by Tony Johnson
Accepting the odd offer, Malorek bit into the delicious sandwich, only to also bite into a honeycomb filled with wasps hidden inside. Malorek was stung repeatedly on the inside of his mouth and throat and all over his hands. He immediately clawed at his neck and began turning blue.
“What did you do?” Emilia screamed at Cain, seeing Malorek fall on the ground unconscious. She looked for help from the foster parents, but they were too intoxicated to even walk a straight line.
“Help me!” she yelled.
Cain took a step back, scrunching his face in a way that showed he didn’t care, and said, “Don’t worry. He’ll be fine.”
“He’s going to die! Can’t you see that he’s allergic?”
“Why do you care so much anyway?”
“He’s my friend! I care about him,” she cried.
“I thought you cared about me?” Cain snarled, jealous that he had never gotten this level of attention from the girl he was attracted to.
“Who in their right mind would like someone like you?” Emilia spat.
Cain stomped to his room and slammed the door behind him, leaving Emilia to recruit a nearby orphan boy to help her take care of Malorek.
“You! Come here and help me take him outside,” she ordered. The boy obliged, and together they carried Malorek and laid him on the front steps of the orphanage. He awakened groggily, and Emilia could tell by his eyes that her friend was not all there.
“I hate my life,” Malorek mumbled. “Please let me die. I don’t want to live.”
“Help!” Emilia yelled, running down the street into the nearest square. A tall, veteran warrior with pieces of golden armor was the first to respond. Emilia led him to Malorek. Instantly recognizing what was wrong, the warrior scooped up the boy and ran to the nearest infirmary. Emilia followed behind, but was told to wait outside once she got to the building.
“Please help him, Alazar,” she prayed out loud. “It’s my fault that he’s so sad. I’m sorry. He’s always been kind to me. He doesn’t deserve to die.”
Within the hour, one of the clerics came out and spoke to the young, female Elf. “You did a good job in alerting that warrior. We were able to give him an antidote and save him before it was too late, but you should go home and get some sleep. You and the boy’s parents can come tomorrow to pick him up. We’ll let him sleep here tonight.”
Walking back to the orphanage, happy that Malorek would be okay, Emilia’s smile vanished as she saw Cain waiting on the front steps for her. Without warning, the bully grabbed the back of her head and smashed her face onto the concrete steps. With blood pouring out of her mouth and her now-crooked nose, he smashed it four more times before kicking her down the steps and leaving her on the side of the street. “You never should have pretended to like me so you could get treated better.”
Malorek awoke in the middle of the night, somewhat dizzy and nauseous, but alert enough to sneak out of the infimary without anyone seeing. He didn’t like being cared for by anyone except himself.
Heading straight for the orphanage, seething with anger, he was ready to take aggressive and violent measures to get his revenge on Cain for the years of pain and misery he had endured at the hands of his foster brother.
Halfway home, a voice called out from the shadows of a dark alleyway.
“Malorek?!” the voice asked in surprise.
“Emilia? What happened to you?” he asked, seeing her limping, with a tattered hood over her head. His tone was oddly calm, as if he was either overcompensating to hide his rage or he was totally at peace with what he was about to do.
She removed her hood to show off her broken nose, swollen eye, and multiple bruises. Then she plunged her face into Malorek’s chest and sobbed uncontrollably.
Pushing her off himself, Malorek walked away, making Emilia cry even harder. She ran in front of his path blocking him. “Malorek, I’m sorry. I know you think I’m only trying to be your friend again because that’s what I need since things didn’t work out with Cain, but it’s not true. You are my friend. I do care for you.”
Gently grabbing her shoulders and shifting her to the side, out of his way, Malorek’s only response was, “I’m going to fix everything.” With determination in his eyes, he continued walking toward the orphanage.
“No! Stop! What are you going to do?” Emilia asked frantically while grabbing his wrist, fearing Malorek was going to get hurt if he tried to fight Cain again.
