Marhime. Marhime. For a long time, he thought it was his name. 'Marhime' came the whispers from the vardos, and those sat around the bonfire as he passed through the Kumpania. Some would spit in the dirt, some crossed themselves, others went so far as to cleanse the grounds and sweep his footprints away after he'd passed. As if even those would bring misfortune upon their families. But none of it phased him anymore. It was all he knew.
"We are unclean. Our blood will never find salvation. Not in these lands, not among our people. All we have is wretchedness and cruelty to embrace us. No one will ever love you, Rares. They cannot." His mothers words. They rang in his head, filling him with despair and emptiness. Trying so hard to smother his light. She'd said he was too delicate. Too soft. That the kindness would kill him and them. So he'd spent his life fighting his nature. To show his family they were wrong. Marhime meant tainted, unclean, corrupt. His family were all those things and more, marked as cursed, and if the events of his life were any evidence the pendulum swung in favor of it being true.
He hadn't known a life of kindness, not even among his own blood. You'd expect outcasts to have been more closely knit but growing up had been nothing but hard lessons. You learned fast how to survive or you didn't survive. Not when they had so many mouths to feed and too many relatives prioritizing their own skin over any other. As time crept along they'd slowly shrunk in numbers. Illness, deals gone wrong, enemies, stupidity, vices, backfired hexes or hexes cast upon them, the list was endless.
As far as he knew, he was the only one left. Truth be told, even if he knew there were any left alive it would have brought him no comfort. He was, for all he knew and cared, the last shadow of his accursed bloodline and it was better that he be the last. He'd probably be dead already if she hadn't embraced him. He was almost dead on the night he'd been given immortality, he should have died, but something buried deep within him wanted a chance. At what? He still didnt know the answer. Rares closed his eyes against the small fire burning in the makeshift pit near the front steps of the vardo, his claws pulling the fur of his jacket closer to his neck, replaying the night in his mind.
Both of his parents had died. His father, having gotten his mother killed over a bad deal, had sought revenge... he never came back. So Rares, being young and inexperienced, had tried to manage on his own. He'd been left the vardo, which would have sustained him for a decent amount of time had the thugs who'd killed his parents not found him and picked it clean to collect what they were owed. They'd beaten him, leaving him more or less alive, still breathing at the very least. He was shocked they hadn't taken the vardo itself when all was said and done. Small miracles.
Injured, alone, starving, Rares lost his will. The night of the storm he remembered stumbling, falling out the front door, landing in a puddle. He'd tried to rise only once but his body was on fire with fever, every joint screaming for relief, his head swimming. He'd stared off into the woods after he realized he was never rising again from the spot where he now lay. Wondering how long it would take before the hypothermia killed him. His broken bones hadn't set right. His ribcage so pronounced, fractured. But just as the light began to fade from his eyes he'd seen her. Like a reaper, like death made flesh. To this day he still wondered if she was death. Only death whispered like that.
For days after the embrace he'd questioned if preserving his existence, as wretched and despised as he was to the other traveling families, Kumpania's, and even his new clan it seemed, was actually worth it. His one turn of fortune, and still a cruel joke, was the wealth left behind by his family that he'd discovered by chance. The taste for luxury was a vice among quite a few members and he'd caught a scent from letters left by his grandmother, hidden by his mother, that eventually led him to a cache. Someone was stashing for a rainy day. But the one stashing never made it to the storm. He used much of it to remodel the vardo and then hid the rest, safely tucked behind locks no one would want to suffer opening. And so he made a way for himself, deep on the outskirts of the large fairgrounds where Kumpania's set up for their seasonal shows. His vardo nestled in dark woods few had the stomach to travel through. Here he remained. A whisper. An ill omen. A curse.
His eyes opened, endlessly empty, lit by only the inner fire of survival. He wanted more than this. More than eking out his existence taking jobs whispered behind hands. The people who sought him would never acknowledge that they'd set foot near him purposefully, if they saw him again they'd cross themselves and shield their children. The hypocrites. Snakes who hissed their sickness into his waiting ear, offering him purpose, a chance to quiet the pain, and he would take their money and their sins. The jobs, especially when blood was spilled, sated the emptiness for a time. Sometimes the request was simple, a little hex or a horror. Sometimes they ended a life. It didn't matter. He took them all. Rares had done so much now it all blurred together, made him numb, made him sick. He was delicate, his mother had said, fragile. Maybe. But he was very good at what he did and he was still alive, in a sense. And they were buried.
Rares spat into the fire, his tail sliding serpentine across the dirt in agitation. May they all rot without peace. A sadness flickered somewhere deep within him but he refused to sit with it. He had no pity to spare. No will to mourn. What sense was there in mourning those who deserved nothing? Those he owed nothing? There was no sense in it. To mourn meant there had been love or loss. He felt neither. He had neither. The sadness again. Consuming. He needed someone to bring him a job. He needed a distraction.
