"AGAIN! Do it again!" At eight years old, Sylas hung onto every word that fell from his older brother's mouth. Right now, he was actually hanging onto a tree branch and failing to pull himself up. The boy's grip slipped and he dropped onto the grass butt-first with a wince.

Ten years older but not that much wiser, Levi laughed at his younger brother's most recent failed attempt to climb the shortest tree in the lush backyard of their massive oriental-styled mansion. When the young man finally stopped laughing, thanks to a hard kick aimed at his shin, he held out his empty hands.

Sylas slapped the paring knife that he'd liberated from the kitchens into his brother's hand. Crossing his arms across his chest, Sylas watched carefully as his brother called upon magic that had expressly been forbidden by their mother and slowly created a ghostly mirror-image of the real knife. After a quick flick of his wrist, the ghostly dagger materialized into physicality.

Sylas eagerly grabbed both knives and ran back to the tree, using the knives to roughly hack his way up the tree and onto the branch closest to the ground. Unfortunately, the magic dagger expired just when Sylas was going to climb onto the branch, leaving him dangling with one arm yet again.

"LEVI! AGAIN!"

"Make it yourself, you goblin! You're holding it!"

Sylas dropped down from the branch, this time landing on his feet. He stared hard at the knife, his brows furrowing in concentration. After a moment, his shoulders slumped.

"I can't do it…"

"You're not trying hard enough, Sylas." Levi walked over and grabbed his younger brother's hands. "You have to feel the magic first, and then imagine it forming in your other hand. Then you can force it into the shape of the knife. Stop expecting a new knife to come out of nowhere."

Sylas's tongue stuck out of his mouth as he concentrated. A faint wisp of ghostly magic formed in his empty palm, but dissipated after a few seconds.

"Well, that's a good start. Keep practicing and you'll be able to copy anything in no time."

A shrill beeping came from Levi's pocket and the young man took out his cell with a sigh as he answered the call. "Levi speaking. No, Lady Syl is not home right now. Ah, yes, I see. I will make sure that she knows. Yes. Yes, thank you for letting me know."

Sylas ignored his brother in favor of trying to get his magic to form in his hand again.

"Sylas?! Sylas, where are you!"

Sylas looked up in alarm from where he was reading a manga and ran to the doorway of his home's library room; Levi never yelled like that unless it was an emergency. His older brother rounded the corner and immediately spotted him.

"What's going on—?!" Sylas was promptly grabbed and tugged as his brother didn't even bother to slow down as he kept running. The boy almost tripped several times in keeping up.

"Oh Goddess, they're here, fuck, I have to, where the fuck is— right, yes, that way! Here!"

Levi skidded to a stop at a room at the very back of the mansion, which was a storeroom for all of the preserved and canned food. He dragged his younger brother over to a corner and kicked up a corner of a dusty rug. A trap door was under the rug. Levi immediately hauled it open, the hinges creaking from age, and shoved his brother into the small crawl space.

"Levi, what's going on?" Sylas knew something was incredibly wrong and he felt absolute terror grip his heart when his brother unhooked one of the daggers from his belt and handed it to him.

"I'm going to find Mother. Stay here and don't make a noise, alright? I'll be right back. Don't open the latch for anyone."

A hand ruffled through his messy hair for a moment before the trap door swung shut over his head and locked, leaving Sylas in barely-visible darkness. His fingers tightened around the sheathed dagger.

The silence was deafening. Sylas didn't know how long he'd been sitting in the space, barely breathing, until he mustered the courage to feel around the space. His hands felt three walls and nothing to his left, so he crawled through and kept crawling while using a hand to feel for the walls. Sometimes the walls diverged into two or more paths that ended with dead ends and some muffled screaming coming from the floor above him.

Gunshots. Steel ringing. Shouts.

Sylas kept crawling in the darkness with one hand gripped tight around his brother's dagger. He followed the indistinguishable voices whenever he could, but more often than not the voices would abruptly stop after footsteps rushed in and guns went off.

He didn't know how long he'd been inching his way through the maze underneath his home, but eventually he saw a sliver of light slicing through the darkness – a gap in the floor! Sylas moved in that direction, eager to see light again.

