"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."

You cry, the first time you kill what the Prioress tells you is a monster.

Ennoia doesn’t scold you. She lets you cry, lets you feel the full shame of it, crying, her silence worse than words. There is only the soft shh, shh of membrane pulling away from flesh as she peels the serpent’s skin off with a boning knife, to sell in a back alley of Sanlow.

You are nine years old and you have decapitated a half-grown amphisbaena, its first head still attached by a braid of muscle, its second head staring blankly from an oil spill of blood.

You look over at it as you kneel by the riverbank, scrubbing the black blood from your snow-white knees. It clings to you like that head to the amphisbaena’s neck: with a malevolence bordering on sentient.

“Anakis,” calls the Prioress, the serpent’s skin slung over her back. Your face is streaked with the aftermath of violence. She sees it—you see her seeing it—and then she turns away.

“Pick up your knife.” You pick up your knife.

Needless to say, you haven’t cried ever since.

You’re still not too fond of the blood and evisceration that comes with the job, though—some stains never really wash out—so over the years you’ve developed a method of finishing off your quarry by freezing its heart solid. Of course, since death is seldom immediate, your knowledge of bestial anatomy has evolved alongside your humanity, steadily coming to rival that of an arcanist’s. A stiletto of ice to sever the spinal cord or brainstem or axillary artery is just as effective, you argue, as a broadsword beheading.

As the Prioress dryly laments, you’ve a habit of making things far more complicated—and reckless, in an albeit fastidious way—than they should be.

And for what? Nothing holy about a slayer of the Mother’s worst monsters; some Alutelians cross the street when a keeper passes, for fear of catching the rumored miasma of monstrous corruption. You’re not so self-absorbed, either, to think yourself sanctimonious—and it’s more than a simple aversion to gore.

Sometimes, you think Ennoia suspects.

Moonlight falls in pale stripes through the slatted window of your room, the glass spiderwebbed with ice. A candle down to the last of its wax flickers on a desk bare save for an inkpot, a white quill, and a dagger with a dragonhide sheath.

You ease a thin leather bookmark, its edges worn ragged by use, into the anatomical text you’d received a fortnight ago as half of the payment for a contract. (You couldn’t refuse it, to Carmen’s annoyance—books can’t feed mouths—so you’d reluctantly slid over a quarter of your monthly-allotted drachma as penance.)

You reach for the cup of mead on your nightstand, unthinking. When you bring it to your lips, the mead has solidified into a chunk of cloudy alcohol. You curse and set the cup back down, pewter thunking dully on wood, before falling back on your bed pallet. It’ll take hours for the mead to melt.

There’s a phrase Ennoia likes to say, and you mull it over again as your breath dances in white clouds above your head. Freedom is but the distance between the hunter and its prey. You chew idly on a lock of your hair. Who is the prey?

But you shouldn’t ask such an obvious question.

Your mother had always reminded you, as she’d rocked you to and fro in a swaddle made of snow, who the prey of this world were.

It had not been her, and it had not been you.