Chapter Text
I had always been a sufficiently astute and disciplined pupil to my father, whose title I was made aware of that I would inevitably inherit the moment I could comprehend what the phrase clan leader meant. In his footsteps, I followed; in his silence, I listened. I was the heir of Ragar Kertia, and it had never occurred to me that I could be anything else; such realities simply did not exist within the world I knew, and as my father had dedicated his very existence to our Lord and our country, so would I, to continue the clan leader’s legacy, as this was the noble path of existence. I had truly believed this for the majority of my life, even though honor was not something that always came easily to me in my younger years and was a duty learned either through my father’s disciplining or through my own strenuous self reflection.
It was not a particularly special day in which I encountered him for the first time: Father’s friend, the human, the noble hunter, the Noblesse’s Bonded—he who possessed many legends, souls, and names, but the name people now knew him by was Frankensein. I had only heard stories about him thus far, both from my father and from others not so keen to his residence in Lukedonia, and upon seeing his silhouette, I recognized him near instantly. My father often discussed his friend in my presence, to such an extent that I felt as though I knew Sir Frankenstein myself—that I was personally familiar with how sunlight made golden halos of his hair or how he held himself with perpetually magnetic confidence or how multitudinous his smiles could be. Though I had my own reservations regarding the human, he was whom both my clan leader and the Lord acknowledged and so I kept such controversial thoughts to myself and placed my faith in Father's judgement of character, as I had always.
The courtyard garden had the fortunate company of a warm and easy afternoon, and the human and my father were conversing in the shade of one of the fruit-bearing trees. Between them, Sir Frankenstein held something small and reddish orange in color that he had harvested, like he had captured a sunset in between his fingers. From this distance, I could still perceive a slight black char that ate away at the ruffles of the man’s sleeve. Then, in a sudden and rare act of intimacy, Sir Ragar Kertia pulled down his mask and swiftly leaned forward to take a bite, the surely sweet nectar momentarily wetting his lips before being discreetly licked away. The mask was returned as he looked upon his friend with a nearly juvenile earnestness with which even I was unfamiliar—a fact that startled me—and to which Sir Frankenstein made a bemused expression.
Becoming acutely aware of their desire for a spot of privacy, I departed to a more distant wing of the estate to resume my studies with the hopes of possibly impressing Sir Gejutel K. Landegre the next time we were to meet, admittedly partially motivated by my own quiet vanity. I had not yet crossed the arches when I became aware of the demanding footfalls of another noble who found keeping my pace and attention imperative. Karias Blerster possessed the most peculiar quality of being utterly unlike his parent in character—to a near unnoblelike degree—even if they shared similar stylings in terms of appearance. At times, this both exasperated and confounded me, and it compelled one to wonder how it was that Sir Krasis Blerster had raised his heir, though I was in no position to question such things.
"Finally, I run into you. I don't believe we've seen each other for the past..." He drifted off to count imaginary numbers on his fingers before giving up on the endeavor entirely with a playfully vexed wave. "Doesn't matter. But I have you now, Rajak." Karias laughed to himself and flicked his blonde hair back with a gloved hand, as dramatic as usual, even if no one had asked for such dramatics. I only deigned to give him a brief sideways glance as we both continued to walk. While I did not look towards him, how he pouted was obvious enough in his tone of voice. "Not even a greeting? As cold as ever, I see."
"What is it that you need from me?" I urged.
"Is it not enough to desire a peer's company?"
"For you, Karias? No."
"Oh! You wound me. Tell me, are all Kertia men like this?"
Normally, such a flippant question would not have given me such pause, but on this day and in this afternoon, it did. Being like my father, upholding his virtues and following in his footsteps with tireless scrutiny, had been an old source of pride, and as such, I had always considered myself rather knowing of the noble Ragar Kertia. He was what I studied most of all, and any book or scroll paled in comparison. Having witnessed what I had in the garden, it dawned on me for likely the first time that perhaps Father possessed of sanctuaries, romantic twilights and dim regions, whose gates were lucidly barred to even myself. I had no answer for Karias.
He was accustomed to my silence, however, and took it upon himself to one-sidedly continue this banal conversation as we arrived in step to one of the greater libraries, greeted only by the silence of aged papers and rays of dust illuminated by the spill of the stained glass.
Death was as real and as commonplace as life itself; they were things that went hand in hand for most beings, as I knew. To a noble, it was a ritual. It would be inevitable that my father would one day enter his eternal sleep, and his soul would rest within the inheritor to the soul weapon Kartas. Such was a noble's death—one did not truly cease to exist; even in slumber, we were eternally perpetuated. Nonetheless, I would be untruthful if I claimed that the thought of my father's eventual absence did not sadden me in the slightest.
