Shepherds of Wraith: Book One

by Nyssa Renay

  “W-What are you going to do to them?”

  “Not me, son. You,” he replied coolly, leaning down to angle a microphone toward Raxis. “You’re going to give the order to kill those defectors.”

  “But, Dad, I can’t—” Raxis argued.

  “You’re almost fourteen!” the king bellowed. “It’s time to grow up and start acting like a king.”

  The prince looked toward me again, and I saw Lexani’s gaze turn toward me, a slight grin upon his face.

  In that moment, I wanted to be anywhere else, but I knew I had no choice. I had to play along with Talmari and the king, fearing I’d be considered a traitor for even the slightest infraction against the Crown.

  I nodded, telling Raxis to obey his father, and I watched as a terrified young boy was made to kill his own subjects for the very first time.

  -74-

  The prince stretched out his hand to pick up the microphone, unable to stop his shaking. The king leaned forward and pressed a switch on the dashboard below, opening the two-way communication channel to the truck. Everyone in the room could hear the sounds of the vehicle rumbling through wilderness as one of the cameras on the man in the passenger seat in the front cab of the truck.

  He pulled a small wired box to his mouth and spoke. “This is Administrator Lebanosa…what are your orders, Sire?”

  “Go on, son,” Lexani encouraged. “You can do it.”

  “T-This is the prince,” he began. “On behalf…behalf of my father, King Lexani, I am ordering you to kill all the defectors.”

  “Acknowledged, Your Highness. Shepherds are clear to terminate on contact.”

  The prince did his best to steady his hand as he placed the microphone down, and I watched in dismay as his proud father put his hand on his son’s shoulder, relishing in this unconventional bonding moment.

  The room watched as the vehicle slowed down when it came upon the first of the escaped fugitives—a girl of about seventeen running through the grass with all her might.

  “Shepherd Perrenus!” the administrator called out from the front. “It’s one of yours.”

  Perrenus grabbed the railing on the side of the vehicle to balance himself as he leaned over and aimed his staff at the fugitive. He shouted angrily in Wraith and the tip of his staff erupted in a flash of green light that crashed into the girl, rapidly enveloping her in twisting thorny vines. I watched in horror as the vines pierced her chest and throat before bursting out of her eyes and mouth as she dropped lifelessly to the ground.

  “Confirmed kill, Your Highness,” the speaker blurted out. “Confirmed kill.”

  I felt my blood run cold as the vehicle sped on as if she were nothing. All those years of training and study and obedience gone in an instant. The prince barely moved, and I assumed he was as much in shock as I was.

  The next runaway they came upon was climbing up a tall tree. She ducked behind it to avoid the vehicle’s bright spotlight before jumping onto a nearby tree to try to blend into the darkness.

  “I’ll get this one!” Shepherd Vestichi, leader of the Malian sect, reluctantly called out as he stepped toward the edge of the truck and called out in Wraith, summoning a flock of jet-black ravens. The glossy birds scattered throughout the surrounding trees, darting from tree to tree until they found their prey. Within seconds, the flock swarmed the deserter near the top of one of them. They pecked and scratched at her flesh. She screamed out in pain and tried to swat them away but lost her balance and tumbled down through the branches, striking her head several times before crashing onto the ground.

  The girl’s body lay motionless in the dirt, and the vehicle stopped just long enough for Vestichi to disembark and check on the body. After a quick examination, he solemnly walked back to the back of the truck and climbed on board. His subtle look of despair and disgrace said it all—she was dead.

  “Excellent work, gentlemen,” the king boasted.

  “Thank you, Sire,” Administrator Lebanosa replied as the vehicle sped on through the woods.

  “Only three more of the little shits left. Let’s keep it up!”

  “Yes, Sire,” the speaker crackled.

  No more than a few minutes later, the vehicle came upon two more of the escapees. They were running together as the spotlight exposed them. Instantly they broke apart, darting in opposite directions as the vehicle came to a screeching halt. This was hard for me to watch. I knew each one of these potentials. I had either worked with them or trained them in the kitchens, and it broke my heart to see their lives end in such a nightmarish way, but I suddenly realized a distinct pattern was emerging.

  Each of the deserters was from one of the lesser physical sects, those with a concentration in the intellectual capabilities. The first girl was from Settle, the second from Idol, and the two running away were from Brio, which meant the defiant movement wasn’t as contained as the king had originally thought.

  Shepherd Batopho from Palpit sect and Shepherd Phlogis from Kindell sect leapt from the back of the vehicle and darted after the two Brio potentials. I knew the older girl was one of Eeliyah’s fellow interns at the medical ward, and the other was a younger boy I worked with for years in the kitchens. Knowing what was about to happen to them, I couldn’t help but feel that Eeliyah would most likely blame me for having something to do with their gruesome fates.

  The screens displayed each of the shepherds hunting down their targets like sport. I watched in disgust as Shepherd Phlogis threw his head back and shouted something to the heavens, casting an enormous ball of fire at the boy and engulfing him instantly. The fire burned away his skin, hair, and clothes so quickly and so violently that the boy crumbled to dust in a matter of seconds. When the job was finished, he smugly walked back to the vehicle, a wide grin on his face.

