Home Is Where the Hate Is: A Broken Kid Fights for the Only Thing He Has
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points Story: “Home Is Where the Hate Is” Author: Mickey Zucker Reichert Series: Thieves’ World New Series, Book 1
Previous: The Introduction - Meet Cauvin
Meet Dysan
This story hit me harder than I expected.
Dysan is sixteen years old, but he looks seven. He lives in the ruins of an abandoned temple on the Avenue of Temples, a stretch of Sanctuary that nobody visits anymore because the Bloody Hand of Dyareela destroyed every altar, murdered every priest, and left the buildings to rot. Ten years later, the wreckage is still there. So is Dysan.
He can’t count past five. He can’t do small talk. He’s perpetually underfed, undersized, and dressed in rags. But he speaks every language he’s ever heard with perfect fluency, down to the accent. Ilsigi, Rankene, Wrigglie, the coded tongues of spies and thieves. He picks them up like other people pick up colds.
That talent is both the best and worst thing that ever happened to him. The Bloody Hand of Dyareela figured out what he could do when he was small, and they turned him into their personal listening device. They taught him to steal, to climb, to squeeze his tiny body into impossible spaces. They sent him to taverns and gatherings to sit quietly with a bowl of goat milk and report back every conversation he overheard. In exchange, they didn’t torture him as badly as the other orphans.
That’s the deal. That’s his childhood. Don’t get tortured as much because you’re useful.
The Brother He Lost
Dysan’s brother Kharmael was everything Dysan isn’t. Big, strong, healthy, with strawberry-blond hair from their father. They shared a mother and nothing else, genetically speaking. Their mother was a sex worker near the Street of Red Lanterns. Dysan’s father could be anyone. His mother had contracted a disease from a client that damaged Dysan in the womb. That’s why he stopped growing. That’s why counting breaks his brain while languages come naturally.
Kharmael kept Dysan alive in the Dyareelan Pits. Literally. Without his brother bullying him into eating, moving, staying awake, Dysan would have been sacrificed to Dyareela as a weakling.
Then the Irrune destroyed the Bloody Hand. The Torch (yes, the same Molin Torchholder from the Introduction) interviewed each orphan. Dysan said he wanted to stay in the Pits. He meant it. It was all he knew. But Dysan used his skills to break Kharmael out of solitary confinement, and together they went back to gather their things.
The other orphans were feasting on raw horsemeat. Kharmael joined them. Dysan’s stomach was too weak. Kharmael forced a bite on him. By midnight, everyone was vomiting. By morning, Dysan woke up to find his brother cold beside him.
The meat was poisoned. All the orphans died. Dysan survived because he’d barely eaten any. And then the men who came to clean up set everything on fire, not knowing anyone was alive. Dysan tried to drag Kharmael’s body out. He couldn’t. His brother burned, and Dysan barely escaped through a window with his own clothes on fire.
He’s been alone for ten years.
Someone Wants His Home
So when a group of Rankan women buy the ruined temple and hire a stonemason to rebuild the walls, Dysan takes it personally. This ruin is everything he has. The crumbling walls, the leaky ceiling, the mud path, the crawl space where he sleeps wedged between ceiling beams. It’s his.
And he fights for it the only way he knows how. Not directly. He’s too small for that. He fights like the spy he was trained to be.
First, he waits until the stonemasons leave, then spends all night kicking out the foundation stone until the entire freshly built wall collapses on him. He gets crushed by falling rocks, bruises his hip, wrenches his wrist, and limps to bed barely able to walk. But the wall is down.
The next day, the masons come back, see the wreckage, and start over. This time they mortar the stones. So Dysan switches tactics. He sneaks down while the women sleep, steals their money, releases mice, snakes, lizards, and frogs into their bedrolls, and sets one of their blankets on fire by dipping the edge into their campfire.
Here’s the thing. Every act of sabotage nearly kills him. The wall collapse buries him in rubble. And the fire triggers a nightmare about the Pits. He dreams about Kharmael dying, about dragging his brother’s burning body, about the smoke and the flames and the window. He wakes up screaming for the first time in seven years.
And that scream is what gives him away.
The Women of Sabellia
The women are not just random settlers. They’re a Sisterhood dedicated to the goddess Sabellia. They’ve been sent from Ranke to spread their faith to the women of Sanctuary through good works and charity. Not the bloody sacrifice kind. The actual help-people kind.
Their leader is Raivay SaVell, an older woman with sharp yellow eyes who sees way more than she lets on. She’s been watching Dysan since the beginning. When the masons first found their wall destroyed, SaVell’s gaze swept the ceiling like she could feel him hiding there. And when Dysan finally falls through the ceiling (SaVell uses priestly magic to collapse the beams under him), she’s not surprised at all.
The other women see a hurt child and immediately start cooing over him. “He’s so cute.” “Adorable.” “Poor little one.” Dysan is a sixteen-year-old former spy-assassin who just spent three days vandalizing their property, but he looks like he’s seven. The disconnect is almost funny.
But Dysan reveals his real power when the women switch to their private coded dialect, thinking he can’t understand. He listens to them debate what to do with him. SaParnith wants to scare him off. SaMavis worries about making their religion look bad. SaVell insists they can’t act like the Dyareelans.
Then Dysan speaks to them in their own secret language. Perfect accent. Every word.
The room goes completely still.
Finding Home Again
This is the part that got me.
SaVell uses a small touch of divine magic on Dysan. Not violent. Not controlling. Just a warmth that strips away his defenses and sends his mind back to the feeling of his brother’s arms around him. For a kid who hasn’t been touched with kindness in ten years, it’s devastating. He starts crying and confesses everything.
“I live here. You’re going to take away my home. My home!”
And then SaMavis just picks him up and holds him. This grown woman rocks a sixteen-year-old former street orphan like a baby, and he doesn’t fight it. He goes limp. He lets himself be warm.
The negotiation that follows is practical and a little funny. Dysan offers to share the space. He can crawl into small places for repairs. He’s good at listening. In exchange: hot meals, real walls, a bed without a hole in the bottom.
“Welcome to my home,” Dysan says.
“Our home,” SaVell corrects him.
My Thoughts
Reichert does something difficult here. She takes a character with an absolutely horrific backstory and makes him feel real without turning the story into trauma porn. Dysan’s pain is specific. The poisoned horsemeat. The brother he couldn’t save from the fire. The way he uses anger as fuel because the Bloody Hand taught him that was the only way to focus. These aren’t generic sad-kid details. They’re the particular scars of a particular life.
And the ending earns its warmth because Reichert doesn’t rush it. Dysan isn’t “saved” by the women of Sabellia. He negotiates. He reveals his value. He makes a practical choice to share rather than lose everything. The comfort he accepts at the end isn’t surrender. It’s a kid who’s been running on survival instinct for a decade finally deciding that maybe he doesn’t have to do this alone.
The small details are great too. The way Dysan always charges “five” for jobs because it’s the highest number he can reliably handle. The goose attack at Bezul’s shop. The stranger named Pel with blue eyes and wiry black-and-white hair who looks just enough like a former Dyareelan priest to trigger Dysan’s memories. That’s a thread that’s clearly going somewhere.
This is one of the strongest stories in the collection. It’s self-contained but leaves you wanting to know what happens to Dysan next. Which is exactly what a good anthology story should do.