They say a man is paid his due.

  That eventually, all the sin you put in this wide world, it comes right back to you.

  All that good? That's yours too.

  Maybe.

  Maybe that's true for folk born in places where things are fair. In places where law and kindness and all that other bullshit reigns true.

  But for me? For all the folk born on the border, all we mixed blood bastards in our little pocket of destined hell?

  Ain't no such thing as fair.

  Justice? That's a promise left unkept.

  And law? That's the boot grinding down on your throat.

  No, there is far more than all that. Far more, and far too strange.

  I came up a farmer's son. Honest, salt and ash, a good boy. I kept the Chant, the words of Divinity’s gospel, always in my heart. I worked my family's fields every livelong day. Told the truth and respected my mama and daddy. Went to service every day of rest, wore a damn cassock every Last Day. Never raised a hand to an honest man.

  By all accounts, far and near, I was a fine man of the Northland Territories.

  Right up until I hit eighteen.

  Mama said it was like the Heretic himself had lit a magefire in me. All blue and red and ugly green.

  Suddenly, I didn't take too well to rules. I didn't see a life in them dusty fields. I felt the boot of another on my strong neck, and you know what?

  Decided I didn't fuckin' like any of that.

  Didn't like not being able to pay for my mama's medicine cause the tax man come for our last share. I didn't like an empty belly because the Lord said I ought not hunt his swiftlope and game, called my trap lines poachin’ and my fishin’ theft.

  I hated it.

  Hated it all so Godsdamned much, I started doing something about it. It was small things, at first. A hunk of venison for Widow Yfir, trot-lines fat with fish for the Green family, truffle mushrooms stolen right from the Lord’s mana rich garden and sold to market to buy an elixir.

  But I was never one to be satisfied, not by much of anythin’.

  I started stickin’ up carriages that passed through the sparse, doomed greenbelts that were left of the great Northern forests. At first I didn’t hurt folks, was polite and respectful. And still took ‘em for every damn copper they was worth.

  The heat started to build on me. Like I was a kettle on to boil, and the Lord was home for tea.

  He sent his 'best men' after me. Old Hunters who'd never made it far, retired Legionaries who'd not fought more than a goblin in their lives, and kids as young as me and greener'n a spring meadow.

  They came for a country boy and they got one. Never quite found me, besides the odd glimpse. I'd circle them through the forests and through the mire, tirin' them out and gettin' nice and lost. When night would come I'd pick a tree or a hollow and bed down to rest, a little Heretic's fire to keep me warm.

  Meanwhile, them poor boys, they got a quick education in the North and her rare monsters. No circle wards, only Hearthfire. About like pluggin' a breakin' levee with just your thumb.

  Some died, I’m sure.

  I only got better and better at what I did, with time. Despite havin' no Path, I seemed to have a sense for the dark work I did. Locks would just... agree with me. Wards that should've sounded my trespass broke when a little tickle or notion led me to kick over the right rock or cut a scratch at one spot or another in the frame of a door.

  Probably, I did manifest an Ability.

  That happened sometimes, when a young man or woman lives a little too much before they can find their way with a God or a Saint. One did not need guidance to have power. A Patron just made it easier to survive what you became.

  By the end of my second summer, near to twenty years of a hard bit life, things change.

  For me and mama and Alice and all our kith and kin.

  The Empire was hungry, ever hungry, and she'd done stripped these lands, my people's lands, near to barren. There was so little mana in the soil that crops got sick with blight, or just... withered right there on the vine. Game was becomin' scarce, movin' north to seek Wyld that still remained. And the more the land suffered, the more the Lord taxed his folks, the more the Empire taxed him.

  Everyone took his neighbors bread, and we were all hungry for it.

  It got too heavy, that boot on my neck and the cost of it.

  An early cold-snap and a hackin' cough. Momma was sick, real sick. And daddy and Alice would soon follow, skinny as they were. I had to fight tooth and nail for them to eat any of the vittles I 'stole'. That was the thing about good people in a bad place, they'd starve if it meant doing right.

