Above them in the pure and absolute blackness of the sky, a rift had opened. It was a blue gash in the never-ending nothingness. They felt the unknown force tugging at them, beckoning them inside.
Both wore jet black shining metal armor. He stood eye to eye with her and held her close with his dried-blood covered gauntlets. His forehead rested against hers, and they stood in silence as the fires grew larger and larger around them.
"I will find you," Crinnan promised as he looked at her. She returned the gaze and nodded, fearful of what was to come.
He shuddered in spite of the great heat that surrounded him. He clenched his teeth together, and with all of his emotional strength, he let go of her and allowed the rift to pull her in.
"I will find you!" he screamed. Her body disappeared into the darkness above him, and his eyes opened.
Crinnan jerked up in his bed. His heart pounded, and his body glistened with sweat. His breathing and the steady hum of the monitors to his right were all that he could hear in the dark room. The vivid dream lingered in his mind but was soon blotted out by his thoughts of reality. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he remembered where he was and let out a sigh.
His vigor had returned to him, and it seemed that the confusion and overall disorientation had mostly faded. Sage the Elf had been right, he truly had needed the sleep. He rubbed his eyes and blinked as he looked around in the darkness. The glow from the electronics was all that he had for light, and so he decided to stand.
His feet found the cold concrete floor, and he slowly and precisely made sure that he was able to find his balance before he attempted to walk. He felt only a mild bit of dizziness, similar to what a hangover felt like in its last hours. It was nothing to him; he had fought in battles with full hangovers before. The whole experience might have been debilitating to others, leaving them whimpering in their beds as they waited for their brains to dry out. To Crinnan though, it was nothing more than a slight inconvenience. He took in a deep breath and walked across the room.
Bright light filled the room as he flipped the switch beside the door. "Fuck," He groaned again as he shielded his eyes with his hand. He should have thought of that. His mind was running too slow; his decision making wasn't as sharp as it usually was. He allowed his eyes ample time to adjust to the intensity of the light, and as he regained his vision, he removed his hand.
He stood silently as his gaze took in the room. From the monitors at the bedside to the cabinet beside the sink where Sage had said his belongings awaited him, he looked over everything and processed it all. He awkwardly turned toward the sink, still feeling mildly unbalanced, and hobbled over.
As he approached, Crinnan caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror that was hanging above the sink. He frowned and exhaled a sort of half groan when he saw his tangled mess of brown hair that hid all but the points of his ears. He briefly tossed the hair about with his fingers and hoped it would land satisfyingly. After a moment of messing with it, an act which he was not wholly committed to, he looked away from the mirror and searched for his belongings.
Crinnan was a half-blood as they say. His father was Humaan, and his mother was an Elf. There was not much physical differentiation between a half-blood and a full-blood Elf; each typically had pointed ears and narrow noses. In height, they rarely made it to six feet tall, but never fell below five and a half feet. Elves and half-bloods, when brought up by other Elves, generally lacked in the humor department. This was a characteristic that was forged in the days before the Ancients, in the Age of Blood. In those days the Elves, being subservient to the Vampre, realized that humor did them no favors when it came to survival and became a very humorless people.
Crinnan also inherited his mother's family's famously cold demeanor. His mother was a member of the Fyres bloodline, one of the Elvish great houses. They were, historically speaking, huge assholes and in general not very fun to be around. While his mother wasn't a terrible cunt like the Ancient stories say about the Fyres Elves, she was still a bit of a bitch.
Crinnan haphazardly fell to a knee and opened the cabinet door. The hinges whined with an old cry for grease, but Crinnan gave them no regard. A white bin sat inside the cupboard, he pulled it out and set it on the floor before him and examined its contents. Crinnan felt dismayed at the size of the bin, as it was by no means large enough to hold his broadsword or armor. As he removed the items inside, he groaned to find that his assumption was correct.
