Chapter One : The Beginning
"All my life is on me now, hail the pages turning."
There was nothing different about him that separated him from the hundred or so other students. He was a bit young, perhaps, but, as in all of his peers, his eyes spoke of an age beyond his years. He was thin, quite scrawny, and even a bit scrappy looking. Fresh from an asylum in Munich. A little ghost in the middle of the white room.
He was dressed in white, as well, a high collared suit that hid his rib-thin, oddly angled body and obscured his sex. By the length of his hair and the long dark lashes of his eyes, he could have been a girl. A strange looking girl, or a particularly feminine boy. His wrists, which were hidden by the overlong white, almost colorless, sleeves of his regulation schoolboy outfit, were still oddly padded with baby fat, while the rest of him, in direct contradiction, was underfed, bony. Hips jutted out beneath his dipped in stomach. Bony knees were knobs on his stick-like legs. His cheekbones were prominent in his baby-doll face and his neck was long and graceful, like a swan's. Parts of his form clung to child-hood, desperate and longing -- his wide eyes, his pudgy wrists, his underdeveloped, immature body. His skin was paper-thin and pale.
Standing in front of the Three Elders, he was nothing much to look at. The wide, empty room dwarfed him, made him paler. It was bright, but there were no windows. It reeked of artificial creations, the strength of hands and metal, and power, which glowed around the long table like a shield and a warning. The one woman, face creased and ever smiling, had her hands, folded, before her, knuckles warped, protruding, from the mess of skin and flesh on the table. Her nose was blunt, smashed into her face. She seemed, to the untrained eye, quite kind, but everything about her was planned. Cruel. Even he could see that, and he was only a child.
Then again, he had never really been "only" anything.
"Name?" she asked.
Like bells, he thought, then shook his head. Like the sounds that came from the fencing hall in the early morning. Like death, perhaps. Rich and cool.
He didn't have to answer. A man who held a manilla folder spoke for him, with a thin, nasal voice. He was pale and wiry and a bit stooped, but his eyes were quick and darted from face to face with a strange, youthful sharpness. It was odd, to see a man like him in a place like this - young inside old rather than old inside young. There was nothing left to him, though, besides his long, deft fingers and his shrewd, alert eyes. His body had been ravaged beyond human by the strength of the altered being within.
There were so many like that in Rosen Kreuz.
"He has no name," the quick-eyed man said. His lips were thin and tight and they did not know how to smile.
"Age?" the woman commanded directly after the answer, eyes crinkling into crescents.
Somewhere unimportant, in the corner of the room, someone small wrote a few words down on a white notepad. Slowly, the man with the folder and the knife-sharp eyes turned towards the short, painfully awkward figure in the center of the vast room, who was tugging at the hem of his little white shirt.
"Sieben," he whispered. All eyes on him. The woman crooked her finger toward him, beckoning him closer. Everything quiet and still and oppressive in the air around him and, for a moment, he couldn't move. And then he took a step forward, and another, towards the woman who was stone inside a mask of kind smiles. She had not forgotten how to smile. She was using it to hide the shivering cold inside her that made him sick, made him want to fall to his knees. It was fake. He had always known to hate liars, and that was what she was.
"Sieben?" she queried in a lower voice. The boy had passed the first test. He had ventured closer through the darkness that surrounded them. Through the death.
As she bent forward over the table, palms pressed down on the shining mahogany, he wondered if she left fingerprints. Like a tiger, with a cruelly smiling face. He felt like prey.
"Sieben," he repeated.
"He's young."
"He's frightened."
"He's powerful." The eldest man spoke first, then the one with the hat, whom the boy had been watching, wary, and then the woman again.
"We have researched his history," the quick-eyed man spoke again. As the old woman nodded, he went on. "His parents were at Auschwitz near the end of World War II when they were very young. There, they were tested with an experimental drug that has yet to be identified; it was perhaps manufactured by Estë agents themselves." He paused. Licked his lips. Cast a glance at the boy and then back to the Elders. "This drug did not affect them directly; however, the father did show signs of an empathetic nature before he died. The child--" he gestured towards the boy " -gathered the residual affects of the ddrugs, still inside the mother and passed on to him from the father. A class one telepath, but not of a purebred nature." There was silence.