It was devotion to duty that stilled my trembling heart.
So wholly had I believed in the continuity of the noble soul that it was with acute curiosity that I encountered a particularly aged and weathered book during my studies that recounted an entirely contrary phenomenon also known by the name death. The detailing on the cover had been nearly completely worn away, but I was still able to recognize the slight impressions of a coiled serpent which I found to be reminiscent of the one who belonged to the Agvain Clan. The book's spine cracked with age as I perused its contents, from which I learned that:
Before a prior Lord, one even more ancient than our own, had ordained that nobles were to congregate within the land now known as Lukedonia, those of our kind lived rather dispersedly amongst the humans and their various young civilizations. Revealingly, it was from such human civilizations that nobles received the muses that shaped much of Lukedonia's aesthetic qualities to this day, but this was rather a footnote. As contact between our kinds was markedly more frequent in those olden eras, so too was the frequency of soul bonds. What could a human gain from such a union? Powers beyond their understanding—and immortality. As for the noble, they received in return a soul. Perhaps it was such an arrangement that was the origin for the many human stories of deviltry, but selling one's soul only for the sake of power and riches seemed rather absurd to me.
What held my attention most of all, however, was the following passage:
There is no ordinary human who could overpower even a juvenile pureblood; however, this does not signify that it is impossible for a human to kill a noble. Death at a human's hand results from a poisoning, not of the body, but of the noble soul, and such a death is not eternal slumber; it is disappearance: the body decays, and the soul is no more. Those nobles who have formed true contracts are the most susceptible. What brings about di—
The rest of the page had been crudely torn off, and I traced my fingers along its sharp, jagged edge, wondering as to what could have possessed the book's assailent to have committed such a careless act. My studies decidedly came to a close when Karias, likely noticing a subtle change in my expression, lifted his eyes from his own manuscript and inquired about the situation.
"Someone has torn several pages out of this," I promptly answered, though I remained distantly focused upon the faded words and yellowed paper.
"And you're certain is wasn't yourself out of disdain for all things that are not your clan leader?"
I finally then fixed my gaze on Karias for the sole purpose of leveling an unamused glare at him.
He snapped his book shut in a single hand, the sound sudden and ostentatiously loud within the otherwise silent library, and I found myself grateful that no other tables besides our own was occupied while I was in the company of Karias Blerster. "Can you not stand even a little jesting, Rajak?" he said.
In response, I only maintained my silence, shut my own book with a quiet finality, and stood from my seat to return the text to its appropriate place of residence tucked away in between the many other covers.
Karias clicked his tongue petulantly as I turned to leave. "Always so austere..." he chuckled to himself. "How he can live like that confounds me, but I suppose that's part of his charm. The poor thing..."
The new morning was only a handful of ticks before turning into noon when I saw my father in the entrance room and turning towards the crowned front doors, his steps still ever silent on the decorated stone tiles and geometric mosaics underneath. "Will you be sparring with him again today, Clan Leader? Sir Urokai Agvain has been looking for you."
"Unless the matter is of importance to the Lord or to Lukedonia's safety, Urokai may wait. I will only be in the company of Sir Raizel and his Bonded in their home, however, as Frankenstein is still recovering from our prior match."
"Shall I let Sir Urokai know of your whereabouts should I encounter him again today?"
With a strange timid quality, Father pulled at his mask, appearing to give my question some thought, eyes shifting between amiable and antagonistic, before answering with his usual calm decisiveness: "No. I would like to keep this particular excursion private, Rajak."
"Very well, Sir." I dipped my head respectfully and watched my father depart with a graceful swiftness I had yet to master through the arched doorway, slipping from the cool shade of the interior into the warm touch of sunlight, dark cloak fluttering behind him like fractals of black ink in the wake of his abilities. I had grown accustomed to such a sight and to my father's frequent outings and did not find it imperative to investigate much further into their nature or reasoning, as I trusted the clan leader to inform me himself if there ever was a matter he deemed appropriate or necessary to divulge. Despite knowing this, there was still a peculiar, diminutive sort of sorrow that accompanied the sight of his departure and nipped at the edges of my heart—an inconsequential occurrence but not one that escaped my notice. But such paltry and personal negativity always disappeared upon greeting Father at his return, so I thought little of it and occupied his absence with the duties of a fledgling clan leader and training on my own.
My heels dragged deep scores into the earth as Karias's blow forced me backwards, but I sprung on him again, slipping into the air, surely invisible, before he could reorient himself to my new position and landed the forceful swing of my elbow on his back, tipping Karias off of his balance for a moment that was brief but left a window just wide enough for me to sweep him off his feet entirely. Dust billowed upwards and faded the ends of my black coat when he fell to the ground, but as I became arrogant and therefore careless, I too found my legs swept from under and landed with a graceless thud not far from him. It was like this, with the both of us half covered in dirt and haphazard wounds that one of the knights of the Kertia Clan found us in the colosseum.