  I, I wasn't a good man.

  Saw their sufferin', and I looked for a way to make someone pay, and in more than coin.

  Found that tax man. Found with his bags fat with coin. His guards were tired and bored from long travel on lean fare.

  I found him, and I did as the Empire had always done to the men to the North.

  Killed, and took all I desired.

  I gunned him down. Shot him in the back, and his hired hands followed. Five lives cut short by smoke, lead, and the fury of a son turned a sinner.

  I returned home with my spoils, and I fed my family. I bought medicine, and that I could not spend, I buried for the next winter. Not for long though, the word was out. I had been seen, spotted by an Imperial scout sent to deal with a 'bandit uprising' out in the Broken Coast.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Ha.

  Was almost a point of pride to know the Empire considered me an army of one.

  But pride was a cold comfort when they came.

  I had kept one third of what I stole on me. Enough that they might not look too hard at the donations made to the Chantry where my sister now served, might not ask folks about their suddenly full bellies and the medicine in their cabinets.

  And Gods’ mercy they didn't. Just clapped me in the irons I had earned. Locked me up and took me to the place where the Empire dumped all its rubbish and rot.

  I was lucky, in a way, to live three years in prison like that. I worked my days in a log camp or a quarry. Took the meager bread, then took more from who I could. Spent my nights, shackled in the cold, laid out on freezing stone or hanged from high when the guards got a wild hare.

  Normally, murderers like me just got the rope.

  Wait a spell, rot a little to sweeten the despair.

  Then hang.

  But again, again, justice failed. I ought to have died there, I'd read enough scripture to know that. Learned to read just help little Alice study to be a mother, so I knew what was owed. What was owed.

  But they just... couldn't be bothered. Too busy with great things to care for the small.

  I think they forgot about me, 'til time came to fill another ship headed for the New World. Then I was a number, a name on the roster of the latest transport. A lost soul in the belly of the beast, destined for a land of dust, sun, and monsters. A wild and untamed wilderness that-

  That I was never supposed to see.

  All of us chained and bound. Whores and heretics, gunfighters and old revolutionaries. Farmers' sons, artificer's daughters, noble scions who'd plain pissed someone off and found that birth don't matter spit before power.

  The ship rocked and I went slack in my restraints. That was the way, don't fight the metal. I learned that a few weeks out. Don't fight. Don't pull. Rock with it, let it carry you with the waves.

  Fight, and you'll be rubbed raw.

  Fight, and infection, rot and death will soon set in.

  One hundred two had passed, by my dubious count, none of them quiet. Most of them women and old men. The ones who couldn't take the dark, the cold, the damp. The ones who couldn't learn to rock with the rhythm of the world. The ones who couldn't take the beatings, the abuse, the rape. The ones who stopped scratching at our iron chains.

  That night, though, even I struggled to keep myself.

  My arms were numb. The manacles chafed and bit deep into skin. Rust and blood fell in flakes with every pitch and roll.

  I was hungry, the real food run out, only water and thin gruel for the last two weeks. The guards ate that. Fever had set in, maybe in all of us, maybe in just me.

  Either way, I knew what came after the fever.

  "Storms a-coming," a voice said, mine but not my own. A low rasp, a voice of dreams and visions and other worlds, "Storm's a-coming! Clean water and fish! And death, a whole lot of death. Somethin’ in the Deep is stirrin’ again. Lookin’ to swallow us whole.."

  "Shut it boy..." rasped the old Named man to my left, "I'm trying to die in peace."

  And he’d probably earned it, seeing as the clans honored him with a given name, but…

  "Peace is a dream old timer, no such thing in this life of sin, but a dream, a dream, a dream."

  "He is taken with the Gods," said another.

  Said she.

  The Mother to us wicked men. Piety and grace, buried amidst the rot and sin.

  "Pass easy, son. It will all end soon."

  "Fuck you," the man laughed, "ain't no passing easy. Should be passing with an axe and a pistol in his hand, the Horned God grant you that!"