“Just wait here,” he said in an annoyed voice.
“Don’t do this,” she cried. “You don’t have to get revenge for me.”
“I’m not,” Malorek said flatly. “I don’t care that he hurt you. I told you already we’re no longer friends. What I’m about to do, I’m doing for myself.”
Breaking out of Emilia’s grip, he left her standing alone. He bent down, picked up a large rock, and walked the rest of the way to the orphanage. Cautiously walking past his two unconscious, drunken foster parents, he gently pushed open the door to Cain’s room and found the bully fast asleep in his bed.
Malorek stood next to the boy who had troubled him for so many years. Moonlight shone through the window, casting his shadow on the wall as he raised the rock with both hands and smashed it down into Cain’s skull.
One blow was not enough. Cain awoke with a start, feeling his head explode in pain and a stream of blood run down his face. Before Malorek could bring down the rock again, Cain instinctively kicked at the intruder, sending him falling backwards to the floor. The overweight thirteen-year-old was on top of the smaller framed teenager in a heartbeat. He sat on Malorek’s stomach and used his hands to pin down his foster brother’s wrists so he couldn’t move.
Malorek flailed around on the floor, but could barely move an inch. Blood from Cain’s cut dripped onto his face. Malorek’s only means to defend himself was his mouth, so he jerked his head forward and bit down onto the Dwarven teenager’s nose. As soon as he felt it in his mouth, he closed his eyes in disgust, clenched his teeth even harder, and began pulling and jerking his head back as hard as he could.
Cain screamed in agony, released his grip on Malorek’s wrists, and wrapped his hands around his foster brother’s throat. Malorek opened his mouth to gasp for air, spitting out the tip of Cain’s nose in the process.
Feeling like his skull was being caved in from the rapid lack of oxygen, Malorek’s vision began to blacken. He could tell he was going to pass out again, like he did after the beatings, but this time, he knew he wouldn’t wake up.
Six quick footsteps crossed the wooden floor and a silver blade flashed, catching the light of the moon. Emilia came behind Cain and stabbed him repeatedly in the back with a long, sharp kitchen knife. She had a crazed look in her eyes and didn’t stop stabbing until Cain slumped over dead. She immediately sat on the floor with her knees pulled up to her chest and began sobbing uncontrollably.
Malorek pushed the dead body away, wiped the blood off his face, and walked over to Emilia. “Where did you get this?” he asked, gently removing the knife from her white-knuckled grasp. “The kitchen knives are always locked away.”
“Cain stole it from the market and kept it hidden under one of the floorboards. He showed me it last week,” she spurted out between tears.
Malorek sat on the bed behind Emilia and began massaging her shoulders. “Don’t worry,” he kept soothingly repeating, “everything’s going to be okay.”
Then, grabbing a handful of her hair and with a violent pull, he jerked her head backwards and used the sharp side of the blade to cut open her throat.
“You should have never abandoned me,” he told her softly as she died. “You’d still be alive if you would’ve let me die. That’s all I wanted. You took that from me. That was your mistake.”
For a couple minutes, Malorek sat on the edge of Cain’s bed, watching the growing pool of blood spread across the floor with a devilish smile on his face. Then he walked into the living room and took
the half-open bottles of alcohol and wildly poured them on the hardwood floor and all over the furniture.
This place would be better if it was burned to the ground. Out of all the kids who have grown up here, more than half of them end up as criminals within a couple years. This orphanage is a breeding place for evil. Killing them all will make the world a better place. He took a candle, threw it on the floor, and watched as it caught the flammable liquid on fire.
Before he walked out the door, the orphanage mother woke up, saw the fire, and alerted her husband.
Seeing Malorek with a disconcerting grin, the Dwarf yelled, “You stupid boy! What are you trying to do?” He picked up a glass bottle and threw it across the room, hitting Malorek in the forehead.
