Rasputin
Legacy Name: Porcelain Heart

Most of Rasputin's dreams are lucid.

Even in the world of his birth, he had all but mastered the art of controlling his dreams, and he would spend many nights indulging magical powers he could not experience in his waking life. Sometimes, he dreamed himself back to places he had visited; more often, he dreamed of places about which he had only read.

And, occasionally, he dreamed that he traveled through strange lands where he met strange people, and even stranger beings whom he couldn't think of as “people” at all. They shared with Rasputin esoteric knowledge which he pondered upon waking, wondering if it might be true. He also wondered if those who imparted it to him might be more than mere constructions of his own subconscious, independent entities who actually existed somewhere in the world. . . or somewhere outside of it.

Yet Rasputin never seriously considered that there might be life beyond the Earth he knew, until he was snatched away from that Earth himself and thrust into the midst of another world teeming with life human, demihuman, and nonhuman alike. Now, with the magical abilities he's gained, he is able to reach the Dreamlands almost every night. He believes wholeheartedly that the creatures he meets there are real, and that they hail from many different worlds beyond the two he's known.

He knows such worlds exist because he's seen the doors that lead to them, and met an entity who can open and close those doors at will.

◈

Most of Rasputin's dreams are lucid, but the night he meets the vampire woman called Rip Van Winkle, they are not. She's been drawn into this new world just as he was, and she asks him a question no other newcomer ever has: “Who is the girl? The pretty little girl in the black dress, with ribbons in her hair. The one who brought us here. Who is she?”

Rasputin answers Rip honestly, “I don't know. I saw her only once.”

Yet later that night, he sees the girl again when he relives his own arrival in a dream he can't control.

◈

“Drown in the lake of Hell!”

As Grigori Rasputin sinks into frigid water, his body is too weak to fight its way back to the frozen surface even though his mind is fully, horribly aware of everything: pain and cold and realization that those are the last human words he'll hear on Earth. . . the bitter curse of his murderer condemning him to suffer eternally the death which is overtaking him.

No, it won't end like this—I refuse to die! his brain declares. Yet his body—poisoned, shot, beaten, and now freezing and drowning at the same time—does not listen. It defies his will and his intellect, and he thinks, In the end, we are no better than the animals. Human determination. . . it means nothing. . . .

Rasputin has been holding his breath, willing his stupid body not to instinctively inhale the icy water, and the lack of oxygen makes his lungs burn and his vision begin to go dark. Thus, when time and the swirling water come to a halt around him, and a door appears to swing open in the very fabric of reality, he assumes it's a hallucination—a trick of his fading eyes.

But then, he can no longer hold his breath, and when he inhales involuntarily, somehow it's air and not water his lungs draw in. Everything in the world surrounding Rasputin is at a standstill, yet a draft flows out of the open door before him. It ruffles the long hair and black dress of someone standing there in the doorway: a smiling girl with violet eyes and ribbons tied in her dark hair. Beyond her, he can see only darkness.

“Do you want to live?” she asks Rasputin. Her voice is that of a woman rather than a child, and he realizes that she's older than he thought: a young adult and not a little girl, despite her childish attire and mannerisms. Both her tone and smile are taunting as she dangles the promise of salvation before him.

He tries to speak, fluid gargles in his throat, and he thinks he's inhaled water after all until he spits out a mouthful of blood instead.

“Of course I want to live!” he rasps when he's able. His aching body is cold and trembling, and he can scarcely make his lips move. “However I can survive—no matter what!”

“Heh. . . .” The girl's smile grows, showing a hint of teeth between her lips, and she holds out a white-gloved hand to him. “Then leave behind this world that's turned its back on you. Come with me!”

Rasputin thinks that taking her hand may be accepting an offer of salvation from an angel, or it may be making a deal with the devil. He doesn't care which it is, as long as it means his life won't end, and he reaches out his own shaking hand to close his fingers over hers.

The girl steps back, tugging Rasputin after her into the darkness beyond the doorway. The door behind him swings closed on the only world he's ever known, except in his dreams. . . and now Rasputin can see that it's just one door in a hallway lined with them, as far as his eyes can make out in either direction. Floor, ceiling, walls, and doors are black, everything black except for the edges and corners of the doors which glow in violet light, the same color as the girl's eyes.

Another door swings open across the hall from where they stand. Through it, Rasputin sees daylight, although it had been night as he drowned in Russia only a moment before. He's pulled towards the doorway, as if the draft of fresh air he'd earlier felt from the hallway is now blowing him out again. The girl's hair and skirts again flutter like they're being stirred by a playful breeze, and she lifts the hand still clasping Rasputin's.

Then she opens her fingers, letting go. His hand slips from hers, and he tumbles through the open doorway to land in a damp, bleeding, crumpled heap in another world. As he lies there on the ground, already warming under the springtime sun shining down on the grassy meadow where he's fallen, the door back to the hallway falls closed and disappears.

