Majinwa was a place that measured worth in persistence, in how much you would give when the world asked for more than you had. The village sat on the edge of a wide, red plain. Stone houses huddled together. In the center rose the temple to Vares, the Devil God. Smoke from its ever-burning grill stained the sky; the priests kept their rituals steady as a clock, even when the clock's hands seemed to tremble.
Faran Izen was a man whom people respected the way they respect a river that never changes course. He had led patrols, taught young fighters, and repaired temple fences. He carried himself like a man who had answered the god's call in every season of his life. He loved his family, not with a softness that showed on his face, but with a quiet, stubborn devotion. When Rinz was small, Faran would lift him onto his shoulders and walk through the village, and men would nod. That nod was praise. That nod said the boy had a place in the world.
Sari Izen was the other kind of strength. Where Faran's hands were blunt and precise, Sari's touch was careful and light. Her voice had always been soft, but it carried more comfort than any message. She laughed with Rinz when he stumbled on his first wooden sword. She patched his bruises at night and braided his hair in the morning. When the boy looked at her, the world felt safe.
Rinz grew up in that household between duty and kindness. He was not born stubborn or wild; he learned blade work because his father set it before him, not because the boy wanted it more than anything. When he hit the wood in the courtyard, he hit it with the concentration of someone who wanted to make his family proud. When Kinz, his younger brother, was born, the house filled with a different laughter. Kinz's cheeks were round, his hair warm under the sun. The two boys shared small moments: stolen fruit, races to the well, a promise whispered under the low moonlight. "I'll protect you," Kinz would say, and Rinz, who had already been shaped by training, would answer, "I'll protect you too." The promise was simple and true. It was the kind of promise that kept children close at night and made fathers sleep easier.
Then, the year the wells ran thin changed everything. The rain that had come like a clock stopped coming. Crops that had fed their own and the neighboring villages failed to rise. People grew thin. The temple's braziers burned, but prayers tasted like ash.
The priests gathered in the open square more often, their faces drawn. They read from old scrolls and recited rituals that no longer warmed anyone's heart. Men who had once trusted the pattern of life started to panic. Houses that had once been safe turned inward; families counted grain like treasure. Faran kept going to the temple. He kept asking, kept bringing what he could. He cut wood, delivered food he could spare to the priests, and measured the silence where answers used to be.
You have to understand the small change that poisoned everything: it wasn't a single command from the god. The god did not utter a line of demand. The silence, months without a sign, without any dream or blessing, made the priests and the proud men like Faran search for a cause. What does a person do when the pattern they have lived by fails? They reach, and when they reach and find nothing, they clutch at something, anything to make sense of loss.
The priests began to whisper that the god wanted a price. They spoke of balance, of returning something precious. In that heat of fear and hunger, people looked at what was most valuable and thought: if the god will answer to something precious, then that thing must be given.
Faran listened to the arguments between men and to the priests' warnings. He listened to the farmers who said the fields were ruined, to the mothers who said their children were thin, and to the older men who said the god's silence could be ended by a great offering. He thought with the focus of a man who had until now sacrificed for the safety of others. He thought: What is more precious to me than anything? The answer was his son, his oldest blood, his namesake.
The decision did not make him cruel. It made him afraid. He truly believed that by offering what he loved most, he could poke the sleep of the god and bring back the life that had faded from their village. That belief took shape not because the god had spoken, but because the vacuum of meaning pushed him into it. He told himself the act would purchase their future.
When Faran told Sari, he did it with the practical bluntness of a man who thought he had a path to fix the village. "We will give what is needed," he said. His hands were steady. Sari's hands were not; she reached for him and found only the tautness of a man who had forced himself to decide.
"No," she said at once, not with the religion of priests, but with the raw voice of a mother. "You cannot. Not Rinz. Not our child."
Faran's face hardened in a way that terrified his son when the truth fell into the air. It didn't look like hatred. It looked like someone who had sat with a difficult sum long enough that he accepted its solution. He had convinced himself of what the god required. "It must be something precious," he said. "If I give nothing of value, what will the god understand? A precious thing will show sacrifice."
He imagined the fields green again. He imagined Kinz's laughter filling the house. He imagined Sari no longer needing to count grain. That vision was the one thing that bent his mind the most. He believed the god was a force that understood value, and he thought that a father's highest value could bargain with the sky.
