My day always started with a small offering to the Dark God my family worshiped, getting picked on for being too soft-hearted and going to school trying to forget what I had to do in the morning.

With the stress of having to kill a small animal every week, bearing with the guilt and adding some more on top of it, my academic life should be suffering, but that wasn't quite so true. I was one of the best students in our school and I took a lot of pride in that. It was also something that made me less useless as far as my family was concerned, so studying became my salvation in more ways than one.

I shuddered remembering the person I had almost become and went on with my day.

Given my mood at the start of the school, it was easy to imagine I didn't have many friends. My siblings joked that I was more of the stereotypical cultist than they were, but I would digress... if I could; I had a few people I talked to, but no real friends. It was a bit lonely with that, but I was fine with my current status quo, fewer things to worry about.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Besides, my class even had a mascot who made things interesting! Her name was Mira and her goal was probably to piss off as many people as she could to add to her newspaper.

She wasn't my friend, but we did greet each other if we happened to meet in the street or in school. We didn't talk much since we lived in almost completely different worlds, but her presence was a pleasant addition to the torturous and monotonous life of mine.

Once she got a wif of an interesting secret she would do her best to uncover it and see if it was worthy of being added to her newspaper. Of course, she had limits on what she would do and she would rarely hurt other people with her stories, more often than not just making their lives more interesting.

Every week I waited for her usual outlandish and funny stories, something which was common with a lot of the students of this school. At the end of the paper, she usually mentioned the victim of her next story... and at the end of it indeed there was a name... my name.

Always a loner, never interacting with people but being the best student in our school, it is impossible not to have any secrets! Await eagerly for the secrets of Kyle Ryzen on next week's issue!