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THERE WAS SOMETHING SACRILEGIOUS in the way Sinika carried himself. Even as a child, the rejection of authority was settled deep within the iron coffers of his bones. It was hard to imagine him as anything but the radically archaic Fabrikator wise beyond his years; yet, there was a brief time in history when Sinika was nothing but a boy.
Raised in a poor village somewhere above Os Alta, there was a look about him that soldiers thought was a little too Fjerdan; he brandished a healthy dozen bruises for that look, a subject of their desperate play for patriotism. Sinika learned to hate the word. He supposed he inherited that from his mother, among other things. She was a Fjerdan Tidemaker, exiled from her home country to another nation that despised her for the other part of her she couldn't control.
When Grisha testers came to their doors, his mother reminded him of patriot games. And the ways powerful men liked to play it.
Sinika never spoke to his mother again, but he seemed to find her everywhere he'd look; he saw her silver hair in the embroidery of his Durast kefta, and in the deep purples he saw the flowers growing in her gardens. He imagined her by the fountains outside of the Little Palace, dancing and twirling the water between her fingers. In the ballads carolled in the streets, he heard her voice that once sung sweet lullabies as he'd fall deep into slumber.
The first time he entered the Fold was when he began to forget her, and so did any other Grisha clinging onto the memory of their parents. Some were easy with letting the past die, but the child inside him pleaded in defiance. So, he was something short of eighteen when he buried himself — shovel in hand as the corpse of his innocence lay delicately on the soil. The shovel was now a glinting scythe, and doe eyes peered back at him; partly in horror and another part the grimness of Sinika can't place his finger on. Yet, the corpse does not resist and there is no time misspent before the earth enveloped it.
Every scrap of sweet and good becomes dead and buried, and all that is left is the shell of a man with a scythe in his hand and the corpse of a child rotting beneath the dirt. The Orphan of Os Alta.
