The First Champion

by Sandell Wall

  Kaiser just did not have the energy to be angry anymore. For six months in Praxis, he had been consumed by his rage. It had driven him. It had defined him, and if he was honest, it had almost destroyed him. Looking back, when he asked himself if Mariel would have approved of his behavior, Kaiser was ashamed to admit that she would have been appalled.

  Mariel’s gracious nature had been what held Kaiser in check. Before finding her, he had been on the reaver’s path. His world had been one of paranoia, subterfuge, and slaughter. That was how he had been trained from early childhood. The painful lessons learned in the catacombs beneath Tarragon Cathedral never left him. But with Mariel at his side, Kaiser had learned another way to live.

  She had taught him happiness. Together, they made a family, and through them Kaiser found a joy that he had not known was possible. As Tarathine and Saredon grew, he exchanged paranoia for pride, and he had used his position to protect his family. Determined to keep them safe, he became the most powerful reaver in recent history. Yet Kaiser’s old nature still lurked beneath the surface, watching, waiting, and whispering to him that he was a fool.

  When Mariel died, Kaiser’s old self reared up to reassert its dominance. For a time, he gave himself over to it. The harsh lessons of his childhood had covered him like a cloak against the pain. Everything his instructors said had been true. To survive, you had to numb yourself to all feeling. That way, you made yourself invincible.

  But like her mother before her, Tarathine would not let Kaiser disappear down the suffocating hole of his despair. No matter how bleak things seemed, she had pulled him back from the precipice time and again. After a while, Tarathine’s unwavering love had gained the upper hand on Kaiser’s anger, and it had started to fade.

  And then they found Sorrell. Kaiser glanced at her as he paced. She rested with her back against the stone wall. Her eyes were closed, but he did not think she was sleeping. There was the slightest, subtle thickening around her midsection. The first sign of the child growing inside her.

  Kaiser had not been prepared for Sorrell. She reminded him so much of Mariel. They even looked alike. Sorrell was what Kaiser imagined Mariel would have become in a different world. She possessed the same strength of character and will that had drawn him to Mariel in the first place.

  Looking back, Kaiser understood now that he had allowed his attraction to Sorrell to subvert his grief over Mariel’s loss. Sorrell was right. He had wanted a replacement for his dead wife. The very notion caused the Mariel in his head to get angry with him. Not only was it extremely disrespectful to her, it was a grave insult to Sorrell.

  Despite this realization, Kaiser found himself clinging to his grief. The thought of moving past it filled him with crippling guilt. To stop mourning Mariel was to finally let her go. Her memory would still be there, but the person he kept alive in his mind by the strength of his need would be gone, never to return.

  Kaiser looked up at the sky. He had forgotten how good the sunlight felt against his skin. He had the sudden epiphany that the oppressive miasma represented the fog of grief and rage he had lived under for the past year. The sun represented a new day, a new chapter. Here, in this place, he could take a step forward. A step that did not erase the past, but built on it, cherished it, and let it recede without being chained to it.

  Of all the places to do some serious soul searching, Kaiser picked the slave pen of a foreign city in a hostile empire. Kaiser snorted to himself. They were one misstep away from destruction, and here he was, lost in his own world. Before the courage to change left him, Kaiser went and sat next to Sorrell.

  Sorrell did not respond, but Kaiser could tell by the change in her breathing that she was aware of him.

  “We need to talk,” Kaiser said.

  After a moment, Sorrell said, “I’m listening.”

  “You were right,” Kaiser said. He paused. This was going to be harder than he thought.

  When he did not continue, Sorrell said, “I’m sure I was. What, in particular, are you referring to?”

  Kaiser looked out through the wooden slats at the other cages while he spoke. “I haven’t been fair to you,” he said. “I… I wanted you to be something you could never be. I wanted you to be Mariel.”

  Sorrell did not reply for a long time. Kaiser waited. He did not blame her if she did not want to reconcile yet.

  “She must have been an amazing woman, for you to hold on to her memory so long,” Sorrell finally said.