Forced to his hands and knees from the impact, the pain only fueled Malorek with greater fury. Many years of enduring the yelling, beatings, little food, and emotional trauma had caused him to reach a breaking point. In a rage, he shouted, “This world would be better without people like you!”
“People like us?” his foster father asked as his wife was slapping at the fire with a wet towel. She managed to put it out after a few swats before it spread too far. “All you were was an unwanted, abandoned boy we found on our doorstep. People like us are the ones who keep kids like you alive. We took you in, we provided for you, and you try to kill us and all your brothers and sisters while we sleep?”
“I am setting them free from the torture of this place. I am saving them from growing up to become like you two, worthless wastes of life.”
“You’re psychotic. You always were. Get out of this house and never come back. You are a threat to the safety of everyone here.”
“Your son knows that all too well,” Malorek declared.
The Dwarf’s eyes widened, but he stood exactly where he was and stared at the ruthless, smiling monster in front of him. Behind him, his wife sprinted into her son’s room. She let out a horrified scream when she found the dead bodies of her son and Emilia lying in a massive pool of blood.
Knowing that scream meant Cain was dead, the foster father closed his eyes. Opening them after a couple seconds, he asked, “Are you happy now? You got what you wanted.”
“Not yet,” he said. “You still have to pay for making my life miserable. But that can wait for another night.”
Then Malorek walked out the door.
Chapter 52
At the age of seventeen, Malorek became the youngest person in history to graduate from the warriors. He was the first pick in Celestial’s Warriors’ Draft and immediately began serving in his designated watchtower.
One day, while on patrol, he watched a father with his young son in hand briskly walking through Diamond Plaza. The father accidentally ran into a lady who was carrying a bucket of water, knocking her to the ground and causing the water to spill across the cobblestones.
“Aren’t you going to stop?” the child asked when his father continued to hurry across the plaza without apologizing.
“We don’t have time! We’ll be late,” the father harshly quipped, picking up his speed, dragging his son by the hand.
Malorek watched the boy break out of his father’s grasp and run back to the fallen women. He helped her to her feet, then took her bucket and began to walk to the well to refill it.
Before he could, however, the father forcefully grabbed his son’s arm and pulled him back. “I told you we are in a hurry! Let’s go!”
Malorek, stopping the two, got down on one knee and spoke to the boy. “Don’t listen to your father. You did the right thing in asking your dad to stop. It’s important to hold people accountable when they do bad things.” The worry on the child’s face from being scolded by his father was replaced with a smile when the warrior handed him a silver coin.
“You’re a better man than your dad,” Malorek spoke to the boy even though he was standing up and staring directly at the father.
For a moment, the father glared back with a red face and hands clenched into fists. Not breaking eye contact, Malorek reached down and gently rested his hand on the sword in his sheath. Go ahead and hit me if that’s what you want to do. I’ll cut your arm off before you get the chance.
Knowing there was nothing he could do to retaliate, the father turned his back and quickly walked away. “Come on. We’re leaving,” he scolded his son. The young boy followed his father, but not before looking back at Malorek and mouthing the words, “Thank you.”
The warrior nodded and looked at the puddle of spilled water he was standing in. The incident reminded him of his foster father treating him poorly and a promise he had made to the Halfman. It’s important to hold people accountable when they do bad things, Malorek repeated to himself.
That night, Malorek sat on a bench directly outside the orphanage he grew up in, honing his sword. He stared at the horizon, where a storm was rapidly forming. Above him, the clouds grew darker by the minute.
As he moved the whetstone up and down, sharpening the blade, he heard slurred yelling, children crying, and glass breaking.
In nine years of absence, not a thing has changed on the other side of those walls.
“It’s always like this.” The voice of a small Dwarven boy jolted him back into reality and out of his memories of the dark days of the orphanage.
“Do you live in there?” Malorek asked the eight-year-old who sat next to him on the bench.
The young Dwarf replied by nodding up and down and then responded, “Yes, and every day I wish I didn’t.”