"Sir Rajak, the scout team has returned from the Eastern lands."
I was on my feet urgently and attempting to present myself as most resembling my clan leader's collected demeanor as best I could even in my disheveled state. "Has there been any findings on the Noblesse's whereabouts?"
The knight's eyes were casted to the ground shamefully, and he dipped his head such that his face became obscured in the shadow of his pale hair. "No, Sir... It is as though he has simply vanished."
"Has no one considered that he's stopped living?" Karias remarked blithely, not even having gotten up off the ground. Rather, he had straightened out his long legs and crossed them at the ankles and was leaning back, supporting himself with an arm and simply lounging, not at all bothered about the dust. It was definitively intentional the manner in which he sprawled himself to allow his bare chest, exposed by his increasingly low collar, to catch the sunlight as he tilted his chin upwards as though to kiss the very sky. "How else could a noble just disappear?"
I narrowed my eyes at such excessive theatrics, but it was his comments that I found most unbecoming. Pointedly ignoring him, I continued to address the knight. "When shall I expect a full report from your conroi?"
"Within the week, Sir."
I nodded sternly and dismissed the knight afterwards, noting to myself that I should pour over the collection of older documents in the mean time before discussing the matter with my clan leader.
While I was not terribly familiar with the duties and personal life of the Noblesse called Cadis Etrama di Raizel, I had taken notice of Father's behavior since his disappearance and had begun to see Sir Ragar Kertia with even less frequency than before, but even during those sparse moments in which I was fortunate enough to be in his presence, he seemed markedly exhausted and I would be regretful of tiring him further. I did not know the depth of what relations Father kept with the Noblesse and the Noblesse's Bonded, but for them, he was personally, intimately motivated, relentlessly persuant, to seek Sir Cadis Etrama di Raizel. So I, as well, did all that I could to aid him.
Karias finally deigned to pick himself off of the ground. "You truly believe the Noblesse is out there?"
"My belief does not matter. It is my clan leader's."
He scoffed. "Good luck then, I suppose."
My clan leader was the highest point at which I could imagine nobility. It was he whom I, with no frugalness in effort, took after, as I had the impression there was no one better whom I could strive to become; I did not and could not doubt him in any capacity. As I was a bearer of the Kertia name, I was dutybound to uphold the clan's honor, and it was a great concern of mine that I might, in one way or another, act foolishly so as to not only disgrace myself but also Father. The thought repulsed me, and I hoped that such a day would not come before I entered my own eternal slumber and long afterwards as well. In honor of my father, I toiled with utmost steadfastness and found quaint rewards in the admiration of my peers, though it was my father's approval most of all that I sought. My desire for his particular recognition bred in me the habit of astute observance, and it was with this observance that I watched him return to the estate one night, the aura about his shadow somehow forlorn.
"Has something happened, Father?" I asked, quietly emerging from the shadows and into the moon-dusted air.
He looked at me for a long while, the caution in his bright red gaze melting into something entirely tender and loving, like it was I who was his sole purpose for existence, like there were none better and more deserving of Sir Ragar Kertia's acknowledgment than myself. I found it all, at once stunning and overwhelming and could only stare back, shaken, as I awaited his response.
He stepped towards me, heel purposefully clicking against the tiles, unlike his usual silence, and placed a hand on my shoulder. Even as his rare touch was delicate, I felt the great weight of his affection, and it inspired in me such immense gratitude that I could hardly bear it, that a simmering, trembling emotion akin to dread rose within me for fear something unspeakable had happened or would soon happen for Father's kindness to be so generous tonight, like an omen. "What am I to you foremost, Rajak, your clan leader or your parent?" he finally said, voice achingly soft.
Though I was slightly numbed to the reality of the situation, my response was near automatic: "My clan leader."
An emotion passed over Father’s eyes that I could not decipher, haunting and wonderful and tragic—like longing for something that could never come to be, that could only be beautiful and remained the most beautiful in one’s imagination—a poem, a song, an epic. In that moment, I realized, I did not truly understand all that Sir Ragar Kertia was, that all of my studies had only given me a mere impression of him, that sanctuaries were still beyond my reach, and that I, as his heir, was only an imitation, a shallow shadow, a naive doppelgänger.
He nodded. “I see...” Father whispered, then silently drifted deeper into the house on his own, leaving me to ponder upon the exchange until sunrise.
It was not until several days later when I reconvened with Sir Gejutel that I learned that was the night of Sir Frankenstein’s departure.