Red.
The first thing he ever witnessed — his own arrival, and the start of hers fading.
Before anyone else could see it, he watched it settle over his mother's smile, a color with no business being there.
{Long before his name meant anything, there was only a child, and a world too white to hold a name of its own.}
Iremember.
No.
Weremember those days before I died.
*Cough...Cough*
"Mother..." A child's voice broke the stillness of the white bed.
"Oh, don't worry, sweetie, it's nothing really..." Radiant blue eyes. The mother gazed down at the small child beside her.
*Cough...Cough*
"Red..." Ever since he was born, the boy could see death before it arrived.
{His white world had always been tainted with life, and life, to him, had always looked like this — a color no one else seemed to notice.}
The hand she'd raised to cover her mouth, "Huh?" warmth spread over.
She looked down. Her eyes widened. Her pupils trembled.
A gust of wind through her long, light brown hair broke the moment before it could settle into fear.
"Oh, it's nothing, really. I just had too many cherry drinks, don't worry."
Her playful tone sat strangely against the seriousness in her son's eyes.
A small child wearing such an expression was not normal. Even less normal was what he actually saw — not the red smeared faintly across her palm, but a transparent veil of it, settling itself over her like a second skin.
It moved to embrace her. His eyes darkened as it did.
He climbed onto the bed, and in his stare, the red veil and his mother's glowing blue sat side by side, one trying to swallow the other.
"Huh, what is it, sweetie?" His hug surprised her — too strong for a child his size.
'I will...' He said nothing aloud. His eyes stayed fixed on the veil behind her, hostile in a way no child's should be.
"Don't worry, your mother is strong." She hugged him back, a handkerchief still damp and red pressed in her other hand.
"I'll... I surely will make it vanish, wait for me..." Young as he was, his goal was already carving itself into whatever he was going to become.
{And so the white room held its first red, and the boy who watched it swore, in the silent way few children can, to unmake it.}
"I don't understand, sweetie, but I promise, however long it takes, I'll wait..."
Her words were light.
Her eyes were not.
Really.
How could she lie to us like that...
...
The white room dimmed. Sound came back before sight did — laughter first, then light, then a tree he didn't remember sitting under.
"Hahahaha... Catch me, but you can't." Children's laughter, bright and careless, pulled the blue-eyed boy back out of the memory.
He sat across the wide road, watching them run. 'A waste of time.'
"Uhm..." Dappled sunlight cut through the leaves like shards of glass, and he frowned against it.
The discomfort didn't end there. *Step...step...*
The footsteps came. Heavy. Steel-toed. A sound he knew too well.
'Why is he here...'
They stopped a few paces off. A deep voice followed. "Son, why not join them?"
He'd braced for it, and his body still tensed anyway.
His eyes, dark and hollow a moment ago, dressed themselves quickly in something that passed for a child's.
"They are slow... and clumsy... and I don't want to." Flat. Unbothered.
"Indeed, they are slower than you. Hmh." A pause, thinking. "You can hold yourself back a little, boy. You don't need to use everything, always. Did you forget why and what I started teaching you?"
Something in the boy's composure cracked, just slightly. He turned, sharp. "You wouldn't hold back either."
"HM?!"
The husky sound alone made him flinch, and he turned back toward the road rather than answer it. 'If I don't look, maybe he'll go.'
The boots started again. Closer. A hand landed on his shoulder — broad, blunt-fingered, gripping harder than it likely meant to.
He looked up at the man properly now: a bit short, but built like something carved rather than grown, a beard thick enough to swallow half his face in shadow.
Eyes, greyish green eyes. A fierce gaze that was always stuck on his face.
"You think your mother would like to hear that you're just sulking in the—"
The boy shook the hand off and walked, saying nothing. For half a second, something shifted behind that beard — the ghost of an expression the boy didn't turn back to see.
"This is not fair. It's a blatant threat," he muttered, reaching the road's edge.
A glance one way. Then the other.
In that glance "...!" Something flew past him.
'This—' A flash of red at the corner of his eye pulled his whole body toward it before he'd decided to move.
A little girl. Running after a ball. The veil was already resting over her.
'Unfortunate.' Toward her, specifically, he felt nothing at all.
But the veil itself — his fake, childish face twisted around for a moment. Hatred, bleeding color into his eyes until they matched the thing he hated.
'One day. One day, I will make you disappear!'
*Squeak... * Tires screamed against asphalt.
He turned his head, his mask already back in place. 'She's going to die. It's too late.' Still, the thought came out indifferent.
Then—
He turned back to the girl.
Suddenly, something broke through the mask. A real expression, one completely out of his control. The first one all day.
'Why— how did it vanish—'
Gone. The veil was gone.
He'd watched it descend more times than he'd bothered to count, and it never once left before finishing what it came for.
It didn't warn. It promised.
Nothing — no prayer, no medicine, no strength he'd ever seen — made it rise again once it settled.
Until now.
The car still came. The girl saw it, finally, far too late to matter.
There should have been nothing left to do.
So why had death simply left?
A violent gust of wind answered before he could.
Then a sound that wasn't the car hitting anything at all — a crack, deep and heavy, boots shattering asphalt like glass.
The car tore past, dragging a wall of dust behind it, and through that dust he saw the shape he already knew — short, thick-built, boots planted wide, dark hair and beard catching what little light broke through.
His father. The girl held safe against his chest.
'Why is he—' The boy's stare didn't move off him. This man had just made the boy's entire purpose in life look effortless.
"It's — it's The Man With The Bag!!" One of the children screamed it first.
