He spent the first few years of his life nameless.

  When many cyanen lived together in one city, it was inevitable that an egg or two in some clutches would be misplaced. As much as one would expect for such an untended egg to hatch a diseased abomination or nothing at all, many weren’t so lucky. Those larva with the misfortune to hatch healthy were called “lice” and belonged nowhere. But even with nowhere to belong, they remained. A pointless, desperate existence, so close to the locus of civilization.

  In his case, the locus of civilization was known as Athens. He wasn’t a particularly noteworthy louse, either, not even after he had molted past the homogeneous larval stage. He had a muted dust-brown carapace, marred by a black splotch of a birthmark that spread from his left shoulder and stretched two fingers up his neck to just below his face. His build was hardly wiry, but his sex-appropriate diminutive stature meant it was hard for him to look imposing, even for his age.

  His first calling, as with many lice, was theft.

  At first, he would lift bits of sugarbread and fruit from refuse piles, but he quickly learned it tasted better if he stole from stalls and open markets, and was less likely to make him sick as well. But, he would get in trouble when he did that, so he figured it would be better to buy food properly.

  And how to buy food? Why, with coins. The city was a cornucopia of coins if you knew where to look, and most of the places you could find them would hardly miss them. At least, that was what he assumed, when purses parted with their owners at his command with barely a sound.

  From purses, he became more daring, and turned to jewelry. And this was where the trouble began.

  Jewelry and finewear tended to be strung around the necks and wrists of his targets, and it was much harder to steal from someone’s neck without them noticing. So he honed his craft, stole and stole and stole until he was certain he could steal someone’s head right off of their shoulders without them noticing. However, his certainty was misplaced.

  The priest of some god or another walked into the alley adjacent her temple, likely thinking that she was safe so close to it, and the louse took that chance to strike. Keeping his blades safely stowed, he leaped past her, grabbing her holy symbol, a pendant of a rose, and effortlessly slipping it over her head.

  But before he could properly escape with it, he felt her hand close shut around his wrist, and knew he was caught.

  The priest dangled him high in the air, arresting his momentum and lifting him up to get a better look at him. She was tall even for a woman, and moved with practiced grace and elegance. She had a ponderous look in her eyes that scared the louse, so he acted without thinking.

  He swung back and forth, moving his entire body with his hips, and kicked the alley wall to break the priest’s grip. He barely got free on the forward swing, which launched him directly at the priest’s chest. He pulled out one of his ventral blades and, grabbing onto her head, drove it straight into her soft, exposed neck.

  A maneuver that could only be performed by someone much smaller than his target.

  The priest coughed and staggered backwards. Blue sprayed out over the louse as he fell to the ground, not quite landing on his feet. He stared up at the stricken priest, even more afraid than he had been before. The priest seemed to recognize that, because as she fell backwards onto her rear, she stretched out a hand, as if to say “it’s fine”. But that wasn’t the case.

  “To be brought low… by a louse,” the priest rasped. “I don’t know who you think you are, but… for good or ill… Rhoda will be watching you. Always.”

  With that, the priest slumped forwards, limp from bleeding far too quickly. She wasn’t dead yet, but she would be soon.

  The louse ran from that place. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but he needed to escape the accusing shadows, the stench of blood that clung to his blade. Such was the darkness of Athens that hardly anyone passing by took any notice of the child covered in blood running through her streets.

  Eventually, he made it to the city outskirts, where he found a bridge to crawl under. It wasn’t one he was familiar with, but he didn’t want to bring himself as he was now into familiar places. He felt oddly heavy, and his flesh under the shell felt clammy, and shivered anxiously. He felt sick, like he had just eaten bad food or slept in the cold for too many nights. He couldn’t dispel the image of his blade disappearing into soft flesh, or the feeling from it, the smoothness.

  “Never again,” he whispered aloud. “Not like that.”

  The louse didn’t know how long he remained under that bridge. The bridge spanned a drainage ditch that was mostly dry, but the air was still damp and unpleasant, and mold clung to the quarried stone around him. The smell made him shiver. He tried to wipe the blue blood off of his blade with the rags he always wore, but part of it had stained. He tasted metal somewhere in his mouth.

  Eventually, the mouth of the bridge darkened, and the louse looked up to see a slightly larger boy, a louse as well.

  “Hey,” the boy said. “What’s my savior doing cowering under a bridge like this?”

  Right, the beleaguered louse thought. I remember this guy. He had filched the baton right out of a private guard’s hands when the other boy was being beaten, and only the other louse had gotten a good look at his face. Of course he would recognize him.

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  “You don’t have to call me that,” he replied. “I just needed a weapon back then.”

  “Bet you did.” The other louse called him on his lie. “That your blood all over you, mate?”

  The louse involuntarily shivered, his chelicera and teeth chattering. He hated looking weak in front of other children of the street, but today was different. There was no other option today.

  “Hey,” the other said, his voice turning soft. He gently sat down next to him. “Hey, hey. I’m sorry. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. Just nod or shake your head. Is this your first time killing someone?”

  The louse bobbed his head up and down weakly. He wondered how the interloper knew he’d killed someone, but he supposed it wasn’t that hard to piece together. Positions reversed, he was sure he would have recognized the signs, too. The streets were not so kind that lice could not be expected to bite once in a while.

  “Do you think you’ll be able to do it again if you have to?”

  The louse shook his head emphatically.

  “Thought not.” The other louse sighed. “Then let me propose an arrangement tween the two of us, yeah? See, I’ve killed before, myself, both vermin and cyanen, and I must be a much worse villain than you -- cause it means nothing to me, at this point. Problem is, I got no finesse, and if I spend all my time fighting for food, people like the guard you saw last time are gonna catch me tired, you know?”

  The louse nodded slowly.

