"<I am not long for this world,>"

Grigori Rasputin had dreams of the day he would die. Not nightmares, for the release of death comforted him. He was close to the Lord. He was strong with his faith, stronger than many around him. Yet many accused him of darker practices, centered around his alleged meetings with the Khlyst sect. Those who followed the Khlyst denounced holy doctrine, saints, and only relied on the spoken word for communion with God. There was always the possibility, according to those who feared them, that they were instead speaking to darker beings. And so, whenever those who looked into Rasputin's eyes flinched with terror, they were quick to blame those unseen hands working in the shadows.

Rasputin knew his love for God, and his strength with the Lord often mirrored the fear of the Devil. Tsar Nicholas II, last of his kind, trusted Rasputin above all other mortal men. That was the former peasant's only protection in life, however. With Nicholas leading his men in the trenches, turmoil at home boiled and simmered. Within a week, Rasputin would be dead. He knew this.

"<I shall not leave it,>"

He would often touch the rings that the Khlyst sect had kept for him, or so they said. He locked them away in a pine box, laden with chains, under a secret compartment in his room. Their latent potential, the energies within called out to him. But he could not wear them - not just yet. He needed more time, just one more ritual and it would be enough to...

"<But not with that as part of my story.>"

His convictions, however, were too strong. The rings could be destroyed, but not by any source of power yet discovered on Earth at his time. With them he would wreak terrible vengeance once more upon those who defied the word of God, but then that would go against the very nature of God, embracing the self-destructive and not the restorative. And so they stayed in their confinement, and Rasputin waited for his fate to unfold into the unsettling mystery it became.

The Khlyst would eventually retake the rings, and keep them for another who would come close to true immortality. Their mission was ever to create the ideal human, wrought of human flesh and nothing else, given tools with which to embody every facet of humanity. Its tempers, kindnesses, jealousies, benevolence, cruelties - the veritable hydra of emotion and impulsiveness that it could be at any given moment. Only then, could they die out after accomplishing what their communions with a higher power were established to do. Only then could the Khlyst vanish into history.

For thirty more years after Rasputin's death, the Khlyst waited. Those with curiosity to achieve, came. Many were consumed by the rituals, but only one ever received the rings again.

One without limits to his desperation.

The rings were meant to be used in tandem with the blood rituals of the Khlyst sect. Without them, the body would either be destroyed or the rings would simply not respond. Further along the echelons of the rituals, the wielder would become more accustomed to their power. Rasputin ever only used some of them once, since his trials with the Khlyst were interrupted by his demise.

When Heiji San'Vun deserted his unit during the Second Sino-Japanese War, he was afraid of death. He became terrified of what it meant, that absolute nothing. Over the course of the decades, and with the countless scars embedded in his flesh, he began to become comfortable with the idea. Things are meant to end, but through the irony of ending life to obtain his goals he could no longer end his own. The rings are a constant reminder of that failure, even in the success of mastering them.