  It only took Shepherd Batopho a few minutes longer to track down the girl, but her death was not as swift and merciful. As the shepherd called out in Wraith, I watched the girl start to shake and twitch. She screamed out in torment, clutching her head as blood began to trickle from her eyes, nose, and ears. She scrambled around on the ground, searching for a large rock, and smashed it against her head to try to end her agony. Moments later, the shepherd clenched his fist as the poor girl clutched at her chest and fell to the ground in a lifeless heap.

  “You see that, Raxis?” the king began. “That’s how you deal with insurrection. You need to set an example so the rest fall in line. Otherwise, these bastards will run rampant, and before you know it, you’ve lost control of your kingdom. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” the prince said meekly.

  “Look, son, I know this can be a bit scary at first, but over time, you’ll understand why it has to be done. Trust me, if there was another way, I’d gladly take it, but these defiants have left me no choice.”

  “Do you mean that?” Raxis asked, a hint of hope in his voice.

  “Mean what?” the king replied, puzzled.

  “That if there was another way…a better way…you’d take it?”

  “Of course, I would! You don’t think I enjoy killing my own subjects, do you?”

  “No, but—”

  Suddenly the speaker crackled to life once more. “Potential straight ahead! Shepherd Diabelle…it’s one of yours.”

  There was a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach as the screen displayed the fifth and final fugitive. It was Arcro, the boy I’d shown around the Necra dorms and kitchens on his very first day at the academy. He’d tried to hide by climbing up a tree, hoping to be camouflaged by the thick foliage, but the spotlight easily located him before he had any chance to conceal himself.

  Shepherd Diabelle moved up and did the unthinkable. She reached out and spoke loudly in Wraith, casting a wave of scalding-hot tar that wrapped around the tree he was hiding in. For only a moment, Arcro’s form wriggled under the thick, black tar before the substance solidified around him, suffocating him to death.

  The nightmare was fin
ally over, but I still felt sick to my stomach long after the screens went blank. I understood why the king had ordered the shepherds to kill them all, but I couldn’t believe the one person I’d looked up to my whole career at the academy was capable of such a thing. Worse yet, I wondered if one day, I’d be forced to perform the same wretched deed as well.

  -75-

  With five defiants dead and two imprisoned, the king saw an opportunity to drive home his point on the penalties for disobedience by any potential who still might be considering joining the defiant cause. He ordered his royal horsemen to visit the families of each of the seven potentials who tried to escape the academy and burn their homes to the ground, hoping the action might double as a declaration against the recent rioting as well. These new tactics seemed to work. All defiant rhetoric at the academy and rioting activity on Telshakra disappeared almost immediately.

  With Raxis spending the rest of the week after the Festival of Ein in the Rectory, I was free from my obligations to the prince and finally had some time to go and catch up with Eeliyah, which didn’t turn out to be even close to what I’d hoped.

  “Don’t you have a prince’s ass to wipe or something, Vigil?” Eeliyah scoffed as I found her working at the medical ward in her final year internship.

  “What’s with the attitude?” I snapped.

  “Seriously?” she huffed. “Ever since you became one of them, I’ve barely seen you at all.”

  “I’ve been busy,” I argued. “This job takes up almost all my time! And when I do get a free moment, I need to find a way to fit in some kind of training before I graduate.”

  “Why? It’s not like you’re going to have to go off to fight in the war like the rest of us.”

  “I still have to guard the prince. I almost died when those things attacked the Divine Mountain. I need to be ready.”

  “Then why are you even here, Vigil?”

  “Because I missed you,” I urged. “Doesn’t that mean anything?”

  “Yeah, it means you’re feeling guilty and now you just want me to forget I’ve spent the last six months wondering if there was really anything between us at all.”

  “Of course, there is!”

  “Well, it doesn’t feel like it to me.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re so upset. It’s not like I’ve been ignoring you on purpose. I didn’t ask to be a guardian, you know.”

  “And I didn’t ask to be put on a damn shelf for you to take on and off whenever you feel like it! That’s not how it’s supposed to work,” she snapped and turned to get back to work, seemingly trying to focus her anger on something other than me.

  “What do you want me to do, Eeliyah? Stop training altogether so I can spend more time with you? Is that what you want?”

  “No,” she said turning back toward me, letting out a sad sigh. “I want you to want to spend more time with me. I can’t make you, and I’m starting to realize you’re never going to.”

  “But, Eeliyah—”

  “I’m sorry, Vigil. I have work to do. Please excuse me,” she said with tears welling in her eyes as she walked past me and quickly exited the room.

  I stood there, feeling like the whole world was against me. No matter how hard I tried to do the right thing for those around me, there just wasn’t enough time for me to do all the things I wanted to do. The prince had now robbed me of that. I saved his life but lost my own in the process. There was nothing I could do to put things back to the way they were before.

