The crowd, sullenly muttering curses, began to disperse back to their barren fields.
But Kain stood motionless. His heart was pounding so hard that it echoed in his ears like an alarm bell. The spark under his ribs seemed to flare up into a hot fire. Regardless of origin. The right to undergo the trials. This was not just a decree. It was a key. The lock on his shackles had just clicked open.
That very night, he gathered his meager belongings. They were ridiculously few: worn-out boots taken from a dead mercenary last year, a water flask, and a piece of coarse whetstone. Just last week, he had given his trusty rusty crowbar to Thor, the lame blacksmith, promising to chop firewood for him for free until the end of summer so that he would reforge the piece of iron into something resembling a two-handed sword. The blade turned out heavy, ugly, and notched, but it was real steel. His steel.
As Kain was tying the baldric made of stiff hemp, the rotten floorboards creaked behind him. In the doorway, wrapping herself in a hole-ridden shawl, stood Martha. In the dim light of a melted tallow candle, her face seemed carved from gray stone. She saw the sword. Saw the travel bag.
"So, you're leaving," it was not a question. It was a dry statement of fact. His mother's voice was dull, devoid of inflection.
Kain pulled the knot tight and looked up. "In the morning. It's no less than a three-month walk to the Center, if I don't die in the forests of Valois along the way."
Martha slowly walked up to the table. She didn't cry. She had run out of tears many years ago. She looked at his hands—broad, covered with a thick layer of coarse calluses, with dirt ingrained into the cracks that no water could wash away.
"Do you think you're special, Kain?" she said quietly, with a frightening, icy hoarseness, looking straight into his eyes. "Do you think the fact that you crippled yourself at night in the forest makes you equal to them?"
"I feel it, Mom," he replied firmly, touching his chest. "The energy. I tore it out of myself. The Emperor's decree..."
"The Emperor's decree!" Martha spat out suddenly, with vicious desperation, and immediately broke into a strained, gurgling cough, pressing a rag to her mouth. When she pulled her hand away, a fresh bloody stain darkened on the fabric. "They don't make knights out of pig shit, son!" "They use it for living shields. You will come to their golden Avalon, and those arrogant bastards in silks will simply chew you up and spit you out." "They will use your so-called power so you can die in some ditch protecting their pampered asses." "Those in power only destroy the likes of us."
At the mention of "those in power," that same deep-seated, panic-stricken shadow flickered in Martha's eyes, the one that always appeared when it came to his missing father. But she immediately suppressed it.
"I'd rather die with a sword in my hands, choking on my own blood, than cough it up here until I'm buried in this cursed furrow," Kain answered harshly, hammering out every word. A fanatical, unyielding northern ice burned in his gray eyes. "I will not stay." "And when I become a knight of Avalon... I will pull you and Mia out of here."
Martha looked at him for a long time. Her thin shoulders slumped. She realized that arguing with this stubbornness was useless. She turned around silently, walked to the hearth, and took a tiny, dusty linen pouch from a hiding place behind a loose brick.
"There are seven copper coins here," she said hollowly, pressing the pouch into his rough palm. His mother's fingers were ice-cold. "I was hiding them for dark days. It won't get any darker than this." "Buy some proper food on the tract so you don't starve to death in the very first weeks."
Kain gripped the coins. A lump rose in his throat, burning worse than the recoil from the crowbar strikes. He stepped forward and hugged his mother tightly, but carefully so as not to break her fragile bones. She froze, unaccustomed to tenderness, and then hesitantly patted his broad back.
"Kain?" came a thin, sleepy voice from a dark corner of the hut. Mia was sitting on her straw cot, rubbing her sleepy eyes with her little fists. She looked at his bag, at the ugly heavy sword on his back, and her lower lip trembled treacherously. "Are you going to war? Like those men on the big horses?"
Kain walked up to her, dropped to one knee so their eyes would be on the same level, and pulled the most confident smile he could muster onto his face. "I'm going to school, little mouse. To the biggest school in the world." "And when I return..." he touched her smudge-covered nose with his finger. "I will buy you that very dress. Remember?" "Made of real blue silk, with golden threads. And we will leave here forever."
A large tear rolled down the girl's dirty cheek, tracing a pale path. She sniffled and silently, with all her might, clung her small hands to his neck.
At dawn, when Ancient Oxen was still hidden behind a thick, icy fog, and the sky over the hills of Asgard had only just begun to fill with a sickly pale-gray light, a lone silhouette left the village of Oxen. Kain Alseif walked along the washed-out, squelching tract. His boots got stuck in the mud, the wind chilled him to the bone, and his heavy sword chafed his back. But he no longer looked at his feet. His gaze was fixed to the south. There, where thousands of miles away lay the dazzling, cruel, and merciless Center. The journey to the Academy of Aetheria had begun.