Deuses Antigos, Rifles de Repetição e a Lei Seca

The sound of the steam whistle startled Luen awake.

For a moment, he was at a loss as to where he was.

Before him stretched an old-fashioned ship’s cabin, a gently swaying chandelier casting its yellowed light onto glass windows, beyond which lay an endless expanse of sea. The wind howled across the water, seeping in through unknown cracks, chilling him to the bone.

He shivered involuntarily, his head throbbing with pain.

Just last night, he had been at home, pulling an all-nighter over a card simulation game called “Name of the True God.” Why was he here now?

Rubbing his temples with his forefinger, unfamiliar memories began to surge through his mind.

Ethan Polletta, a native of Winston, a coastal city in the northern part of the Kingdom of Antustat; third son of the Polletta family, one of Winston’s five major mafia clans; nineteen years old, a sophomore in the classical painting department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Among his relatives, he was one of the few entirely uninvolved with the family's business.

As his father put it, “One among us must become a good man.”

At this moment, he should have been enjoying the moist warmth of the western coast, savoring the autumn in the capital and preparing for the fall exams. Yet a grim piece of news had forced him onto this homebound ship.

His father, Alberto Polletta, head of the family, had been gravely injured in an attack a few days ago and was now hovering between life and death. Ethan had to return home, to keep vigil at his father’s bedside, as tradition