“Young Master! You must be excited for tomorrow, to see the outside for the first time and experience your Awakening. I’ve heard from the beast handlers that your parents spared no expense in retrieving a first kill worthy of you, and that only three members of the twenty-five-man retrieval team came back! Truly a good omen for the strength of your future power.”
Dorian Corthat Lestra, third child of the Lestra Royal Family, and first in line for the throne of Brantis, shuddered. Normally, the voice of his nurse maid, Elentra, would fill him with warmth and stave off some of his eternal loneliness. But this time her presence (or, more likely, her words) only filled him with apprehension.
“Did… did they say what manner of beast it was?” a mild quaver lay over his words as he asked the question that had been keeping him awake at night.
“I’m afraid not, Young Master. The beast’s power is seemingly great enough that allowing word of it to spread to other nations would be a security risk. All the better though! This means the beast’s power must be great indeed!”
Dorian’s stomach decided that it didn’t like its current place in his body and dropped down to his knees for a friendly visit. A powerful beast would certainly be potentially great for him, if he was able to survive against it of course.
“Thank you Elentra, that will be all.”
“Are you sure, Young Master? You wouldn’t like to hear a story before bed?”
“No, thank you.”
“Very well then, Young Master. I will turn off the lights in five minutes. Pleasant dreams, and do try to rest well tonight, you have a big day tomorrow!”
Dorian walked to his bed and lay awake, staring at the ceiling. True to her word, Elentra removed the light from his room five minutes after. Awash in utter darkness, Dorian continued to simply stare upwards towards the ceiling. Tomorrow was his tenth birthday, and his awakening ceremony. The ceremony was normally performed on the sixth birthday of nobles and royalty, but after what had happened to his older siblings, Dorian’s mother and father had decided to wait longer for him to be more fully developed before his awakening. All nobles and members of royalty ended up… odd… after their forced quarantine, and it was common knowledge that the longer the quarantine lasted, the worse the mental and emotional degradation. Dorian hadn’t seen another person with his own eyes since he had learned to walk (so as to prevent him from accidentally stepping on a roach), he had been locked away in a hermetically sealed tower. There were hidden openings in the walls, with layers upon layers of fine mesh that wouldn’t let even a gnat through (regularly inspected to prevent clogging or insect nests). Dorian had found seven of these “hidden” holes, and tried to destroy the mesh, to allow the bugs in, so that he could finally be free; but they were well protected, beyond his ability to break. After all, the first kill of a royal could not be so mundane as a fly. In the world of Cessalia, the first creature killed by any human being transferred its power to said human; the power scaled with difference in mass, with the maturity of the creature in question, and with magic, of course. A human could kill a flea, but rather than getting the flea’s ability to jump 150 times their own height (862’ 6” for an average human male) they simply had an infinitesimally higher jump (fractions of an inch), due to the flea being so small compared to the human body. Sometimes, people got lucky and their first kill was a rabbit, in which case they would have slightly higher speed, or jumping ability. Sometimes people got very, very, lucky and their first kill being a rabbit gave them a keener sense of smell or hearing. Sometimes people got an invisible trait from their first kill that let them do something more than a base human could, and sometimes it was a physical trait instead (rabbit ears or fly wings weren’t exactly grotesque, but a fly’s head or a slug’s body made finding a spouse rather difficult). Then, there were the magical beasts.
If a magical beast was humans first kill, they gained the magic from the beast and could use it at will. There were no schools that taught magic, or abilities with cooldown timers that needed to be used in conjunction with each other, or boring and pedantic magical languages that basically turned magic into computer coding. Anyone who had magic used it as instinctively as the beast from whence it came. For obvious reasons, the nobility kept a tightly controlled monopoly on getting magical first kills for their children. Let the commoners have their roaches and spiders, the nobility would use the powers of manticores and chimeras. Occasionally, a commoner would accidentally get a magical being as their first kill; like Elentra, who had been taken firefly hunting (bioluminescence was a rare, but useful skill amongst the proletariat) and had accidentally killed a Shirshu (a magical being that looked like a firefly, but was capable of creating light and illusions with no source). When these occurrences happened to men, the men were discreetly disposed of; when they happened to women, the nobility welcomed her in with open arms, made her a member of their work staff (with significantly higher pay than other members), promised her that her children would become nobles, and began to drug her food with poisons that would shrivel her womb and make her barren. The noble men enjoyed tricking these naïve young women into their bedchambers with promises of making her their new queen if she bore them children, whilst knowing that no such evidence of their infidelity was actually possible.
