Syrah Society

A Story by silverstar232

The son of an assassin overlord is challenged of his beliefs an ultimate test of loyalty, where he confronts destiny and dares to defy a life-altering trial.

The trajectory of my life was defined by my first sip of wine, poured away into the steady stream of a singular rivulet that’s run its course down the channel of life, ending at the rim’s brink of a glinting glass cup nestled perfectly into my hands. It tasted alien, in a sense: like a nameless phantom roaming the once-unsullied halls of my throat... and though unknown, it felt -- somehow -- familiar. Sharp, but sweet. Intense, but lulled.

I run my own damn thoughts to the ground with these pitiful ramblings of mine. Now those blasted voices in that ruddy head of mine -- I swear to Dionysus -- has me coughing up clotted blood in crimson clumps -- I blame the wine -- the brittle, teeming dome I own at the cusp of collapse, its teetering tank just about ready to billow.

I’ve kept myself busy in the company of myself: a far cry from an easy feat.

The barren, sleepless room of an underground chamber loomed its lone, life-leaching walls about me, demanding something I can’t offer. The borders resounded in soundless, mocking echoes, testing my resolve in its unsparing invitation to victims, with a leaden mass of asphyxiating air loomed over me, anticipating my inevitable disappointment --

-- and to think, the very person that stood before me was both my source of strength and the root of my greatest burden.

+++

June 4th, 1983.

The day marked my passing of the first official trial required of me by initiation into the Syrah Society.

Hoh. Come to think of it, it was Father’s Day, too, that time. Here in Lithuania.

The high-stake expectations of my fulfilment of the role as a contract-killer subordinate to my father, Solomon, were ever present now… seeing as I was the sole descendent of the overarching overseer of our underground business.

I remember wiping the wry, all-mighty-looking insolence off of such unsuspecting faces. A newfound sense of delight swept over me in a cascade of ascendancy in trouncing my conceited co-agents; the wave inbound did a fine job washing off all remaining traces left of their arrogant features.

I’d proven myself to them.

But at what cost?

I won the only treat worth half the troubles of my throes. Met liquor, got to know it. First chance I had, I took a hearty swill, relished it well. Honest to Bacchus, I can’t recall a time before it. How’d I go a day without grape is beyond me.

That same twisted night, Father ‘Lord Solomon’ had at long last publicly announced my standings as his son.

He said he’d been watching over then. I wonder if his view was any good.

He’d have seen me, rooted. A goddam heap slumped to my feet. Limbs lolled, paler than white-lightning moonshine whiskey. My dull feet were stubborn as all hell. Wouldn’t inch a muscle for the life of me. So I just took it in: the vacant look to his eyes. I don’t think it’ll ever leave me.

Then a sigh caught my ears.

I had sworn I’d heard an audible exhale trickle along the ivory illusion of layered cement, just behind the foolproof mirror sunken into the stifled white-washed walls.

+++

Now, the second time ‘round, I found myself in the same room, same conditions, same gun.

But a new target. No longer a stranger.

I lifted the steel solace of my gun, pointing the barrel at her reposeful figure, an inflating and deflating entity of silent faith staring me down with a gaze that almost made me shift the firearm along to my own damn head.

My fingers gripped at the handle, secret sweat tracing the trigger, and with a ‘click’--

--the bullet narrowly whirred by her ear and shattered the glass behind her, tearing through the facade of a two-sided mirror that crumbled pathetically away from Solomon’s stunned and speechless frame.

It seemed the lethal little bugger streaked its way past the fractured reflector and into the stock-still sternum of the assassin overlord of Syrah Society -- my own father, at that.

Fate spilled its stream. The bespatter of syrah-tinted wine gurgled. Tumbled. A ripple of velvet-mottled glass shards sent splinters spewing. A gush of claret-stained smithereens made their way down into the abyss below. A speckled scene of laurent-hued spluttered.

A single, clamouring thought rang out like the decree of a numbskulled nutcase; the pestering voices inside called out to my inner merry madman, their murmurs as drunken as their master’s:

“how terrifying and yet… magnificent,” they told me.

Until that moment, I had never seen so much red before…

and that’s coming from an avid wine addict.