  Her words took the wind out of Kaiser’s lungs. His eyes filled with tears. That was the last thing he had expected Sorrell to say.

  “She was,” Kaiser said. “I’ve no doubt the two of you would have been fast friends.”

  “I would have liked that,” Sorrell said.

  “This Stone you spoke of. You loved him?”

  “I did.”

  Kaiser did not have to look at her to know she was crying. He could hear it in her voice.

  “In a world full of enemies, he was my one true friend,” Sorrell said. “He died because of me. My selfishness put him in danger. I should have known better.”

  “Mariel would still be alive today if she hadn’t been my wife,” Kaiser said.

  Sorrell let out a bitter laugh. “Don’t we make a fine pair,” she said. “Too dangerous to love, too broken to mend.”

  “I shouldn’t have gone silent on you. I just… I needed to think.”

  “It’s okay. I wasn’t exactly gentle with you. If I’m honest, I kind of wanted to hurt you for trying to turn me into your wife.”

  “I can’t say that I blame you. It may have been the shock I needed.”

  “So… where do we go from here?”

  The sudden change of topic seemed odd to Kaiser. He had to shift mental gears to reply.

  “I suppose we’ll have to wait for Niad and Lacrael to tell us,” Kaiser said.

  “No, I meant you and me,” Sorrell said. She opened one eye to look at him. “A few days ago, you were intent on plundering my cargo. Do you still feel that way?”

  Kaiser blushed in embarrassment, both at his misunderstanding of her question and her clarification. Mariel had been the only other person who could ever make him blush.

  “I need more time,” Kaiser said. “Right now, I don’t trust my heart. And I can’t think straight while Tarathine suffers. I don’t want to make you a crutch.”

  Sorrell said nothing, and Kaiser was left replaying his words in his head.

  “Damnation, that came out wrong,” Kaiser said. “What I mean is that I’d be happy to stand at your side, and I’m glad to call you friend for who you are, not because you remind me of anyone else. Beyond that, the future can take care of itself. Who’s to say what will happen to us next in this insane realm?”

  “You surprise me,” Sorrell said. “Just when I think I’ve got you pegged, you do or say something to prove that I’ve yet to plumb your depths. Of course I’ll stand with you.”

  “I hope that was a compliment,” Kaiser said. “I don’t always understand your sailor’s metaphors.”

  “It was,” Sorrell said, chuckling to herself.

  They sat in companionable silence for a time, enjoying the heat of the sun. It was drifting towards the western horizon and would soon slip behind the high wall at their back.

  “Sometimes, I wonder if I should have stayed in Coriddia,” Sorrell said. “I don’t think we’ll find any more mercy in this place than I would have found at the hands of the emperor’s troops.”

  “I had similar thoughts, when I left my home realm behind,” Kaiser said.

  “You don’t anymore?”

  Kaiser shook his head. “Somewhere along the way, I realized that I have a flawed way of thinking about the past. When life gets hard, there’s a temptation to think back to choices that could have gone differently and imagine a path that would have charted us around the obstacles we now face. But there’s no reason that the road we didn’t take might not have been worse. To believe otherwise is just wis
hful thinking.”

  “That’s a strange thought,” Sorrell said. “So, where we are now is the best possible outcome?”

  “It might be. But it goes deeper than that. We are where we are because it was the only possible outcome, and that’s all that really matters.”

  “That’s not very comforting.”

  “Maybe not, but for me, it stops me from agonizing over every bad decision. Sure, my mistakes look bad in hindsight, but it could also have been worse, and I can’t reverse them now. So I do my best to learn from them and press on.”

  “You’re good at that. Fate could put an ocean in your path, give you a bucket and a scoop, and you’d still find a way across.”

  Kaiser glanced at Tarathine. “I think I’d prefer an ocean,” he said.

  “We’ll find a way to cure her,” Sorrell said. “We can’t have come this far to fail now.”

  “You have no idea how much I want to believe that,” Kaiser said.