The flame-haired boy stood perfectly still, close to the long table. This was the first he'd ever heard of his parents and now he was thoroughly and meticulously going through the quick-eyed man's thoughts, shuffling through his knowledge, to find more. No one noticed but the woman, and she grinned. Feral. Like the tiger that she was. He felt a little slap on his wrist, purely mental, and stepped back. A child caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
"He knows nothing else," she whispered, and he took another step backwards. "Are you afraid?" She paused. "Smart boy. I suppose we are all guilty of something. Perhaps you are guilty of fear?"
"He is guilty of many things," the quick-eyed man informed, eyes lighting up. The Elders lifted an eyebrow each, and it was quite a comical sight, for a moment. The boy, however, was not watching them any longer. His jade eyes, wide with knowledge and pain, were fixed in terror on the man who spoke. The man who knew. "He is guilty of murdering a family in Berlin. A mother, a father, and a little girl. Three times guilty." The guilty one opened his small, rosy mouth to speak, and no sound came out; perhaps that was a result of his own sudden emptiness, perhaps the old woman had decided he would not talk just then.
"Mein Schuldig Sieben," she murmured with a low, chilling chuckle to follow her words. He could understand the English they had been speaking well enough, but to hear his own native tongue used to name him, for what he was, was quite chilling to his supposedly young ears. "We have taken a liking to our little Schuldig," she said abruptly, turning away from the guilty one, and then everything was quiet. He saw the mouths of the Elders moving but he heard nothing and the air was thick and heavy but far from sweet around his body. The small, unimportant someone was scribbling hurried down on his notepad, and then, thin as a shadow and vague as a ghost, that someone was by his side and had taken his hand, pulling him to the great wooden doors that led out of the room and into the narrow hallway.
He struggled to hear what was being said, the tips of his
nose and fingers numb. Already, he had made a small tear in the fabric of the sound barrier, but it was sticky like a spider's web and for a moment, he fumbled, stuck. Then he tore through, his body by the door but his ever developing mind still inside.
"He will be useful," the woman said, "And you will train him -"
"--In more ways than one," the man with the hat spoke, cutting in. Still the ancient, carved smile did not falter on her curved lips.
"By the age of twelve he will be trained and ready for us," she went on, with a soft hiss of warning.
"By the age of twelve he will be trained and ready," the quick-eyed man echoed, promised. "He is yours. Your Schuldig Sieben." Then the door slammed and the boy was knocked back into his body with the echoing sound.
"Your classes will start tomorrow," a wisp of a voice murmured, barely audible.
He paused, his own voice soft and unsure with English words. "Is that my name? Schuldig?"
"Your name is dog," came the reply, "any other name is purely vanity." A pause. "If they call you Schuldig, then you are Schuldig." And he was sent off down the hall and back to his room, newly named, and soon to be newly bred.
Rosen Kreuz was a large, gray building of a nondescript stone. It rose into the sky and was surrounded by a protective wall that was jarring to any trained eye. The school was more like a fortress of war than anything else, but the wall was never built with the intention of keeping things out. It fenced the area in, crept closer to the building every moment a person wasn't looking, and its sole purpose was to insure that what went in stayed in.
Rows of almost colorless trees spiked the space between the wall and school, growing from the dead, cold earth like fleshless hands and clutching for the unseeing, uncaring stone of the wall. Their forms were bent towards the wall, branches all on one side, turned away from the hidden practices of the schoolmasters. They were broken into gnarled, twisted, obedient forms, arms opened to freedom, reaching for the liberty beyond the harsh line of the wall.
No one was allowed into the "garden", anyway. The thin space of pale dirt and brittle, bare trees was empty of man and woman, bird and beast, and had been since Rosen Kreuz was built.
One spot was empty of everything, even the disintegrating bodies of the trees that grew with no water and and weak sunlight. In was in the Northern Corner. Night and day the sounds of screams could be heard through the thick walls and the trees had long since stopped growing there. In the night, the stones of the Northern Corner glowed a soft red, brightness which oozed and leaked power over the rock, shining in the darkness.
In his five years at Rosen Kreuz, Schuldig was sent to be punished in the Northern Corner once. He had been there for almost five years, and, though he knew how students were effected by Estë's patented brand of punishment, for a moment, it seemed as if it wasn't going to be that bad. He was ushered without a word into the Northern Corner, where the sounds of purely mental screams echoed in his dreams, louder and louder as his powers developed, giving him nightmares through the night. The doors to the Black Room were shut behind him and... He was never foolish enough to have another reason to go back again.