“I used to live in there too, many years ago.”
“You? But you’re a warrior. What were you doing in a place like this?”
“My parents abandoned me here after I was born. How’d you end up here?” Malorek asked the kid.
“I never knew my father. As far as my mother, she was murdered. I was sent to live here in Celestial with her brother, my uncle. He runs this orphanage. I hate him though. I wish my mom was still alive.”
Malorek nodded, knowing how the boy felt. “What’s your name?”
“Grizz,” the boy said proudly.
“Well, Grizz, I’ll tell you what I learned growing up in that house. If you wake up every day and you feel there’s injustice, then you should try to do something to change it.”
“What can I do to change anything?” Grizz said, looking at his own body as if he was mentally willing himself to grow bigger and stronger at that very moment.
“Anyone has the power to force change, even someone as young as you. You just need the courage to do what’s necessary. Today though, I’ll take care of it, so you don’t have to worry about anything,” the warrior promised, leaving the boy on the bench and walking toward the orphanage. “When you wake up in the morning, things will be different.”
Heading up the same steps he’d been abandoned on as a baby, Malorek entered and saw that the house was in worse condition than when he left. His foster mother had become sickly thin, while his father had become even more obese. There were broken bottles of alcohol piled in the corners of the room and a foul odor that made Malorek wrinkle his nose.
The foster mom sat awkwardly propped up against a wall. Her face was puffed up on one side, and he could already see bruising had begun. It couldn’t have been more than a couple minutes from when she was struck.
Malorek stared at his foster father, who stood up and glared back, sizing him up and down with a puzzled look on his face as if to recognize where he knew this warrior from. His eyes widened when he finally remembered.
“Get out of my house!” he angrily slurred, thinking he was pointing to the door, even though he was facing the wall. He was too drunk to know the difference. When Malorek refused to move, the Dwarf, who was now fully bald with a bushy beard, pushed him in the chest. “You’re not welcome here!”
Not flinching from being pushed, Malorek sounded irritated as he warned the drunkard, “You can hit these kids and your wife all day without the fear
of consequences, but it’s a bad idea to push someone like me.”
A few of the orphans came out of their rooms and watched, eagerly anticipating what this warrior would do to the man they all despised. Grizz, who also had the feeling something terrible was about to occur, stood in the front doorway which was left open and watched the escalating argument until he noticed his foster mother sitting against the wall mouthing the words to him, “Go get help!”
“No,” Grizz shook his head, disobeying. He wouldn’t miss this for the world.
The orphanage owner was the type of person who believed he had incredible strength when he was intoxicated. Again he pushed Malorek, but this time tauntingly asked, “What are you going to do about it?”
In less than the blink of an eye, Malorek unsheathed his sword and cut off the arm of the man who had bruised and belittled him for all his childhood. As screams from the Halfman and surprised gasps from the observing children filled the air, Malorek raised his sword to deliver the final blow, but the Dwarf’s wife jumped on Malorek’s back, “No! Don’t do this!”
Still in a fit of rage from the bad memories, Malorek instantly threw her off and watched as she stumbled and fell, smashing her neck on the edge of a nearby table. After an awful cracking sound, she didn’t move.
Two warriors suddenly appeared in the doorway. They pushed Grizz out of the way, but Malorek could see the boy trying to peer through their legs to see what was going to happen next.
Malorek’s only escape was the window on the far side of the room. His one-armed foster father was directly in his path to the window, kneeling in the middle of the floor with blood spewing out of his arm. Malorek tightened his grip around his sword hilt, sprinted for the window, and, in one fluid motion, swung his sword, cutting off the Dwarf’s head.
The two warriors had already drawn their swords and were running after Malorek, so he quickly took the only dagger he had on him and threw it behind him at the closest warrior. The blade struck the man in the middle of the throat, and he fell to the floor with a look of panic on his face as he struggled in his last moments of life.