"Run, he'll take you away! RUN!" The others scattered, shrieking, the game forgotten.
The man knelt, setting the girl down gently. "If you run onto that road one more time—" His voice was low. Serious.
*Kya... Ahhhh...* She caught one look at his face mid-sentence and was gone too, crying, sprinting after the rest.
She made it just in time.
"How did you..."A voice, low and wrong, came from directly behind him.
'Someone's there—' The father turned toward what should have been his son.
What met him wasn't the boy's clear blue eyes.
It came the way a mask fails — not all at once, but at the seams first.
A hairline fracture at the corner of one eye.
Then the mouth.
Then the whole practiced shape of "child" split like old porcelain left too long in the sun.
Behind every crack, something looked out that had never been human to begin with.
The man who broke asphalt with a single step took one back instead. His arms rose on instinct, some old soldier's reflex trying to defend against a threat his body understood before his mind did.
Empty eyes. Dark eyes. Not a child's.
Monster.
"How did you..." The thing wearing his son's face sounded almost desperate asking it.
The father had no answer. Couldn't have found one if he'd tried.
"Help me. Help me do it — make it vanish!" Small hands grabbed at his clothes, and it was the grip, more than the eyes, that made him shudder.
"What are you—" He caught himself before finishing the question, horrified he'd nearly asked it of his own child.
"I want it! I want to be as strong as you!"
Still, no words came.
'No... he is my son.' But he'd seen these eyes before — on some men who came home from war with whatever made them human left somewhere on the field behind them.
That memory was the only steady thing left to think through.
"I'm sorry..." He knelt. Pendants at his neck jingled faintly as he took both small shoulders in his hands.
The monster's gaze didn't change.
"I'm sorry, son." Softer now, a tone this child had never once heard from him.
"Help me—" It didn't understand softness. Didn't know what to do with it.
"Yes... yes, I'll..." His head dropped. He stared at the ground, unable to carry the weight of what came next — because who could, having failed his own blood this badly?
When he finally looked up, his whole face had changed.
"Boy." The gentleness was gone, replaced by the same weight he himself had been raised under. "I'll tell you four—" He stopped, seeing the hollow face in front of him, and gripped tighter.
"Five! Five Commands." He would not make his own father's mistake twice, even knowing it was already too late for it to matter much.
"The First—"
No.
"Look before—"
Those damned Commands. Still holding us, even now.
"The Second—"
I said no.
"The Third—"
I remember that one. I hate that one most of all.
We don't want to remember them. Not even now.
...
"Do you understand?! You follow them for as long as there are lives left to live! Follow them, and you will be strong — stronger than you will ever need to be!"
Something in the child wished to be human again.
"I... I will follow." He was weak. Just a child. And he had just watched real strength save a stranger's life with a single step.
'I will make it vanish!' He wanted that same strength for the one thing he still felt anything for, and so he took the words exactly as they were given.
"Alright." He had no choice but to believe a man who wasn't entirely sure of this path either.
{And so the Monster he was learned to wear a boy's face again, and called it becoming human. But time did what time does.}
The mask held that day. It would not always.
...
{Beneath a sky too clear to be kind.}
"Mother, you said you would wait..."
{Green fields, and the people in them, no longer moving.}
"No. It was I who was late. I'm sorry."
His voice had dropped since the white room. His hands no longer fit against hers like a child's.
{A still young child stood alone.}
She had promised to wait.
He had promised to return strong enough.
The red veil kept its own promise first.
This one broke him quietly. He had been too young to do anything but grieve.
Years folded past before the veil came looking again.
...
{Beside her now, a young woman rests.}
'Don't worry, sis. I'll protect you all.' A vow, cast in something harder than words. Only the wind carried it now.
{A taller boy. Still alone.}
He'd learned to fight by then. To endure. To bleed. To kill.
But when the moment actually came, none of that had been the right lesson.
He'd learned how to take lives.
Not how to save them.
Death, it turned out, was not a lenient teacher.
This time, the grief came late, and colder — guilt had gotten there first and left less room for it.
...
{Further on, where the stones carried names instead of voices.}
'My love, whatever comes, I will protect you. He knelt before the one promise he'd been certain he could keep.
"I wasn't there. I'm sorry... we were too late."
{A grown man now, alone before his love's stone.}
She had smiled when he swore nothing would ever take her.
So he ran — far enough, he told himself, that whatever hunted him would never find her.
The distance he built to keep her safe became the grave between them instead.
By now, there was no grief left new enough to call by its own name. Only the tally, and what it was doing to him.
Promises.
Graves.
One after the other.
Every time someone trusted him with their life, he arrived too late. Too weak. Too foolish to have seen it coming.
Slowly, it stopped being death itself that he hated most.
The veil hadn't only taken people from him.
It had proven, over and over, exactly how little he could do about it.
He understood, far too late to matter, that he had never been the one meant to stop the red veil.
He was the one who brought it wherever he went.
Once that settled into him, the last things holding him together started, quietly, to give way again.
"Stand up, my son!"
Even after everything — after nearly losing himself more times than he'd bothered counting — that voice came back, and he obeyed it. He pressed it into himself like a mask, until the edges cut skin to stay in place.
It was the only thing keeping himtogether.
But the day it broke —
Well. That is not where we start.
Years passed, and the mask still held.
Not perfectly. Never perfectly. But enough that he could run, laugh, smile, live — while the shadows stayed exactly where he'd put them, behind his eyes and nowhere else.
Then, in the span of one night, all of it came due.
Under a full moon, five men came looking for his father.
By sunrise, four Commands had already been broken.
And when he woke up, the world was already drowning.