02

He dreamed of the dead.

Konrad dreamed and he heard them call his name, over and over. No one knew his name, he shouldn’t have known it, but those already dead and those bound to be knew it, and they told him who he was, every day, every night.

Konrad...

Konrad stood knee deep among the mutilated bodies of his children that he didn’t knew yet, his blades dripping with blood. Screaming under the burning red skies of terra with his brother’s corpse beneath him, weeping, howling with laughter.

The skin slipping from his fingers as he uncaringly flayed the man, crying only afterwards and for himself and not the bloody deed. Crying for the unescapable truth of what was to be.

Konrad Curze, dying. Always dying, burning steel cutting through his chest, always piercing, breaking the bones, suffocating…

With an almost soundless gasp the young man rose to its knees in the corner of the dark room, throwing off the bed covers that he used as blankets.

Embroidered silken sheets slipped from his shoulders revealing the pristine, sweat covered skin of his still developing body, first signs of growing muscles showing in the way of his chest and arms.

Konrad took a deep breath and abandoned his sanctuary of pillows and sheets stacked in the corner of an opulent mansion. His sanctuary for the night, a quarantined mansion in this part of the city. Quarantined as a crime scene, closed off until the blood of minor corrupt nobles, his previous victims, could be scrubbed from lower chambers of the mansion.

The smell of blood still lingered, even weeks after the event it drafted from the lower floors to the rooms that Konrad choose to rest.

Walking unperturbed through the darkness he entered the dark shower room, with only moonlight illuminating the depreciated marble floors and wide silver mirror.

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Konrad stepped into the always dripping stream of cold water and let the cold numb him beyond the point of pain before stepping away and turning towards the mirror.

It’s been fourteen years. Roughly fourteen years since he first became truly aware of himself. Though he was older than that, he could barely understand his first few years of life.

Crawling, listening, watching for those first few years, filled with visions and knowledge and no understanding of anything.

Konrad didn’t know how to feel about it, it was too much. To be so young and so old at the same time. He remembered, but the understanding of his infant years escaped him, like a dream that happened, insane and nightmarish.

Maybe it was better that way, that he couldn’t really grasp his childhood to its full extent. The reality was ugly enough anyway, no need for him to linger on how things were before.

He sighed and leaned towards the mirror, noting the changes in the contours of his sharp angular face. His wet hair dripping with water, hanging to his collarbone. The sharp contrast of shadow on the ivory figure of his body, every contour of the muscles visible in the moonlight.

He was changing, growing. Konrad thought as he pushed himself away and made his way to the sleeping chamber.

How old was he now, sixteen standard years. seventeen? That was about right. seventeen years of existence, fourteen of those he could understand.

A short time for someone who caried centuries of experience, or was it knowledge, with him.

The visions were getting stronger with each year.

He understood that, knew so much. The level of his knowledge was so vast sometimes, so vague other times.

Konrad was haunted, by the past, by the future. By the truth of what was and what was bound to happen. For years he saw himself, and others in unchangeable futures, the short visions of what would come to be.

But something was changed for Konrad. He knew so much more than just the end vision of the future. He knew, if not saw, the fate of his brothers, his fate. The events that would shape the galaxy in the millenniums to come.

His vision was a curse, but it was also a gift. And it felt to Konrad sometime, that it was as if he had lived a thousand lives already, with knowledge and wisdom to come with that. With understanding of more than just wicked and cruel life on Nostramo.

And while some things in his visions remained unchanged, like his death, always burning like a blade in his heart, there were things different. Visions blurred, some events before the inevitable results shifted, and changed.

While Konrad couldn’t shift his path from where he was, while the truth of him remained unchanged, he saw himself shifting others.

There was yet choice available to him.

After all, what is one ending, compared to the path that led to it.