House Red

The Wedding - Chapter 1

I had not been back to Boston for at least 100 years. It had obviously changed drastically since the last time I had been here, but not in the most obvious ways; it was more subtle, as if the soul of the place had changed. It felt off. This had been my home for a large portion of my life. When I had completely devoted myself to House Red and Father, the Primarch and King of my House, learning from him and carrying out his orders as a good son and Jack.

That all changed when I shed the yoke of what I discovered was oppression rather than protection. I loathed the Game and longed to leave it behind for true personal freedom, but unless the True Death takes someone, personal freedom is a nice way of saying slightly more autonomy than a mindless drone.

The Game was the perpetual struggle for power using open politics and subterfuge to gain a hold over the other Houses and Players in the Game. My House was one of the three Great Houses whose Kings made up the Triumvirate (Father swore that the Romans stole the name from him). It was a council that oversaw the Game, set laws for the Houses, and made rulings on major disputes. When the Triumvirate was called forth, things went very badly for all involved; The Great War, World War II, Alexandria, Chernobyl, and the Sacking of Rome had all been direct results of the Triumvirate's choices.

Rarely, if ever, did I partake in the political machinations and maneuverings of the Houses unless absolutely forced to do so. As the Jack of my House and direct son to my Primarch and King, though, I was obligated to attend the Declaration of Prime for the Jack of another Great House. An involuntary shudder ran through me as I considered what Father would have done had I deigned to not attend.

Despite our disagreements, I knew Father cared for me greatly and indulged my choice to avoid the Game. He also turned that to his own end, essentially using me as a wild card in stacked deck, an unknown quantity among constants. When another Player mistook my choice to avoid the Game for the most part as a weakness, it was a mistake they were only able to make once. I was my father's secret weapon and we were both fine with the arrangement.

My relations with the Jack of House Gold were amicable at worst, and something akin to friendship, though outright friendship was impossible due to our alliances. Allister and myself had even worked together on occasion as emissaries for our respective Houses, and had the rare meal when we were both known to be in the same location. Unfortunately, the person I was here to see today was not that Jack.

The Jack of House Black, Dimitri, was a sadistic bastard who had slaughtered people wholesale for amusement and sport before it had been outlawed due to the difficulty of hiding it from humanity as information became easier to transmit. He was one of the most ruthless Players. His House treated him like a dog on a leash, letting him off the leash when force and brutality were the flavor of the day. Subtlety was not his strong suit.

As the Jack of House Red, I had still done my fair share of terrible things for the Red, but never took the joy from it that Dimitri had. I had a wry smile on my face as I added having to go to this event towards the top of that list, though Dimitri was not what made this so hard.

Another lifetime and an entire person earlier, I had been ready to declare my own Prime. Anastasia of House Gold was the daughter of my Golden counterpart. She had been turned rather recently, roughly eleven centuries earlier which made her extremely young compared to her peers. She was little more than a child compared to me, and I even remember her father Allister's birth into House Gold another 2,000 years before that. I was ages older than them both, but age or familial relations meant little to a race that was not constrained by the inevitable end to achieve their goals and experience their world by a certain time.

Declaring a Prime is like marriage for humans, but with more implications. It could not be undone. Because of this, it tied Houses together indefinitely. It was used by lesser Houses to move up the hierarchy of the Game by assuring alliances or outright merging two Houses into a larger one.

The Great Houses used it the same way, but rarely between each other; a misplay from one of the three in a move that monumental could doom that House to an inferior position for centuries. My father felt that my declaring Anastasia as my Prime would have been beneath my station because she was a lesser Player, and it would have also weakened the position of our House. I had been chafing under the thumb of my King for years now, and he was determined to use this event as an object lesson in moving without the best interest of the House in mind. He ordered me to assassinate Anastasia.

I planned the assassination to operate without me and set it in motion, following my father's last order before leaving my home and his control for almost 300 years. Somehow, Anastasia had found out about the plans and avoided the attempt. No one could prove who had planned it, so the heightened tension eventually relaxed.

This would be the first time I have seen Anastasia since I had bid her farewell after a fantastic meal with a kiss and a promise to see her again soon. This would be interesting.