Chapter 4: Blood speaks for Itself
Kei sat with his back to the damp wall and let the knowledge come.
It arrived the way the rest of it had, in ordered arrays, unfolding as he reached for it — not learned but *remembered*, as though he had always known it and had only just been reminded. And what it told him first was the thing waiting three days out. The ritual. The true awakening.
The true awakening was the coming-of-age rite of the Rakshasa. Every member of the clan passed through it. There were no exceptions made.
The Rakshasa, Kei understood, were feline humanoids — close enough to human in build and limb and face that the resemblance had served them for ages as a way into the mortal worlds. Their faces ran sharp and angular, small-nosed, the ears pointed, the brows arched, the skin a light grey. Their heights and features varied the way a mortal crowd’s did, no two the same.
Two things set them apart from the humans they could pass among.
The first was the eyes — vertical slits down the iris, which let them see in the dark as clearly as Kei was seeing this lightless room now.
The second was the hands. A Rakshasa’s hands were reversed, turned a half-circle at the wrist, so that at rest the palms faced outward from the body where the backs of a human’s hands would sit — the thumbs still on their original sides but rolled the wrong way round, the finger-joints folding backward when the hand closed to grip. Kei looked down at his own hands in the dark, and they were these hands, and the wrongness of them sat in him a moment before the knowledge smoothed it over.
These were the marks every Rakshasa carried from birth. But a Rakshasa was born with more than what showed — a potential, folded away inside, that the awakening either drew out or did not.
When a male or female of the clan reached fifty years — adolescence, by the cycle of their bodies, in a life that ran some six hundred years — they went to the trial. All of them. What the trial made of them decided their place in the clan, and in the whole of Rakshasa society, for the rest of that long life.
The shape of it came to Kei next, and he did not like how well he already knew the room it happened in.
Each adolescent was taken into a dark chamber and bound in heavy metal chains by the guards and left there three days. The room was kept empty but for one thing — a flagon of human blood, mixed with a few drops of primordial blood the high priests were given in exchange for their offerings to the Black Earth Mother.
On the first day the candidate meditated and chanted the name of the Black Mother ten thousand times, and did not drink.
On the second day, when the scent of the blood had worked on them until the hunger stood at its peak, they drank the flagon dry, all of it, and began the chant again.
On the third day, if they were among the ones it took, the body began to change.
It came with tremendous pain. The cells went through a full remaking, the whole molecular architecture of the body turning over at once, and the candidate would spasm and twist and thrash as the beast bloodline down in the blood woke and rewrote them — their height, their build, their shape all shifting toward a true form. That waking of the beast was the true awakening. And the chains were there for exactly this part, to keep a candidate from turning on their own body in the crazed, bloodlust-drowned peak of it.
Kei looked, in the dark, at the torn chains lying in pieces in front of him, and said nothing.
No two true forms came out alike. Each varied with the powers the candidate received and the potential they carried. The awakening burned the old light-grey skin away and left in its place a single permanent color, its tone different for each. Large retractable claws grew from the hands and the feet. The canines lengthened, moderately — sometimes far enough to show a little even with the mouth closed — and in some recorded cases the awakened Rakshasa grew a beast’s tail.
Not all of them lived. A candidate of weak constitution often died in the bloodline’s awakening, the body unable to bear the remaking.
And some lived but did not awaken at all — nothing in the blood answered the ritual. These were marked as commoners, and given a choice: eternal servitude in a noble clan, or registry as an independent worker-for-hire in Rakshasa society. Most who failed came from commoner families to begin with, and rarely from the nobility. When a noble failed to awaken, the noble status was stripped from them.
The beast bloodline ran only through the males. The noble clans held their clan-beast bloodline dear above almost anything, and for its sake they forbade their women to marry any commoner. The commoners, for their part, mostly lacked the bloodline in their blood — though now and again a commoner child was born with it anyway, whether by some turn of the blood or by a noblewoman’s affair carried out of sight of the crest she was born to.
There was a saying the noble houses were fond of.
*Our blood speaks for itself.*
Those who awakened — who drew the beast up out of the blood and lived — were tested for the abilities the awakening had given them, and then, at the awakening ceremony, sorted by those abilities into the different sects of the training temples.
Kei sat with all of it settling into him, the room dark and damp around him and the torn chains at his feet, and understood, at last, exactly what building he was sitting in, and exactly what he was three days away from.