The night they decided, the village had little to offer besides empty jars and the ache in its people's bellies. The priests took Faran's hand and placed a blade in it. The ritual was prepared not in cruelty but in solemn certainty, and that certainty made it more terrifying than any rage.
Rinz did not understand what would happen until the men came for him. They were villagers he had known his whole life. They were the ones who had taught him to weigh a sword across his palms. They did not stumble when they came. They led him to the temple steps with an inclination of their heads that suggested they thought it an honor; in their eyes, there was the strange mixture of belief and fear.
He went forward because a son does not imagine the worst. He went because he had been taught that pain made a warrior. He trusted the men who guided him like a child trusts the hand of a father leading him away from a dark road. He had no sense of how the landscape of his life would split the moment those doors closed.
On the altar, the priests arranged rugs and lit the braziers. They chanted the old words that once brought dreams and harvests. Rinz's heart thudded hard, but not in dread, in the naive steadiness of a boy who thought this was the way to right the village. Sari had followed with Kinz. When she saw where the men led her child, she went silent. Her face did not show the hysterics of a new horror at first; it showed a sudden, raw, frightened pleading that had no words.
"Rinz," she whispered, clutching his hand for a second. "You must be brave." Her voice was cracked, and that was all the strength she could pull together.
When Faran walked in, he held his son's gaze with a look too complicated for Rinz to unpack: pride, fear, and a strange hope that twisted what he had believed to be true. Some acts change a life in a single motion; this was such an act. When Faran lifted the blade, he did so with the same certainty he had once used to stroke his son's hair and with a belief that this would buy what their family needed.
Rinz tried to ask, but the words came out thin and small. "Father… what are we doing?"
Faran opened his mouth as if to answer in the practical manner that had been his habit. The words that left him were cold and smooth: "For the village." That was all he offered, and then he lowered the blade.
The blade did not take his life. It took his limbs.
Pain is many things at once: physical, a white-hot lightning that splinters the mind; emotional, the knowing that someone you love chose to rip away what made you whole. When the first cut fell and the world became raw with blood, Rinz's senses shrank to the slash and the torchlight. He heard his mother scream in a way that felt like the sound of his own spine breaking. He felt the priest's hands on his shoulders as anchors and the wood of the altar pressing into the small of his back like a final and immovable judgment.
They cut his arms and his legs. The men worked with the detached precision of those who perform ritual more often than cruelty. Faran's face blurred in Rinz's vision the way water blurs the shapes of trees. Sari's cry turned into a thin sound like a bird that had been wounded and kept calling out even as it could not fly.
When the last cut was done, Rinz's world became the steady leaning away from pain: the breath that is hard to take but necessary, the thin taste of iron, the shadowed ceiling above that seemed suddenly enormous because he could not move to get closer. He hoped the god would answer, a sign, a thunderclap, a fresh wind sweeping the village clean. He hoped for any proof that his agony mattered.
Silence answered.
The priests' hands fell away, mouths forming the ancient words of supplication they had been taught to use to fit any silence. They looked to one another with the animal worry that you see in hunters who know they have followed tracks to a place where nothing stands. Faran's face folded into something like guilt at the edges; he had acted not in cruelty but in a constellation of fear and superstition. For a brief, terrible second, he looked like a man who had called out into a well and been told nothing back.
When the priests whispered that the offering had not been accepted, what followed should have shocked them into mercy. The same belief that had pushed Faran to offer his son now found a cruel, practical conclusion: a failed offering could bring the village greater dishonor, and a failed offering might be a danger itself. They called the mutilated body a waste, a broken instrument that could not move any longer in the service of the god or the village. Faran listened, his face contorted as if he were chewing on grief and bile at once, and then he ordered them to take the boy away.
They carried him through the gate while the temple's torchlight churned and the village's people watched like shadows in a crowd. Sari reached and clawed, but soldiers held her back. Kinz burned with a small, helpless rage, and then the boy was gone.
They left him at the edge of the scrub where the red plain met the beginning of wild rocks. The soldiers did not look back. They could not. Sometimes people cannot witness what they have ordered; it breaks them. Rinz lay in the bruised shade of thorn bushes, the birds above cawing like strangers. Darkness closed like a blanket.
