The Midnight Star (The Young Elites #3)(44)

He was pure. Superior. And he would follow in his father’s footsteps.



Teren was eleven years old in the second memory.

The blood fever had swept through Kenettra earlier in the year, so his eyes were no longer a pure ocean blue, but pale, so pale that they were inhuman, a complete lack of color. He stood with a bowed head and heavy heart before the funeral pyre upon which his father’s body lay. The fire had spread now from the kindling to the late Lead Inquisitor’s clothes. Teren stayed silent as the flames roared. His father had gotten sick only after Teren did—but while Teren had managed to survive, the blood fever had killed his father in only two days.

Teren knew it was his fault. It had to be. The gods did not make mistakes, and he knew he had to have been marked by the fever for a reason.

Later that night, Teren crept out of his chambers and fled down to the palace temple. There, in the dark recesses and pools of candlelight, he knelt before the gods and sobbed. The Inquisition Axis doctrine specifically taught that survivors of the blood fever were abominations, a punishment from the gods.

He was a demon now. What had he done? He whispered to the temple floor as he knelt. Before him loomed a statue of Holy Sapientus, the god of Wisdom. Why my father? Why didn’t you take me too?

He knelt there for three days, until he was thirsty and starving. How far I’ve fallen, he thought to himself, over and over again until the thought seemed embedded in his very being. I was once superior—and now I’m nothing. My father is dead because of me. Trash. Filth.

Suddenly, in a fit of desperation, Teren grabbed the hilt of his sword and pulled it out. It was the same sword his father had gifted him on the day he joined the Inquisition as an apprentice. He took the sword, placed its blade against one of his wrists, and slashed as hard as he could. He cried out at the jolt of pain. Blood bloomed instantly against his skin.

But, then . . . the wound closed. Teren saw it close, watched with his mouth agape as one side of the slashed flesh rejoined with the other, sealing shut. The pain disappeared.

Teren blinked at the sight. Then he tried slashing his wrist again.

Again, the wound bloomed with blood—before closing.

It can’t be. Teren tried a few more times, gritting his teeth at the pain and then in horror as the pain faded almost instantly. He cut himself more and more frantically, trying to spill more of his blood. But he couldn’t. Each time, the wound healed itself as surely as if it had never happened at all.

Finally, Teren flung the sword away. He collapsed at the feet of Sapientus, weeping. He couldn’t even end his life. He was cursed forever by the blood fever.

He stayed in the temple for another day. Then another. A few friends, other young apprentices, came to check on him. He pushed them away, refusing to answer their questions. He didn’t want to tell them the reason why he wouldn’t speak to them—that it was because he was no longer an equal, but a dog who dared to talk to a man. He didn’t want to speak because he was terrified of the horrible, secret power the blood fever had left with him.

The question haunted him every night he stayed in the temple. Why would the gods let him survive the blood fever marked and disgraced, and then take away the ability for him to end his life? What did they want him here for? Why were they forcing him to stay?

On his last night in the temple, he drove his fist down against the ground in frustration. To his shock, the marble of the floor cracked beneath his knuckles, leaving a hundred jagged lines in the stone. Teren stared, frozen. He held his hand up to the moonlight, observing that his knuckles had healed over and left no mark or injury behind at all.

The gods had made him an abomination—and then given him near-invincibility and strength.

Perhaps they have punished me for a reason, Teren thought. He knelt quietly before Sapientus for the rest of that night, thinking. The next morning, he left the temple.



Teren was sixteen in the third memory.

Though his father’s legacy shielded him from punishment, he’d been kicked out of the Inquisition Axis for being an abomination—but that still didn’t stop him from staying faithful to the crown, trying always to find some way or other to prove that he wanted to devote what little worth he had to serving the throne, to serving the gods.

So he scouted on his own, secretly helping the Inquisition root out malfettos without making himself known. He would follow those he suspected around the city, watching them talk and laugh with their families. Whenever he found a malfetto, he would creep to their door in the night and mark it with the Inquisition’s symbol. The Inquisitors didn’t know he did this, but they must have been grateful for his secret spying.

Then, one afternoon, he stumbled across an apothecary.

It was a charming, small shop, run by a white-haired old man and his cheerful daughter, a beautiful Tamouran girl with a quick smile and infectious laugh. Teren would stop by several times a week to watch them taking orders from customers. Something seemed off to him about the girl. Her name was Daphne. Sometimes, Teren would see her run deliveries in the city. She would take so many winding paths that he’d always lose her in the busy streets. When she returned to the apothecary in the afternoons, Teren would wonder where she had disappeared to.

Until he heard a rumor about a group called the Dagger Society, a supposed team of demonic malfettos with frightening powers not of this world. Apparently, Daphne used her father’s apothecary as a place where she would create pastes that would cover malfetto markings. She helped the Daggers and others paint over their markings. Teren thought that Daphne was the one responsible for keeping the Daggers hidden.