He grabbed his underwear and quickly pulled them up over his legs. As he spent some time on his nether-bits, he recalled Sage pulling out his catheter earlier. He briefly winced at the thought and slipped his feet into a pair of brown cloth trousers, a pair of socks, and finally laced up his leather boots. When he unfolded his white tunic, Crinnan could not help but let out a sigh.
Though the tunic was washed and clean, a large brown and red stain covered the bottom half. Crinnan ran his finger over the stitching along the left side of the shirt; the sight of it pulled his thoughts back to the spear that had punctured his abdomen the night before. His hand instinctively traveled down to the scar on his stomach. How had he survived that? His belly twitched with pain; he groaned and sat up a bit straighter. As he pushed the thoughts out of his mind, he pulled the tunic over his head and returned his attention to the bin before him.
The last items in the bin were Crinnan's black leather gun harness and ammunition belt. He silently pulled the dual pistol harness out of the container and examined it. He immediately noticed that his revolvers were still fully loaded and clipped in their holsters. As his eyes moved to the ammunition belt, he saw that not a bullet had been removed. As he wrapped his ammo belt around his waist and slid into his pistol harness, he stood and wondered why Sage had allowed him free access to his weapons. If he had been in Sage's shoes, he would have restrained his prisoner with a bit more than a catheter, especially if his prisoner was a soldier deemed "terrorist" by the Govian Empire. The fact that everything had been so simple left Crinnan feeling a bit uneasy, nervous even. He feared that he was about to walk into a trap…
Crinnan's journey from the sink to the door, though not a long trek by any standard, was ample time for his mind to shift gears completely. He pondered over the situation in which he had found himself. The encounter with Sage, though a seemingly helpful individual, left a healthy residue of fear on his mind. He worried over what Sage had in store for him outside the room. He planned to walk out of the old white door, find the exit from wherever he was, and escape as quickly as possible. He did not intend on staying long enough to allow Sage to kill him if the Elf planned such a thing.
Crinnan's thoughts wandered to his squad, to those he would call his friends and family, for lack of better words. He thought of how he had somehow been taken from them back in the Belhaasi Weald, and of what he had to do to return to them. He cursed at himself for allowing his enemies to capture him in the first place and grew frustrated at the thought that his squad could perhaps have been ambushed. Though he would never consciously allow himself to show it, they were all that he loved in the world and in that moment it was his greatest desire to be reunited with them.
When he was but a seven-year-old boy, Crinnan's parents had enrolled him in the "Future Centurions" program, sponsored by Black Knight Base 21's renowned Century Squad. Crinnan could remember his Lord father telling him that it would one day make him a ‘great and respected warrior.' Initially, he was not invested in learning how to fight or in becoming famous, as all members of Century Squad inevitably did. He was only worried about leaving behind the only person he had any real connection with up to that point: his twin brother.
A position in Century Squad was reserved only for the best of Black Knight; each of its twenty-one members was a celebrity within the army. Infamous to its enemies, Century was an elite multipurpose squad, capable of everything from reconnaissance to combat, strategic engineering, and demolitions. In times when they were needed, they were able to command individual units an
d were trained to lead and fight with great efficiency.
Because of his father's influence within the army, Crinnan was among the first soldiers to be specially trained to carry out the duties of a Centurion. His father was hailed as the "Hero of Exgrane" for his actions had turned the tide of the Exgrane Liberation Wars nearly a quarter century before, and every Black Knight knew tales of the living legend.
Before the development of the Future Centurions program, Centurions were recruited based solely on exemplary service. Every Centurion before Crinnan had a story to tell about how they earned their place in the squad. Throughout his training, Crinnan was under the influence of some of the more famous Knights whom he eventually grew to fight alongside. They raised him. He grew up hearing stories of how Sir Mace survived a decrepit fortress full of crazed, bloodthirsty Vampre, or how Sir Kavin thwarted a Govian attack on his academy in South Barus when he was merely a teen. Such stories fueled the young trainees like he was; they wanted to be strong like those that came before them.