  “So let’s pair up. I’ll cover your violence, and you’ll cover my vittles. I’ll hunt, and you’ll gather. How’s that sound?”

  The louse glared suspiciously at the other boy, but the shivering was starting to subside. Now that he looked, the resourceful louse could see the telltale signs of starvation on the violent louse. He had made the effort to seem kind, but it was an act of desperation as much as anything else. That was a little bit reassuring; when pairing up with muscle, you wanted to make sure they needed you. The louse decided he could trust that desperation if nothing else.

  “Alright, Hunt,” he finally said. “I’ll lift for you, if you’ll have my back.”

  The other boy, Hunt, laughed, seemingly surprised. “So you’re Gather, then? I like it. Didn’t have names in mind, but if your mind is anywhere near as sharp as your eyes were, appraising me just now, I trust your judgment. Seriously, how scary. I felt like a mark.”

  “Gather” looked down, embarrassed. Whether or not he fully trusted “Hunt”, he could feel the terror and nausea deep within him starting to fade. He wouldn’t have to feel that awful sensation on his blade again, or take on any more curses from gods.

  It still took a few days before he could join in when Hunt laughed.

  Hunt and Gather terrorized the streets of Athens for years.

  Gather quickly found that Hunt wasn’t very devious at all. The violent boy had simply learned to fight the way Gather had learned to steal, and he was good at it. To Gather’s relief, there didn’t appear to be any ulterior motive, or intent to terrorize him later. That said, the larger louse was more confident than Gather was, so he quickly settled into the role of a leader.

  He would also occasionally live up to his name and actually hunt for prey in the wilderness, but never to great effect.

  Gather himself went back to the theft he had worked so hard to perfect. If anyone noticed that a small child had killed some priest of Rhoda, they didn’t piece together who it was; or at least, they didn’t confront him about it. He resisted the urge to find out who the priest had been, whose life he had ended for no reason, until the urge passed altogether. His desire to escape the memory was stronger than his sense of responsibility for what happened. Killer or no, he was still a mere louse.

  But he never went back to stealing jewelry, and he never went after those of the cloth again. He stuck to mere pickpocketry, kept a low profile, kept his protector fed, and came home every morning. He had a name for himself now, after all; he didn’t feel the desperate need to make one.

  He rarely talked to anyone else. Hunt took care of all the grocery shopping in between his own much riskier, less frequent ventures. Muggings, mostly. Though he no longer ran the risk of exhaustion, more than once did Hunt return to their hideaway with a dented or smashed shell, forcing Gather to patch him up. Gather learned first aid rather quickly, with such a reckless partner.

  Gather and Hunt were confidants, partners, accomplices, and friends. As long as Athens prospered, they could prosper off of its excess. Like lice.

  Then, one day, Gather started to hear disquieting rumors circulating through the capital at night. Foreign things started to enter the periphery of his world, with names like “levy” and “glory”, and “defense”.

  The rumor had it that the Astarians were preparing to attack Athens.

  The Astarian Empire was different from Athens. Athens was an independent city with its own domain, ruled by council, with barely a military to speak of. It was surrounded by farmland that supported its markets and trade, and there were natural caves nearby that had been expanded and stabilized when valuable metal ores had been found in them. It was wealthy and prosperous, but that was the extent of its reach. The Astarian Empire, on the other hand, ruled many cities, each with their own domain, with a variety of natural resources and crafts that could circulate throughout its bounds.

  Gather couldn’t understand exactly why such a wealthy country would attack Athens, but Hunt explained it simply and cleanly.

  It was a mugging.

  For the two petty crooks, that was enough of an explanation; neither had any particular need to understand the complicated politics that led to the war, at least not back then. They were still young, and boys besides. They were certain that the levy would never include a couple of runts who hadn’t even reached their fourth molts. And for most of the war, that held true.

  But then they molted. The two were adolescents now, and fair targets to fight the losing war.

  Hunt molted first, and he was caught and taken away first, too. As he was dragged away, he continued slinging promises until he was breathless; that he would keep Gather safe, that the war would end before Gather would be forced to join it, that he wouldn’t let Gather kill anyone even if he were forced to fight.

  But all of that was in vain. The day Gather started shivering and itching at his shell, he could feel the life he’d built collapsing around him. It only took days afterwards for the grim-faced men and massive women responsible for recruiting the idle youth to find him and take him away.

  Hunt had no way of fulfilling even one of his promises; by the time Gather reached the battlefield, the other boy had vanished into some other company of the levy, faceless and teeming. Gather knew he wouldn’t be able to stop himself, either; whether he liked it or not, he had the instincts of a killer, and he always would. So he did the only thing he knew he could do; he insisted on using a mace.

  Normally, with tiny arms like his, a mace would be a waste of time. Other boys and men learned stiletto knives, spears, needles; anything that could puncture gaps in armor with finesse and aim. They were simply too weak to try anything else against their foes’ powerful shells. But Gather knew he could never feel the sensation of slicing through living flesh again. He wasn’t even sure using a blunt weapon would help, but he knew he would die if he had a breakdown on the field of battle. So the quartermasters grumbled a brief “fine, maybe you can be a diversion” and handed him little more than a metal rod with a ball on the end and a wrapped grip.

  The lead-up to his first battle was boring. There was a lot of walking, some of it through blood-soaked fields of turquoise-dyed grass, and trying not to think about all the diabolical smells around him. And then, before he knew it, there was an enemy soldier in front of him, and everything else faded away.

  He used the acrobatic prowess he’d developed as a thief, spinning through the air with his mace out like a maple seed floating from a tree. But as the head of the mace smashed through the head of the enemy soldier, it was Gather who shattered forever.

  Ancillary Justice, and the standalone retelling of Hamlet alongside the history of a god, The Raven Tower.