Weaving - The Antisequence - 2

The sequence comes to you more frequently these days in large, more coherent pieces rather than the usual flashes. Returning memories of death still haunt you, despite them never actually occurring. By now you assume that your failure in Kosskazoka was expected. Neither Dairo nor the few of his betters you’d met since bore concern for, let alone mourned the loss of your fellow slaves. Whatever that mission was, it seemed your dispatchment had been a calculated risk. Either that or a snap strategic response. Likely, those criminals held something feared, or desired by The University and your life had been worth the risk.

‘Had’ being the key word there. Dairo never clarified why he’d brought you, and only you back. When he reported his doing so to his direct superior, an arcanist named Tserlbane, the aged man had chuckled at the notion. As if you were a novelty of sorts. The new arrangement was not explained in plain terms either, but Dairo expected you’d serve as his apprentice. It’s possible you could have rejected him. You didn’t.

A lost dog led by a cruel keeper into the depths of the West’s dark secrets. You learned that the program, which you had until recently been a part of, called the ‘Faceless Initiative’, had been shut down after the bulk of its members were killed. Tserlbane was sending Dairo, and by extension, you on a new mission serving the same cause that had already taken your life once before. Frustratingly, no one would tell you what that cause was.

A train brought you to the familiar city of Audran. Fortunately, you weren’t required to stay within its walls. Your time there was spent in a small, isolated villa far from the city proper. The following five seasons involved the most grueling training of your life. Both physically and mentally. Your salvation from death proved to be no mercy. Dairo made your life a living hell. But he also made you stronger, faster, smarter, and ruthless. Your knowledge of magic accelerated far beyond what you’d previously thought possible. At first, you learned to do things once out of reach. Then, things that put you in the discomforting reach of the law. Finally, you were taught things you’d previously not known were even possible.

These events are frustratingly broken to you now. The trauma is there, but the skills are not. You hold only scraps that come to you in the form of surprise talent, or discovered muscle memory. They’d be remarkably useful if you could access them in full. But from what little you recall, perhaps they are better left, for lack of a better term, unremembered.

In a little more than a year’s time, Dairo sculpted you into something that could have easily bested your past slave self using martial arts alone. The young boy from the southern sands is forgotten by this version of you. Pushed deep inside to become a roiling sea of rage and molten glass. Your core became so amorphous that revenge and destruction lost their unique identities. You became a cold, unfeeling shell that only unleashes the horror within at Dairo’s command.