After years of trials and tribulations, after the grueling training that at times had nearly broken him Crinnan was finally among the first ever to graduate from the Future Centurions Program at the age of nineteen. He completed this feat alongside his close friends and fellow children of influential families, Alec Flinn, and Elia Sols. Though originally twenty children entered the program in his class, those three were the only ones who remained at the end. Crinnan felt proud that he had earned his place in the elite squad, but also felt a sense of dismay at the fact that he had no story like the Centurions who came before him. Despite his years of training, he felt like he had not truly earned the title of Centurion.
Crinnan reached his hand out and grabbed the tarnished brass doorknob in front of him. He turned it, and the door creaked open revealing a warmly lit hallway with stained slat wood floors and metal shelf-lined wooden walls. Cautiously, he unfastened the strap that secured the revolver that was hanging just under his left armpit. With his hand around the grip of the weapon, Crinnan eased out of the room and into the hallway. As he shut the door behind him, the aged wooden floor beneath him welcomed his presence with a deep groan.
Quickly, the Knight surveyed his surroundings. To his left at the end of the hallway was a curious rusted metal door with no visible handle. A keypad was mounted on the wall to the right of the door and above it was two light bulbs, one red and one green. At that time, the red one shone. Crinnan for a brief moment wondered what the significance of the strange vault looking door was. It seemed out of place in the otherwise simple architecture of the building.
He turned his head to the opposite side of the hallway where he could hear sounds of sizzling and the smell of bacon. He noticed what appeared to be a collection of old junk on the metal shelves that hung from the walls. Crinnan could not help but survey the antiques.
Curiously, Crinnan reached out and grabbed a device that sat upon one of the shelves. It was a small plastic silver rectangle with a black screen embedded in it. It resembled a tablet computer of some sort, one like certain members of his squad were trained to use. Crinnan was not one of those members, and so the device was foreign to him. He could feel a button on the side of it with his thumb, and so he pressed it inward. The screen flashed white and then black again, and finally, the word "Scanning" appeared on it. He watched, and after a moment the screen changed, and a message appeared "User invalid, shutting down." The device went dark, and Crinnan stared at it for a moment more before he returned it to the shelf from whence it came. "Strange," he muttered as he moved on. Most of it seemed to be Ancient technology from a time a thousand years before the one he lived in, before the Empire or the Church.
Technology was not something that Crinnan was overly familiar with at all. He was not alone in that fact, most people would have had no idea what to do with a computer or tablet if they were to find one. Modern electronics were so expensive and rare that the typical person had very few opportunities to explore their uses. There were people in Black Knight and in Century Squad whom Crinnan knew that could operate some devices, but very few had a level of mastery that was worth bragging about.
Nearly all consumer technology had been commandeered by The Church when they had ascended to power a thousand years prior. They had, over that time, obtained absolute control over all manufacturing on any significant scale and oversaw all development over new technologies. They maintained heavy regulation over companies like the Agra Triangle Corporation, one of the few and the most powerful of the corporations that were allowed to exist. By doing so, the Govian Empire was able to produce and distribute a wide array of simple commodities that the populace was allowed to purchase.
Crinnan continued onward down the wood-floored trinket-laden hallway, eventually coming to a halt where the wall opened up. As he stood in the opening, he looked to his right, where the hall continued to a dead end. He then looked down two wooden steps in front of him that led to a concrete-floored living space. The room was lined with log walls, and humbly decorated with vintage furniture. Like the rest of the house, it did not lack clutter. A grey sofa sat toward the middle of the room facing the front of the house where a fire burned in a fireplace. Above the fireplace hung an old flat-screen television. Against the far right wall sat a loveseat and lounge chair.
On the opposite side of the living room, to Crinnan's left, was a breakfast bar with two stools in front of it. Before the breakfast bar, about eight steps directly in front of Crinnan sat a circular wooden table with a brass light hanging above it. Behind the breakfast bar was the kitchen, the source of the bacon smell, and of course, Sage.