  "Amen," came from a dozen other souls, but none were near me. The Lord's men growled at the sound of that blasphemous oath.

  A flash, lightless and strange. Something rippled as it intruded in.

  Amen.

  Boom!

  The ship lurched, timbers groaned then snapped like sun-dried bone. Rust fell from my ruined wrists and the world went sideways.

  I didn't pass out, but I wasn’t far from it.

  Boom!

  It shattered what sense I once had. Waves crashing against sea-rotted hull. Something slipped in, and slithered out. Or else the fever just made me think it did.

  In the next instant, the whole of the world tipped like a scale. Screams, and water, and more screams too as wood gave to the weight of so much more.

  Chaos. Just for you. For all of you...

  Boom!

  Screech.

  Crunch!

  And all the ocean finally ran in. It was a mad panic, an arm thrashing, a sea of black.

  I knew it was finally time. The cold, the cold cleared my mind, just enough.

  Just in time to make good on that little hope that had kept me alive.

  They say water can cut stone in due time. That even Empires, Gods, and Great Men can fall when persistent force is applied.

  Water, and force, and time.

  Three things that could break the world. And damn sure break chains them chains of mine…

  The world rocked one last time, and now I did not follow its wake. As folk around me panicked and drowned, I rocked back. With every fiber of my skinny and underfed body, I pulled and twisted. I yanked and strained.

  Snap!

  Rust and age, and a little of my own magic, a little of that plundered mana, freed me from my bondage. I was still weak, but I was free.

  Water rushed in from a great wound in the hull.

  A torrent of black-cold that sucked the breath and the life from those it took hold. I waded, rushing toward a shit-scared guard as my fellow prisoners called for aid.

  I drowned a man that day, held him under and kicked him until bubbles stopped coming up.

  Two.

  And I took his keys and his pistol and truncheon.

  Water was at my shins, my nethers frozen and my feet terribly numb.

  "Boy!" shouted the Rune-Faced old timer, "boy, help us! Help us! Please in the name of your father's name, boy, get us out!"

  I looked at the keys. I looked to the stairwell.

  Four minutes, if my slow mind could rightly count. About four minutes until I was good and dead and so were they.

  "Go," spoke the Mother, that Heretic priestess what kept so many sane, "go, boy, and save yourself..."

  Well fuck me.

  A man, a good man, a bad man, he doesn't leave behind the only bit of kindness shown in years. Now I had to stay.

  "I'll save whoever I damn well please," I growled and unlocked the manacles of a dark-skinned man. As he fled through the rising wake, I moved on down the line, the old timer and the priestess and a dozen more. They all got to go.

  They all ran, swam, and climbed to the light that shone in above...

  My fingers shook as I slipped the heavy iron key into one final lock. A wide-eyed Pardaz from the deep deserts of the mainland, his tawny fur fallen out in patches and his fangs chipped. A pitiful sight, the cold all around would maybe take him before me.

  Was gettin’ so cold. I was always so cold…

  He tore free as I sprung him, clawing my arms to get himself up as I started to sink down. I grabbed a chain and thrust out my own hand as the water got up to my neck. He reached, then shivered.

  Gave me a long and grateful look, and then...

  I saw the fear in his heart.

  And he ran, then swam, then crawled as the water forced him up the vanishin’ stairs.

  It was dark then. Dark and-

  Nothin’. The cold was gone, replaced by a proud and complete nothin’.

  Damn fool me.

  Down, down with the current I went, and into the Deep.

  Lost at sea, with all the sailors and monsters that forever sleep.

  Peace at last, there in that timeless black.

  Death, and just desserts for a Desperado like me.

  Or it might have been, if this world were in any way just.

  Instead, it was Damnation that I found there at the bottom of the sea, and again on strange shores of a world farther West than I even should ever have know.

  And like the curses and legends of old, when I climbed up from the dark, it was to visit hell upon wicked mankind.

  To teach them again to fear the monsters they made.