bloodline

Selfishness ran in his blood, he'd once been told.

He'd been little more than a child then, dirt on his knees and torn skin on his palms. Selfish, she had sneered down her nose at him, because he knelt at the shrine without offering but for the blood still dripping. Just like you parents were. A child, then, he bit his tongue and scrunched his eyes so tight that stars burst in the dark. Selfish, she'd said, and he could have wept. Grace hadn't answered then, and he figured eventually that she'd been right. What could a child offer, after all? Nothing worth what he asked– nothing could balance that ledger.

Years passed with the sluggishness of mud down a mild slope as he worked the fields of his caretaker's farm and tended the roots of something all his own in their little city. Selfishness, more voices had called it. But Aeskir called it survival. What Grace couldn't provide, he'd do for himself. He took what wouldn't be missed. Then he took what he needed, damn those who suffered for the loss.

Then he'd been a child again, at the foot of a shrine, mud-stained clothes and hair slicked to his skin with cold droplets of rain mixing to his tears.

He fidgets with his ring, smearing the rain from tarnished silver, arctic eyes on a distant horizon.

"So? What d'you think? Shouldn't put up too much of a fight, and it'd set the both of us for winter." The playful lilt of his companion drags the child from his knees and back to a man's body, a beast of aching bones and the weight of years on his shoulders. He rolls his shoulders, and thinks again of his prayer. Let go. What a damn lesson that was. Some part of him sparks with rage, sets his jaw tight and curls his ribs to a coiled spring's tension.

Those wily eyes seem to know it too, alive with mischief as Aeskir finally looks his way. It would be a long season without a store to keep him fed. He could haul his way through, though old wounds ache when the temperatures drop low, and he'd already traded his heaviest furs to the smith. He runs his hand down his face. "I don't know about that, Riz. You know I don't go that way. Not these days."

A shove rocks him hard, a thin strength hidden in those agile hands. "You don't go that way?" It's a weapon, that incredulous laugh. "The way you're headin' is a grave, Aes."

So it seems, doesn't it? So it's seemed since that summer storm, so it's seemed since long before that, he thinks. But he thinks of her anyway, that sneer on her face, and he thinks of the empty bellies he'd betrayed to care for his own. Thinks of the long months days ahead of him, and all the nights he'll fall asleep hungry. It's not Grace on his mind, when his lip curls to an angry sneer and all that fear goes to the water. "I told you. I don't go that way, and I won't. Not even for you."

Selfish he may be, but it's not blood-deep.