"I sincerely hope you are not already leaving," Sage called out as he slightly turned his head in Crinnan's direction, never actually making visual contact. He stood before a stove in the kitchen, the skillet before him sizzled and popped. The fork he was using to flip the bacon strip scraped against the iron; the discordant noise sent a chill down Crinnan's spine.
"I hope you like bacon," the Elf continued as his eyes returned to the iron skillet, "It would be near a tragedy to waste such a delicacy."
Crinnan scaled the two steps and waved his hand dismissively at the Elf. He kept his eye on Sage as he moved, "I don’t have the time for such things." He passed the wooden table with no intention of stopping until he found his squad at the Izla'Axi caverns.
Sage turned around, wiped his grease splashed hands off with a towel and cocked his head. Crinnan could feel the Elf's eyes on him and stopped to return the look.
"Very well," Sage tossed the towel in the sink next to him. He strutted around the side of the breakfast bar and stopped at the table, placed both palms down on it, and leaned forward toward Crinnan, "Tell me Crinnan, where is your squad?"
"Wouldn't you like to fucking know?" Crinnan was stubborn and headstrong by default. He generally did not care to hurt somebody's feelings, especially someone that he suspected could have been up to something. He held Sage's gaze, and the two locked themselves in a silent showdown for the moment.
The Elf finally tutted and waved a finger at Crinnan with a grin, "I understand. I should say that if my ignorance or your perception of my ignorance makes you comfortable, then I will oblige," He straightened his posture and rubbed his hands together, "However, I insist that you eat at the very least. Belhaas is no place to wander aimlessly with an empty stomach. Eat and leave; you will need the energy."
Crinnan stared at Sage's deep blue eyes in silence for a moment more and finally, begrudgingly perhaps, pulled one of the wooden chairs from the table and sat down. He did not know how long it had been since he had last eaten, but he was ravenous to say at the least. He recalled eating on his transport to the Belhaasi Weald, but to him, that was an entire day removed.
"Tell me, dear Crinnan," Sage declared while stepping back into the kitchen, "Does your name have any significance, or was it merely plucked from the air by your parents?" Crinnan's eyes moved to Sage's position, but his head continued to face the ta
ble. He pondered the question for a moment and decided there was no harm in answering the Elf.
"My name…" he relayed with a torpid tone…"It was my father's before me."
Sage nodded his head as he prepared Crinnan's plate, "Your father was called Crinnan then? Your father was a Black Knight named Crinnan?"
"Yes," Crinnan turned his eyes toward the wood of the table. He wondered if he was giving away too much information.
"And how many years have blessed this planet of ours with your presence?" Sage inquired as he rounded the corner with Crinnan's meal.
"Twenty-three," Crinnan softly replied as he moved his hands so that Sage had room to put the plate down. Sage walked back to the kitchen and out of view for a moment, and Crinnan looked down at the food. His dish was laden with generous portions of bacon and eggs. A triangle of buttered toast sat off to the side.
"Twenty-three," Sage sang as he appeared again. In his hands, he carried a new pink single layer cake that he had prepared while Crinnan slept. He wore a wide smile on his face and gently placed the confection down on the center of the table. Crinnan looked up at it, and then to Sage and cocked his head with a mild amount of annoyance. Sage, in response, nodded his head with what appeared to be a great deal of delight.
"What a wonderful age… twenty-three," He paused and examined the soldier with his eyes as he laid out a long knife and spatula. When his observation had concluded, he chuckled to himself, "Twenty-three then. So you must have been conceived during the Exgrane Liberation War?" Crinnan blinked and pursed his lips together. He thought that was a bit of an awkwardly worded question, but eventually, he nodded at Sage.
"I believe I am… or I should say I believe I was once acquainted with your father," Sage's eyes seemed to lose focus on Crinnan as if he were recalling a memory.
The Black Knight Box Set Page 4