  “So believe it. There’s no weakness in having hope.”

  “Hope is for people who’re powerless to achieve their goals. I’m not powerless, not yet.”

  “I used to have goals.”

  Something in Sorrell’s voice caused Kaiser to turn towards her. She was staring at the sky, her gaze a thousand miles away.

  “I was going to be the first empress on the Coriddian throne,” Sorrell said. “I was going to change the world. I was going to write my name in history with iron and blood. It would never have been forgotten.”

  “Who's to say you won’t still do those things?”

  Sorrell cut her eyes at Kaiser. “All I have left is hope.”

  Kaiser held her gaze.

  “With the right friends,” he said, “you don’t need to hope.”

  Chapter 20

  MAZAREEM HAD NEVER BEEN a pilgrim before. But as they drew closer to Orcassus, there was no other way to describe their journey. They were on a pilgrimage, their weary feet set towards a holy destination. And Mazareem was at the center. Somehow, word of the risen one had spread. At every city they visited, people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of him.

  Pynel did her part to pretend to honor Mazareem. Dressed in her resplendent armor and regalia, she was never far from his side. He made a game of trying to see how far he could push the act. She would grit her teeth when he praised her in public. When they sat at a venerator’s table in the place of honor, Mazareem would fawn over Pynel and her surviving seplica, explaining how they willingly provided for his every need.

  Humiliated but not humbled, Dezerath endured Pynel’s leadership without question or complaint. However, the disgraced venerator radiated an aura of pure hatred. After climbing out of the canyon, Pynel had stripped Dezerath of her armor and weapons, leaving her with nothing but a single breathing mask like the men wore.

  Pynel had told Mazareem in private that the restrictions she imposed on Dezerath would only last until they reached the capital. The venerator’s family would be furious, and they would probably demand that Pynel be punished for overstepping her bounds. Pynel did not care. She was determined to make Dezerath suffer as long as the woman was in her power.

  The seplica captain also made sure that Dezerath’s plan to reach Orcassus ahead of schedule and take the city by surprise was a failure. At Ravengard, the largest city they visited before reaching the capital, Pynel dispatched a message that would reach Orcassus before they did. Pynel’s comrades would be ready and waiting for them when they arrived.

  Following the ambush, the miasma had hounded Mazareem until he climbed out of the canyon. At one point, it became so hard to breathe that he began to worry he would collapse and die. But when they finally returned to the imperial highway, the intelligence that guided the foul mist had let him go. Since then, Mazareem breathed the corrupted air without any trouble. The sentience that lurked in the Ravening was always there, always watching, but for now, it had decided that Mazareem was not worth the trouble.

  No longer burdened by resisting the miasma, Mazareem had turned his attention to the collar on his neck. It was proving harder than he anticipated to bypass its nullifying effects on his magic. If he could not find a way around the barrier, the only other option was to take the cursed thing off.

  Mazareem pretended to sleep every night, and thus far, none of his traveling companions seemed to realize he was faking it. If they thought it odd that a risen one needed rest, none of them remarked on it. As long as he was discreet, this afforded him a few hours of privacy while the others slumbered. During these times, he tested the collar, working at it with his long fingers to see if he could pull the wicked barbs out of his skin.

  The pain was excruciating, but Mazareem managed to bend the metal enough to remove the spikes and then the collar. Once he had figured out this was possible, he pried the thing off for an hour or two every night and secured it back into place before Pynel rose to check on him.

  This was a small, though not insignificant, victory. However, the effort required to remove the device was considerable. In an emergency, Mazareem would not be able to yank the collar off in its current state. Around the center of the metal band, four long nails pierced his skin and drove deep into his neck. The tips of these talons released a slow drip of toxins from the metal that numbed his sensitivity to magic.

  Over the course of a few nights of work, Mazareem bent the spikes back and forth until the metal weakened and broke where they attached to the collar. Deprived of his usual equipment, he saved these long nails, secreting them away in the flowing robes he now wore. There was no telling when these improvised weapons might prove useful. With the collar de-fanged, Mazareem could easily slip it around his neck and remove it again at will. Now, all he had to do was keep this new development a secret from Pynel.

