Prologue Skara Brae, the City of Assassins. My name is Salrion Grayson, and for seventeen years, I've been forced to live in this hellish city. Spanning over one hundred square miles, hunger, sickness, and war are all that plague this city. For centuries the assassin clans have been at war with each other. It all started over three hundred years ago, a simple slip of a blade started the whole war. Sides were chosen and lines were drawn, and ever since then, death is all that this war has gained. There are many clans that are so small and insignificant that nobody speaks of them. All in all only three clans have been large enough and strong enough to survive for the whole war. The Mythic Blades, who are the more aggressive clan and kill without mercy. The Voice of Death, who are the more political and passive of the three, preferring to fight with words rather than weapons. And the final clan, The Keepers of Blood, a perfect balance between aggression and passiveness, also the clan to which I belong. I joined the Keepers when I was just five years old. I witnessed an assassin who belonged to the Keepers, kill a man in cold blood. Instead of killing me for what I had seen, he brought me to our leader, Durzo, and I was recruited. I lived as a normal child until the age of twelve, when my training began. Each morning I would be woken up before it was even light out, and train for hours on a practice dummy until I had memorized every stroke of the blade and could execute them flawlessly and with deadly speed. I, along with the other recruits I trained with, were taught many things. We learned how to remain unseen, talk our way out of anything, and most importantly, take a life. For the Keepers, killing is an art. The blade the brush, the victim the canvas, and the kill the masterpiece. We were desensitized from killing and taught to have no emotions. Any recruit who showed regret after a kill was immediately put to death. Durzo believed that being emotionless made us strong and that to show emotion gave us a weakness to be preyed on by our enemies. Even with all the training and killing, life was pretty good being a Keeper. We were allowed to do anything we wanted while not training or completing a contract as long as we followed three rules. Always obey, do not betray, and never love. Right from the start we were all taught obedience. If we disobeyed an order or did not complete a task the right way, we were beaten with the flat side of our swords. I only ever received one beating for back talking an officer, but most recruits received them more than twice a day. Betrayal is self explanatory. You betray your clan or give out information to anyone but Durzo, you die. Love however is a bit more complicated. As I said before, we are not allowed to show emotion openly, and the worst emotion you can possibly show is love. To Durzo, love is vile and despicable. It shows weakness beyond compare and is unforgivable, because if you love then your enemy has an advantage over you. They can take whatever you love away from you and destroy you from the inside without ever touching you. Because of this, within the Keepers, the most severe crime you can commit is love, and I am guilty. What makes my love different and an even greater crime however, is that I am in love with another assassin from an enemy clan....