Chapter 53

Lyra’s needle flashed and the sound of cloth shifting across cloth filled the air as she worked.

“Just to keep my thoughts busy ... why do you have a problem with the Ranker? it seems a bit ah personal that you would come to the mansion and do ... what you did,” said Lyra as she continued to pick apart clothing and measure them against Rain.

Rain’s back tensed for a moment and Lyra flinched.

After a moment he began to speak.

“When I was a human, a leveler, I never leveled up. I stayed at level one my entire life.”

Lyra blinked. What did he just say? That, that couldn’t be right. Everyone leveled, even if just a little.

“You couldn’t level? What do you mean?”

“I could level, but I wasn’t allowed to, the Ranker commanded I be made a pariah of Lynthia. If I tried to hitch a ride away on an inter-city caravan I would be beaten and tossed out. The town was my prison and everyone in it my guards out of fear of what the Ranker would do to them if I wasn’t kept like that. I was made Lynthia’s runt, I was made that way because that was what the Ranker wanted. Making me small and despairing was the point, a Black Mark, to put a barrier between what my life could have been that I can look toward but not reach, like an animal in a zoo looking at the wide wild.”

“What a sadistic thing to do to someone...”

“I’ve seen him do things to people that you wouldn’t believe. He rules Lynthia with an iron fist, If someone annoys him he either disappears them and they are never seen or heard from again or he makes a public example out of them in the most brutal way possible.”

“I saw some scary devices in this mansion. Someone who would keep things like that in his own home, it’s very concerning, he seems like a cruel man.”

“You don’t know, you just don’t know. He ... One of the few people who tried to help me ... He dragged by her hair to the town square and ... I found what was left of her the next day. I was eight years old and she was...”

Rain’s voice was becoming snarled, growling slipping into his words, his breath getting heavy and ragged. A splintering sound rent the air and the arm of the chair ripped away in his paw. He stared at it, and then curled his digits. The wood crunched to splinters beneath his pads and he let it rain down on the floor with a sigh.

“I did try, I snuck into the town’s library and taught myself basic things. It never really mattered though, and as I got older I became more sickly, a Human needs to level, I think, if you don’t your body doesn’t ever grow properly. I was so incredibly weak and malnourished and stunted that a Goblin could have broken me over its knee, I couldn’t kill a regular animal let alone a monster. I stuck to the low leveler’s part of town and tried to get by and escape notice, to survive as best I could. I worked on live trapping, but the monsters around Lynthia aren’t really trappable, too strong for anything I could make in my state anyway, in the end it had to be the dungeon, but alone the dungeon was a death sentence.”

“Why did the Ranker do that to you?

“When I was young the Ranker took a liking to my Mother and tried to take her for himself. My Father took issue with that and attacked him. He lost.”

Lyrah paused. That wasn’t an uncommon story in her home city. Being so many levels above another meant it was very easy to get away with doing bad things to low levelers. The larger the gap in levels the more easily the abuse happened. It was a complicated dynamic of pressures and interests and potential that broadly kept people from going too far but in the end a high leveler could do whatever they wanted to a low leveler if they really wanted to, especially to those who lacked social ties and had stagnated in their leveling potential. Giving the appearance of being an up and comer was a protection in itself.

“The Ranker did things to my Father that my Father never spoke of, at the very least crippling him, but in the end the Ranker let him go. I think he wanted him to live with what had happened and what he did to my Mother in front of him, to live with the memory. He’s done that kind of thing before. I ... understand why he does that now, traumatic memories don’t go away, they are always there, in your mind, like little demons. It broke him, it broke my father. He was ... it was like he was disappearing in front of my eyes, becoming a hollow shell. He drank himself to death. He barely acknowledged I existed toward the end.”

Lyra felt her heart go out to him as emotion welled up in her chest, what Rain had been through in his past life hurt to hear, to lose a parent like that, well she knew what that felt like, his words cut deep. She could almost picture the vulnerable wounded person Rain had been, she suddenly felt protective of him, becoming a little teary-eyed at her own imagining. It took her a moment to recall that he was now the massive beast in front of her. Rain the monster didn’t need protecting, he was too strong for that.

“And because he was my father I was given the status of pariah too, a Black Mark upon our family, what little was left of it.

“You need to kill him,” said Opal. She had returned to the room and had begun boiling water over the stove. “Gobbo’s don’t like revenge against big monsters, but this ... you need to kill him.”

“My hate for him is a different kind of hate than toward the ones who murdered me, that pain is fresh and sharp, what the Ranker did I have lived with for most my life, it became normalised, deeper, like a dull aching burn. I can’t just kill him, not anymore, I need to make him suffer, to make him feel some small sliver of what I felt. That’s why I killed and ate his harem, I want to see that moment when he realises what I did, to see it in his eyes. I want to...” His nose wrinkled in a snarl, his upper lip quivering flashing his teeth, his paws clenched. “I want to ruin him, I-”

Rain cut himself off and bowed his head, going silent.

Lyra continued to work around him quietly, measuring and cutting and sewing. Rain for his part regretted speaking, he hadn’t wanted to pick over old memories, memories of being trapped and helpless, victim to the whims of those stronger than him, that was physically repulsive to his current more aggressive self. Memories of countless times he had been beaten for trying to steal food to eat, often receiving broken bones in his fragile state that had healed badly, trying to change his situation but being stymied at every turn by those stronger than him, boxing him in, cutting away his future until he was nothing at all.

He blinked as he realised where his gaze had wandered. Red was sitting with his back to him. Counting coins and picking through various valuables. A little uncomfortable thought wormed its way into Rain’s mind. It wasn’t a perfect parallel but Red was trapped like he had been, victim to Rain, and he was quite powerful now. He did not like that thought, it was the worst kind of thought, a thought with an element of truth.