  To Mazareem’s surprise, the restraint was not completely disarmed. As long as it was around his neck, he struggled to hold on to any thought that might conjure a spell. Perhaps the toxins lingered in his body. Whatever the reason, if he needed to weave an enchantment, the collar would have to come off.

  There was only one spell Mazareem was concerned with right now. Every night, when he tired of fiddling with the collar, he took out the stone chip he carried and contemplated using it. It would be a simple matter to activate the symbols carved on its face. How would Pynel react if he vanished into thin air? He would appear back in the cave in Praxis, free of her and this blighted empire. As Orcassus drew nearer, the temptation to flee grew stronger.

  Mazareem liked to think of himself as beyond fear. He had seen too much and suffered too much to care about the threat of pain. Yet he knew better than most that there were fates worse than death. Other than Abimelech, there was only one person who could inflict that sort of torture on him. And he was walking straight into her lair.

  Abimelech would never let him go, if Mazareem tried to flee and forsake his master. And how would Mazareem survive? Without the antidote provided by the dragon tyrant, the curse of undeath that festered in Mazareem’s body would finish its work. What remained of the dragon scale he carried might last him a year or two, if he was careful. After that, he would wither and perish. Before he died, he would be reduced to a mindless ghoul. This was the price Mazareem had paid for his longevity. As long as he served, he would live.

  In the back of Mazareem’s mind, an idea lurked that he refused to face head-on. He had seen a dragon prince, alive and in the flesh. Consuming the heart of such a beast would grant him true immortality. If he could escape, hunt one down, and kill it before Abimelech caught him, Mazareem might stand a chance of surviving on his own.

  Yet in the end, Mazareem always slipped the stone chip back beneath his robes in disgust. In a millennium of undeath, he had become a coward. He saw this weakness in himself, and it infuriated him. Without fail, he took the path that meant survival. He told himself he was still pursuing his personal goals, that he was still struggling towards the mark of true, never-ending life. But he was starting to believe that h
e was only fooling himself. Abimelech had been manipulating him since the beginning. Perhaps Mazareem had always gone along willingly.

  One morning, after Mazareem had stopped counting the days they had been traveling, Pynel approached him. They had stopped for the night on the imperial highway. Pynel assured them it was safe enough, but none of them rested easy after their harrowing experience in the canyon.

  “We’ll reach Orcassus today,” Pynel said. Her words were muffled behind her ever-present mask. “The approach to the city is dangerous. Whatever happens, stay near me, and follow my lead.”

  “As you wish, captain,” Mazareem said.

  Mazareem watched the woman walk away. Pynel carried herself with authority. Her every step was purposeful. She had no doubt about her place in the world, no question as to what her purpose was. Mazareem found himself envying her.

  They set out with Pynel in the lead. Mazareem walked behind her with the other surviving seplica at his side. Dezerath and the remnants of her house troops were free to follow as they pleased.

  Pynel carried a guidestone in her hand, and its ghostly blue radiance illuminated their path. As they neared the capital, the highway became more defined and started to look like a proper road. Soon, Mazareem could have followed it himself without any aid.

  Around midday, Pynel called a halt. On the side of the highway sat a marker unlike the hundreds of others they had passed. This one was an obelisk carved from black stone, and it stood as high as Mazareem was tall.

  “This marks the outer edge of Orcassus’s influence,” Pynel said. “From here until we reach the city, we’ll be traveling in defensive formation.”

  Pynel addressed Dezerath directly for the first time in days.

  “Venerator, I need your soldiers to be on alert. Do you think you can manage that?”

  Dezerath stared at Pynel from behind her mask. She did not speak, but Pynel seemed to accept that Dezerath would obey. At some silent signal that Mazareem missed, the soldiers tightened their formation. Satisfied, Pynel motioned them forward again.