The inside of the building was white. The walls, the floors, the ceilings -- everything. White and bright lights that glared from above. Every classroom was the same. Every dorm room. Except for the Northern Corner, and the Black Room, where those who had misbehaved were sent, all the rooms seemed to be made of a generalized mold.
In these cold rooms Schuldig sat for four years, his mind probed and his body explored. He was developed into two beings at the skilled hands of many teachers, each molding, each knowing, each cold as ice. One being accommodated the powers of his mind, which reached beyond anything Estë had seen before. The tendrils of his mind could Dreamwalk; could cross the world over directly while he stayed in his small room, without leaping from mind to mind like some sort of hopscotch; could discover thoughts left over in inanimate objects hundreds of years after their owners had moved on. He was pure strength sheathed in a thin, underdeveloped body -- every bit of vitality he had since he was born until he had been brought to Rosen Kreuz had been given to his mind. Nothing had been left over for his thin form, which was nearly starved when he was found. As a result, he never ate much, and it took little to feed him. He was quite eager to learn, those first four years, his mind hungrily drinking up the knowledge they offered him. The muscles of his potential were at last exercised. The idea of school was new to him. The idea of training was at first exciting and then tiring. A boy who had never slept a night through, he began to learn what it was to be weary. He had no nightmares in the pitch black of his sleep. In this time, he learned how to Dreamwalk and not become lost in the misty, twisting coils of a person's imagination. He learned to make barriers between his own thoughts and the thoughts of millions of others, so as not to lose himself to the cacophony of the screaming voices that raged, silent to all but him. That was one of the only blessings Estë brought.
After the first year, he could slip, unnoticed, into even the strongest of his teachers' minds and steal thoughts as if they were common, cheap trinkets that meant nothing in the wide scheme of things. But that meant confusion. He came away unsure of himself, unsure of where he ended and someone else began.
In his third year, his memories were sorted, ordered, finally understood as his own. His body was cultivated to keep up with his mind, and he became quick and thin and muscled; speed filtered into his sharply angled body, weaving in and out with his effect on other's thoughts. In this time, he was changed from boy to man to machine of destruction, from a being with potential to a being of extreme use to a cultivated weapon. The newest model of a telepath, hardly understood and highly feared among dorm rooms, he was the gypsy German "mistake" who could do anything the teachers set him to.
His second being was raised for a second set of the Elders' wishes. He learned the secret language of his body in an entirely different way, how to move his hips in time to another's, how to stand with those hips angled just-slightly forward, how to lie down so that his flame colored hair could pool around his face like fire. The music of the bedsheets was wrapped around his lithe form, and he was soon the top of his class of those who had been designated by some unknown leader to please. And he was good at pleasing. It seemed so, from the very beginning. At the end of each "lesson," he had always been called a good student, and was sent off to his other classes. A good student. A good boy.
Never did Estë have qualms with the loss of innocence. They cultivated it. Schuldig was a whore in two ways; his mind fucking with thousands and his body, ever left behind, being the "good student" with only a mere few. His jade eyes no longer sparkled with naiveté, with innocence; they sparkled with knowledge, and with the cool shield knowledge brought.
In a mere four years, he had been completed. He had one year left until he was handed over to the Elders. To the scowling, silent man; to the calm, joking one in the hat; to the cold woman with the cruel, deceptive smile. The three he could never forget.
Unsure of what to do with him, the faculty sent him into the pile of the unwanted. He became in his last year a common whore, used to please the best of students, the ones who had not yet been sent out to do Estë's bidding. He became a reward for good work as he himself faded away from attention. Not forgotten. Merely put on hold. Perhaps, the last year was a way of preparing him for what was to come. It was also his vacation.
Quite simply, Schuldig came to enjoy what he did. With sweat and sex and tangled bedsheets, with cheap, sloppy, hungry kisses, with the joining of two bodies, came silence. With silence came rest. Peace. In all ways, the young German quite savored it. He knew he would always be everyone's favorite student.
And it was in his last three months that he met a young American, top of his class, top student in the school. An oracle, sixteen years old to his mere eleven. It was in his last three months that he became Bradley Crawford's reward.