For hours, he thought Death would come. He wanted it to. Pain is quickening in the mind like a fever; it hollows you out, and some small part of you believes surrender will end the terrible noise. But the body's stubbornness is a thing most people do not see; an animal will cling to breath even when the mind has given up reasoning.
He woke to the cold sting of morning and the smell of iron and smoke. His skin stung. He could make out shapes like the suggestion of trees and the crooked angle of rock cliffs. At first, he thought he must be dead, and this was the place the living go to sleep. But the breath came, shallow and ragged, and his chest heaved. He tried to move and found that his hands, his legs, the parts that had let him run and swing and reach for his mother, were gone. His eyes filled with a smarting heat that was not just pain but shame and betrayal.
He wanted to cry out, but his throat closed like the lid of a well.
It was close to noon when the stranger found him. The old man had a face like weathered wood and eyes that had seen too many roads. He was not a priest. He was not a soldier. He was a traveling craftsman who followed veins of ore and the songs of distant rivers. He saw the boy, motionless as a heap, and thought at first he was a corpse that the vultures would soon reach.
But his hand was warm when he felt the pulse at the boy's throat. He lifted him, and the weight of Rinz's body was a small, painful bundle that he cradled with an uncomfortable tenderness.
The man's name was Taro, who brought Rinz to a small shelter among dark pines where a thin, honest forge burned. He wrapped wounds in linen and boiled roots and herbs until the steam lifted. He did not ask for answers. He set a blanket and sat the boy near the fire and worked. The old hands were slow and precise. He cleaned the open wounds, stitched what could be stitched, and kept the fever from closing the boy's eyes. He hummed quiet melodies no one had taught.
Rinz's memory in those first days was a tangle. Pain, then darkness. Dreams of Sari's face. The feel of his father's hands before the blade came. The torchlight. A ragged hand that fed him water and called him "boy" the way some men call the sea "sea." It felt almost like being remembered by someone who owed you nothing.
Weeks passed. Months. The fever receded. The stitches grew into scars. He learned the small discipline of being alive again. Taro made a narrow bed and fed him soup that tasted like nothing and everything. The old man taught him to take a breath that didn't tremble.
There is a moment on the road back from such ruin when a person recognizes their own face as something they will have to live with for the rest of their days. Rinz felt that moment like a bruise turning into skin. He would never be the same. He would never walk onto the temple steps again as the same boy. But someone had found him in the threshold between dying and living and chosen to keep him.
When he could sit, he crawled to the small window and watched the plain in silence. Wind moved the grass in quiet curtains. The memory of his mother's last look, half-broken and full of pleading, sat in him like a stone.
He did not speak for a long time. He did not need words. The wounds had been stitched; the body, as much as could be, had been set. Taro did not presume to offer judgment or answers. He gave Rinz food and a blanket, and a place that did not ask why he still breathed.
The boy lay back in the sun. The skin that had been cut had knit in. The world had not offered justice. It had only offered the slow, stubborn possibility of living.
Rinz closed his eyes and thought of Kinz and of the soft way Sari sang a prayer even in the darkest hour. He thought of Faran's steady hands around the blade, hands that had once lifted him and used him. He felt the ache of betrayal and, at the same time, an ember of something he could not name: a thin spark that did not want to be snuffed.
He never made vows then. He did not shout, and he did not plan. He allowed himself one private, small feeling that would grow into his path later: that he would take what was left of himself, and he would not let it be taken again.
The wind moved outside the cabin, carrying the thin noise of the village in the distance, life going on as if nothing had been thrown away. Rinz listened, and for the first time since the altar, he let himself be angry. Not the blind rage that comes in the moment of pain, but a clear, cold determination. It started as a small thing in the chest and spread like a line being traced on a map.
Beside him, the old man hammered a piece of metal, and the ringing sound dropped into the room like a metronome. Rinz turned his head and watched. He did not yet know what he would do with that feeling. He only knew he was alive, and that was enough to make the ache appear purposeful.
When night fell, he pressed his forehead to the cool window glass and thought of his brother's face. He remembered Kinz's promise: "I'll protect you." He did not know whether that promise could still be kept. But as the wind brushed the panes, it sounded less like pity and more like a question: would this boy stand up again?
He was wounded. He was thrown away. He was ashamed. He was alive.
Outside, the temple bells in the distance kept their same slow rhythm. Inside, a different sound had started, the steady breath of a man deciding, without making grand words, to survive.