ashes [vino series]

{ v i n o • r a s o i o }

When I came of age and lost the right to shudder at the sound of my own name I thought I'd reached pinnacle. Like ripping into ropes and weights that tethered my sturdy feet to death's lottery - the sigh that followed came with a sense of greed and narcissism. I allowed my life to take on the role of the axis of my world; perceived pinnacle came with the coming of age at nineteen and I could silently exhale whenever someone spoke the name Vino Rasoio and left it as a broken noun lacking a follow up.

Tough lessons learned are always followed by the bitterest of bites, it was ridiculous to me to mark my coming of age as a pinnacle of my saving grace; there are countless others who hold the surname Rasoio and haven't yet torn razor blades into the paper weights that bind them to the reaper's crystal ball. And the silent house and the television screen can only tell its story in shades of red is evidence of the bitterness that follows a tough lesson learned.

He would never reach pinnacle.

He was a boy with who could still see the coming of age as a final horizon in sight. He belonged home with a razor cap in his hand, not holding a blade as large as himself but at least double the size of his odds of coming home in anything but a box marked by a name and a number - his final morbid definition. For all my muscle and all my bravado, it was nothing but pure desperation and a lack of foresight that led to me breaking the silence I crave and issuing a final task that was barely in his control.

('don't you dare die')

When I clench my fists, it is not because he was pulled away from us to test his already fragile faith in a divinity we cannot see but because I knew the final result and still knew to this day.

When I see the spear pierce his skin one last time I can hear charred remains of our old house crumbling down, the foundations unable to withstand the test of flames. He bleeds, he cries and he

falls.

Everything is nothing more than a screaming blur, for one part of me yells at him to get up and slit the crusader's throat with his glaive. Or to plunge it into his eye with the one hit wonder precision he had the day before but I've seen it too many times to do anything but cut my losses but he was more than a liability and far greater than an asset or a leader.

"Ripred will welcome you back Jenoah, you just have to go to him."

This is the part when I'm supposed to get onto my knees and pray but Jenoah's final fight with belief was settled the moment his glaive failed to pierce Ansgar's sturdy systems and throw a wrench in the belief driving his rusted cogs and rattle the divinity guiding his spear. I prayed the night he left us and never since. "I'm sorry Jenoah, I'm so so sorry."

And I knew he was more than just the product of razor blades sewn into the fabrics of our world of violence and war, he was the one Rasoio who I was sure than when I touched his chest I would feel a heart of gold, not mechanical cogs and gears feeding a drive for violence and money. He wasn't made to breathe synthetic air and spend his final days missing two fingers in the presence of a madman waiting to slit his throat. He should've been with us, holding a razor cap and enlightening everything with his strategies and knowledge - he reminded me that the world did not revolve around my pinnacle and coming of age.

And this pain doesn't come with the failed result of testing a fragile belief system, but from the fact that I anticipated the result and still remained present to watch it come to fruition.

Holding back a wounded howl of agony, I silence the television and revel in the silence. I've seen fire snuff out what brought me into the world, bruises and battered people beyond repair and reveled in blood money without so much as an apology for fear of breaking the silence while all Jenoah did wrong was leave us with a fragile belief in to be tested; Ripred's always been one to back the righteous and the kind ones with a heart of gold.

So why have I had years to hold my pinnacle as the center of the world's axis while Jenoah's was shattered with the thrust of a spear?