  When I walked out of the medical ward, I immediately saw a familiar face staring back at me from a nearby bench. It was Shepherd Diabelle. She motioned for me to join her, and I half-heartedly walked over and sat down.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” she commented coolly. “How is she doing with yesterday’s incident?”

  “We never even got to talk about it,” I admitted. “We were too busy arguing.”

  “Oh? Anything you want to talk about?” she offered.

  I let out a small laugh, knowing she was definitely not the type of person who dealt with drama of any sort. “No, I’m okay.”

  “Thank Ein,” she said, sighing with relief. “There are much bigger things at stake right now, and while I know it’s hard for you to understand your situation, I think concentrating on your career is the right thing to do. I know it’s not a popular idea among boys your age.”

  “Boys my age?” I scoffed. “I’m twenty years old. Far from—”

  “I’m 419!” she interrupted lightheartedly. “You’re all boys to me.”

  I forced a smile. “Fair point.”

  “Anyway, I wanted to see you so we could talk about what happened yesterday.”

  “We really don’t have to.”

  “I think we do,” she insisted. “There’s hasn’t been a potential sentenced to death for hundreds of years, and now it’s created a rift between the Church and the Crown. A lot of the shepherds are furious with the king for his actions, which means you’re guilty by association.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” I argued. “It’s not like I could have stopped it, but you could have. You didn’t have to kill Arcro.”

  “I had no choice, and neither did you,” she insisted. “I’m not blaming you for doing your job. It’s a very volatile situation, and we’ll need to choose our moments carefully before we act. Lexani is mad with power…he always has been, but that’s why I need you to keep Raxis from becoming like his father.”

  “I’m doing my best, but between Shepherd Talmari and the king, they’re starting to really crack down on him. That whole thing yesterday was just to make a point of how unprepared they think Raxis is to be king.”

  “They’re worried, which is a good thing,” she urged. “It means the king is afraid his son might oppose him in a few months when he turns fourteen. All these distractions…the war, and the defiants, and the rioting have kept him from fully concentrating on grooming his son, which gives us a chance.”

  “Us?” I asked, curious as to her motives. “So, are you saying you’re working with the opposition to the Crown now?”

  “No, I’m not, Vigil. But I will say I’m on the side of keeping the proper balance of power between the Church and the Crown. If it starts to shift too much in either direction, chaos and infighting will destroy us long before the enemy can. It’s a very dangerous time, and things could spiral out of control at any moment.”

  But they never did.

  Over the next few weeks, everything appeared to stay exactly the same. Calm; business as usual. To me, it seemed like the king’s show of force worked exactly how he’d planned it. There had been no uprising or public revolt; not even a single fight in the chow hall between those for the war and those against it. Nothing.

  But as time went on, rumors began to surface that the anti-Crown movement had taken their cause underground and continued to meet in secret. If the rumors were true, I knew those involved had made it a point to stay clear of me or anyone I was associated with. I had no idea what to believe anymore, and my life as a guardian was only getting worse.

  Although the king had promised to get me more time to train, Raxis had slowly become my only priority in the eyes of the royal family, and it demonstrated how unimportant I really was to them. As the months passed, my training time with Shepherd Diabelle was diminished so much that it became practically nonexistent.

  As for Eeliyah, she was now a shadow of her former self, and I didn’t understand why. Whenever I’d find a way to talk to her, she’d pull away as if she was annoyed by my presence. She always had somewhere better to go or something more important to do than to be around me. Perhaps it wasn’t her, after all—maybe it was me.

  Maybe I was the one who’d changed after becoming connected to the royal family. Even though I still missed her terribly, after a while, I had no choice but to give up trying to keep our friendship going, as there was no point. It was over. The prince was my entire life now. />
  -76-

  It was late summer, about a month before my graduation, and I had just about reached my limit in dealing with the prince. Ever since he turned fourteen on the first day of spring, his father had made it a habit of pulling him out of the academy for full weeks at a time to learn more about the duties of becoming king. I did what I could to try to keep the light-hearted, inquisitive boy from turning into his tyrannical father, but with a desperate need to make King Lexani proud, Raxis started to think, act, and treat everyone around him in the same way…even me.

  There were still good parts of Raxis that sometimes showed themselves—an occasional invention he created for the good of others; treating me like an actual brother instead of a guardian; even taking a real interest in the lessons of becoming a shepherd—but those moments were becoming rare. We spent most of our time at the Divine Mountain instead of at the academy where we should have been, and I wondered why Ein in all His wisdom had blessed Raxis with a Vivication at all. It was apparent his father had no intention of ever letting him become a true shepherd. All I could do was have faith that everything happened for a reason and concentrate on my own survival. The end of my time as a potential was rapidly approaching, and I was starting to wrestle with the idea that the only way to save my sanity was to give up being the prince’s guardian and head off to war instead.

  One morning, I went to wake Prince Raxis for the day, a task I had routinely done for the past few weeks at the prince’s request. He’d become too unreliable to wake up on his own when we stayed at the shepherds’ tower. As I stepped into his quarters, I was surprised to see him already sitting up in bed with his back against his golden headboard, a pained look upon his face.