‘ why should it be you and i should get along so awfully? ’
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"So much blood — what a shame it's all gone to waste," was the first thing he hears, followed by a question. "What's your name?"
He was lying on the shore of the frozen lake, his clothes wet. Shaking fists and trembling teeth. His breath clouded in front of him. A stranger was leaning over him, asking for a name he couldn't quite remember at that moment. The dull haze of pain numbed his senses. Had someone broken his nose? He couldn't remember that too.
All he knew was that his throat was raw, and he screamed himself hoarse as they pushed him under.
"Arkady," was the name he croaked. But then he recalled, he was no longer Arkady. He now was a boy from the south, a boy who would disappear in a week or a month, who would vanish beneath a new name and a new story.
"Eryk," he corrected himself seconds' later, a stranger's name on his lips once again. Eryk was the name he went by now. A northern name will fit better on the tongues of the Fjerdan people, his mother's voice fresh in his mind now.
"Are you sure about it this time?" The woman asked again, amusement clear in her voice as she regarded him. He was thirteen, but he'd had a hundred names, a new one for every town, camp, and city — Iosef, Anton, Stasik, Kirill. His true name, however, will always be tattoed on his heart. It was a name he can't just let anyone read.
However, how the woman found the situation amusing and utterly indifferent at the same time, he didn't understand.
Eryk forced himself to turn his head so he could see her, blinking away the pain as he did. She had ink-black hair, eyes ancient, black as charcoal, the hood of the long black cloak yanked over her head. She looked older than him, healthy like a Grisha.
Delicate bones and perfect skin; he remembered her now. She looks like a Saint... all she needs is a halo, was what he thought when he first saw her five years ago.
She still looked the same. But it didn't look like she remembered who Eryk is, though.
"Can you get up?" She asks him as soon as her eyes peer over their surroundings, searching for another soul, only to find none. Just the bodies of two children he thought he could be friends with, floating face down in the iced river, blood pooling around them.
He didn't mean to be cruel; that did not mean he was kind either. He would have been there too, drowning in the pool of his own blood if he hadn't done what needed to be done — If he hadn't been ruthless.
