@generalorcaptain from here He never remembered a time before all the scars. His mom had said he was born with them when he asked. The look she'd shared with his dad had said more than her words alone had. What kind of soulmate must he have?
.Scars like rope burns on his wrists, ankles and around his throat, whip marks across his back, a scar on his lower left side, another on his right shoulder. He was even missing a toe. Titus grew up not giving them much thought, but when he helped his dad with the ships or went fishing with friends or swimming, he saw the looks people gave him every time he took his shirt off. A mix of pity and horror. What kind of soulmate does he have?
They assumed that anyone who had that many scars must have been some kind of criminal or something, which made them question what that meant about him, for being the soulmate of someone like that. It started to frustrate him the older he got. He started hiding them, glaring any time he caught someone giving him that look again. But he started to wonder the same thing that he'd seen in their eyes for years.
The first time he got a noticeable scar was after Cavaugh was destroyed, after he'd joined the King's Guard. The tip of a sword caught him across the face, cutting the bridge of his nose before skipping down his cheek. He was lucky it wasn't worse. Very lucky.
There was some tiny bit of satisfaction, petty though it may be, that he'd finally left a mark on his soulmate.
What surprised him a little was just a few days later, when he noticed an identical scar on the face of a young man he'd literally never seen before in his life while at store. He didn't give it much thought before moving over to the man.
"Excuse me. Did you just get that?" he asked, motioning to the scar.
Ardyn didn’t have a soul mate. He remembered as a child, always looking for a scar or a bruise. Any sign of the person the god’s had given him. But each day, each month, each year his skin remained flawless. By the time he got the scars from Shiva, he’d long since given up on having a soulmate. So he found himself relieved when the Oracle was attracted to him, when she wished him for a husband. Her holy destiny meant she had no soulmate, to keep her loyalty to the gods. Which meant she’d never leave him for someone better.
But of course, they got too attached. Then they lost their children, lost their happy ending, and he was left cursed. He at least could be relieved to know that the death scars he acquired would never touch anyone else. Shiva’s punishment and the lost toe from frostbite would have been bad enough. But then zealots whipped him to death for interfering with the Oracle’s destiny. His brother had rescued him, and then centuries later he led a failed revolt ending in him being lashed to a boat by ropes. Then the gun got invented, and he learned fast to avoid those. Each time he thought “at least no one but me has to deal with this” and moved on.
Then one day, 2000 years after he was born it happened. He looked in a mirror and saw a scar on his face he knew he didn’t acquire on his own. A soulmate, now? He laughed bitterly, the Astral’s had a sense of humor, didn’t they? He cringed at the thought of the poor child growing up with an immortals scars. They must hate him, for the stigma that would have left. A mortal looking like this would have been a terrible match, someone people would judge them for. And really, hadn’t he done his share of illegal shit? He got drunk that night, then put the scars out of his mind.
A few days later he was browsing on a stop off, and a young man stopped him. He was handsome, tall, muscular. And he had a matching scar on his face as Arydn, to say nothing about the ugly rope marks around his throat, the peaking evidence of similar under his shirt sleeves. Ardyn swallowed.
“A few days ago yes, I imagine you were born with yours.” He said, “If you’d like a drink I could explain.”
He usually avoided telling people he was immortal. But this young man had spent his entire life covered in the mess of his curse. He deserved to know.
“My name’s Ardyn Izunia by the way.”