◈

Rasputin awakens with a gasp, still trembling with phantom pain and fear until he realizes he's been dreaming. It is again nighttime and winter is approaching, yet the snowy Russian night he nearly died is far away now in both space and time. As he lies alone in bed, willing his pounding heartbeat to steady, he thinks of all that has happened in the months since the girl in black tossed him into that strange new world.

He might yet have died, poisoned and bleeding out in the meadow where he lay, but he'd been found soon after by another man—or perhaps something only pretending to be a man, as Rasputin believes the girl in the hallway was only pretending to be a woman. Calling himself the Black King, the hooded figure had healed his wounds with the touch of a scarred hand, then asked Rasputin to join his cause.

The Black King described a war brewing in that world between human and nonhuman races. He claimed that the humans and demihumans such as elves and dwarves threatened to annihilate the nonhumans—goblins, kobolds, and the other races they deemed to be “monsters.”

“The humans have rejected those they consider unworthy. . . just as the human world turned its back on you,” the Black King had said in a deep voice from within the hood that always concealed his face.

The same thing she said, Rasputin thought. “Leave behind this world that's turned its back on you. . . .”

“Humans rejected me as well, and the salvation I offered them,” the King had continued. “And so now, I lead the fight to unite the nonhuman races against them. There are others like you who have joined me—those called Ends who were once human until they were cast aside and abandoned. They have renounced their humanity and been granted new powers with which to fight.”

“New powers. . . ?” Rasputin had echoed in a murmur, and the Black King nodded.

“Yes. Join me, Grigori Rasputin—reject your humanity and become an End, and you can possess all the magical powers you've only dreamed of.”

How do you know what I've dreamed? Staring up at the faceless man, Rasputin had thought of the strange entities he'd encountered in the Dreamlands and wondered if the Black King might be one of them. Do I know you? Have I met you before in my dreams?

Who are you?

Yet those were questions he dared not ask, and anyway, like that of the girl in the hallway, the identity of the man called the Black King wasn't really important to Rasputin. He wanted to live, no matter what, and he wanted all the power he could get. . . no matter what.

“Then I will become one of the Ends,” Rasputin had sworn without further hesitation. “I will join you. . . my Black Lord.”

He did not become an End alone, for Rasputin's princess also came stumbling into that world: Anastasia Romanova, former Grand Princess of Russia. Though Anastasia and her family had been betrayed and shot about two years after Rasputin's supposed murder, to him only a day passed before she arrived and the Black King healed her of her deadly wounds.

At Rasputin's urging, Anastasia too joined the Ends, and upon rejecting the humans who'd turned on her, she gained supernatural powers as well. The very ice and snow that nearly claimed Rasputin's life became Anastasia's to control. In combat, she had only to murmur, “Everyone, sleep,” and her enemies would. They'd sleep forever, instantly frozen to the core by the winter wind at her command.

Nearly always at her side like a shadow, Rasputin recognizes that his princess is no longer the gentle girl she'd been in their former world. That world had broken her heart, and unlike her wounds, it has not healed. Instead, Anastasia has frozen it as she does her enemies, almost to its own core.

Almost. Very rarely, Anastasia's cold eyes will burn with light as they once did; very rarely, her pale lips will smile for him, and Rasputin will realize that she does still love him, as he still loves her. They are each other's family now, the last vestige of happier times shared in the world they left behind.

But otherwise, Anastasia's heart remains frozen, and Rasputin believes that's for the best. He's protected his own heart the same way, devoting himself solely to the Black King's cause and using his newfound powers to make himself indispensable to his lord. Rasputin possesses no offensive magic like Anastasia's; as when he'd been merely human, his strength lies within his mind.

He can manipulate or even take control of those who are weak-minded, and he can project his thoughts to communicate with others at great distances. Rasputin alone has orchestrated the system under which the Black King is uniting the world's nonhuman races, creating in weeks all the trappings of civilization which took humankind millennia to develop back on Earth: language, writing, religion.

The Black King will one day control this world, Rasputin is certain—yet he himself controls the architecture that supports his lord's rule.

And I won't lose that control, not this time, he thinks now as he waits for sleep to overtake him once more. I won't become overconfident and careless as I did in Russia. I will keep my control over the Black King's government, just as I keep my control over myself. . . over my heart and my dreams.

Except he hasn't maintained control over the latter this night, when instead of lucid dreaming he's been forced to relive how he gave up his destiny to a smirking girl in a black dress, in exchange for his life.

And, as he recalls the look in Rip Van Winkle's beautiful cobalt eyes and the tone of her melodious voice as she asked him, “Who is the girl? Who is she?”, Rasputin fears that he's lost control of his heart as well.

artwork by fil

Advisor of Maliciousness

Credits

◈ Fan pet for the character Grigori Rasputin from the manga and anime Drifters, inspired by the historical figure
◈ Profile and story by Balloon
◈ Background images from Drifters anime official art and screenshot, edited by me
◈ Other images from Drifters and Hellsing anime screenshots, edited by me