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The children of nobles, therefore, had to be kept away from any living thing as soon as they had enough strength and mobility to accidentally kill an insect. Dorian lived in a sealed room, his meals were double and triple checked for maggots, worms and caterpillars before being shoved through a twice-sealed hatch in his door. His room had positive pressure to ensure that his toilet (which led directly to an incinerator) wouldn’t have anything crawling out through its plumbing. He was alone in a completely sealed environment, with no chance of human contact after what his older brother had done.
Dorian spent a few hours going through all of the horrible beasts he may have to face tomorrow, as his parents (whom he couldn’t remember ever even seeing) and a bunch of stern-faced nobles watched him walk towards his doom. He imagined Elentra (whom he had also never seen, but he at least knew her voice) letting out a shriek of pain and fear as she watched him get torn to shreds by the beast within the arena, a beast whose head reached the sky, whose teeth were bigger than his tower, whose claws could rip through mortar and stone… Eventually, his brain grew tired of death fantasies, and tried to distract him by other means. He thought of his brother and sister. His sister, Cassandra, had been the firstborn, and the first in line to the throne. Her Awakening took place five years before his birth, when she was six years old. Her beast had been a unicorn foal, the first ever caught in recorded history, a miracle by all counts, drugged and placid, ready for slaughter. Nobody even knew what unicorns could do, as their magic seemed geared towards evasion and secrecy, they were rarely seen, and never encountered; the nobles all waited with bated breath to see what the full extent of the unicorn’s powers were (and to begin plotting how best to utilize said powers in spying on neighboring states). But instead, his sister had dropped her spear, hugged the unicorn’s neck and whispered in its ears; the unicorn awoke, whinnied in fright, and vanished alongside his sister. No one knew where she’d gone, or what had happened to her. His brother, Malcolm, Dorian shuddered to think about; Malcolm had never made it to his awakening. To avoid another mishap like what had happened with Cassandra, Malcolm was given harsh lessons on the immorality of mercy, and the importance of killing what he was told to, when he was told to. Eventually, Malcolm had stopped eating his meals or responding to anything said to him through his door. When a court physician was sent in to determine if Malcolm was somehow ill or dead, Malcolm waited by the door, out of sight and, when the physician leaned over his bed to check on him, he’d stabbed the physician in the neck and bolted through the door. He snuck through the castle and escaped out into the countryside. Nobody had seen him since, but everyone was worried about what he was plotting, When your first kill was another human, you became one of… them… an Expo. Expos were all, without fail, insane. In killing another human, whether accidental or intentional, and having it as your first kill, something unique happened. Humans weren’t magical beasts, but they also weren’t mundane animals, they were in their own class. Expos were double humans, they had twice the lifespan of an average human, twice the strength, twice the intelligence, twice the speed… and twice the love, twice the fear, twice the hatred. They were twice as petty, twice as sadistic and twice as vengeful, their minds couldn’t handle the strength of their own emotions and they all became crazed. With how sadistic and cruel humans were normally, an Expo was something used in stories to frighten children; and there was one out there with a grudge against his royal family. Dorian didn’t usually wish ill on others, but he did hope that somebody killed Malcolm before Malcolm came back to extract his revenge.
Dorian eventually fell into a fitful slumber, plagued by nightmares that sometimes had him ripped to shreds by a multi-headed beast, and sometimes had him killed by an army of Expos led by his older brother. After hours of troubled sleep, he was awoken by a knocking at his door and Elentra’s rich alto bidding him a good morning. Stiffly, he began dressing himself for the day ahead; the three hours spent preparing him for his Awakening ceremony felt like three minutes. All too soon he was walking down a well-appointed hallway towards the arena where his demise surely awaited him. Elentra said something to him, probably an encouraging platitude, but he couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of his heart in his ears. He was handed a spear, and the doors opened before him. There, in the middle of the arena floor, was the multi-headed beast from his nightmares.
“Well,” Dorian thought, “At least I had a long, full li-, wait no I didn’t. At least I got to experience… I’ve got nothing. Guess I’m dying at ten years old because THAT, is a Hydra.”