At the end of the pathway, the sliver of light coming through a warped floor board was barely enough for him to see that there was another trap door above him. He was about to try and push it up when he footsteps and voices appeared.

Sylas adjusted himself so that he could peek through the gap in the floor board. He could just barely make out the wide windows and curtains to the side and some overturned furniture – a chair, a dresser, a changing screen. Some booted feet.

He recognized the changing screen. This was Mother's room, but Mother wasn't here…?

A scream. The sound of ringing steel. Something heavy hitting the floor. Silence.

"See? Lady Sylvia, this is what happens when you go against the Black Mage." An unknown man growled.

"You killed my husband, my son, and all of my servants. You might as well kill me now, Damien. You will get nothing from me."

Footsteps. A person being dragged.

Sylas bit his tongue hard when Mother appeared in his line of sight, her white dress soaked in blood as she was forced to kneel facing his direction. He tasted iron.

"Ah, well, it's good for you then that I have orders to kill you once I finish off your youngest son. Where is that little snotball, anyways? Not even your precious Levi would say a word when I cut off his hands."

Sylas' Mother said nothing and stared forward, her back as straight and strong as tempered steel. Her mouth twitched imperceptibly when she noticed that a slight glint of an eye peeked out from the tiny gap in the floor boards.

"He is safe. You will never find him. Do what you must and be gone." Sylas' Mother dismissed her assassins with an unimpressed look.

"Che. Fine. I'll be sure to take a picture of the look on your little boy's face when I tell him that I killed his mother so easily, right before I slice his head off too."

Sylas flinched.

A sword swung.

A headless body slumped to the floor.

Mother's head carelessly grabbed by the hair and stuffed into a bulging black bag that dripped blood.

Sylas could feel that dagger in his grip growing unbearably hot.

"What—"

"Hey, that's—"

Sylas could feel every blade in the room splitting once, twice, three times…

Sylas screamed, and death rained from above.

When Sylas was eight, he killed his first man.

It would not be his last.

Ainle was the city of his third foster home in the span of two months.

The foster home in Ainle was also the only place that Sylas had stayed in for more than a week before trying to run away.

"Sylas, come on!" A tugging on his hand brought Sylas back into the present. A gap-toothed, pigtailed girl with a sweet smile tugged harder and Sylas finally relented and started walking.

"Lynn, where are we going?" It was easy to hop the fence of their foster home and make a break for the small convenience shops lining the cramped and dirty urban street they lived in.

"I found a machine that didn't have a camera, hurry up!"

"You got the coin?"

"Yes, I have the coin!"

The vending machine was in a shady alcove next to an alleyway that smelled like piss and mostly contained gum and chips, but Sylas hadn't eaten breakfast (the foster parents that he and Lynn lived with often forgot to leave breakfast for them when rushing out the door) so it all looked absolutely divine.

"I want the chips with the pancake flavor."

Sylas wrinkled his nose. "Really? Those taste like butt."

"So? What do you want?" Lynn crossed her arms across her chest with a toothy grin. To Sylas, nothing seemed to phase her or make her stop smiling; it was both comforting and slightly unnerving.

Sylas looked thoughtfully over the choices. "I want… the donuts, with the powder. I've never had that."

"Okay, then do the thing. We need two dollars. Uhm… eight quarters."

A quarter dropped into his palm. Sylas swallowed and closed his eyes, squeezing the coin between his hands. After a moment, he opened his eyes again.

Nine quarters – one real and eight not – sat innocently in his hands.

All eight phantom coins went into the machine. Sylas made sure to keep clenching the real quarter until their snacks fell down into the box down below. Once Lynn held out the snacks with a happy laugh, Sylas exhaled in relief. He passed the real quarter over to Lynn in exchange for the donuts.

"Whoo! Food!" Lynn grabbed Sylas' hand and tugged him away from the vending machine with a skip in her step. "Let's go find Ellis and share some with him!"

Sylas shrugged, but the boy couldn't help but smile as he let his foster-sister lead the way to the orphanage that was a few blocks down from their foster home.