by Aaron Hicks
Tainted
Survival
A Prologue in the Life of
A Day in the Life of
A Play in the Life of
A Grand Master in the Life of
A Wedding in the Life of
A Honeymoon in the Life of
You’ll have to go through me
A Dilemma in the Life of
You’ve got to be kidding me
An Awakening in the Life of
An Arrival in the Life of
A Departure in the Life of
An Epilogue in the Life of
Index of words, people, places, and forms
A special thanks to Sara Callanan who edited this mess into something understandable.
To my family who support me emotionally by listening to me ramble on for hours about fictitious characters.
And to Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, for all He’s done for me and my family.
I. Survival
It came to pass that Uktesh, he who survived the death of his village, the trip to Manori, a battle with a minotaur, and the Voukidists’ plot at the tournament, not only did he survive but flourished. As his fame spread so too did the number of his enemies grow. Within his grasp was the legendary god form. He knew not that he would need to achieve this quickly, for enemies near and far to his new home were gathering their strength. In the time to come enemies would become allies and allies who would in turn become enemies. Enemies known and unknown would begin their march. Armies would rally and fall. But above all: The Afflicted would Rise.
{From The Life of Uktesh Marrion – 61 RA – Rise of the Afflicted}
II. A Prologue in the Life of
She smiled and scratched the spider wolf in front of her. One at a time its eight eyes blinked in pleasure. Most people found its hairless body repulsive, but she liked the way its eight eyes blinked in uncontrolled ecstasy. She patted it solidly on its right flank twice to let it know she was done. It nudged her hand with its muzzle and she laughed, unable to resist scratching it some more. She knew that as dark red as its skin was, one bite meant her painful death, but she also knew that it would never hurt her. She’d made friends with this one’s mother and had basically raised it from its birth. She’d been bitten so many times as it grew up that she had gained some immunity to the poison. But now that it was a full adult it would be foolish to test her luck. She had named it Spidey Wolfie, and even though she now knew it was ridiculous, she’d been young then, and the name stuck to the playful creature.
She’d always wondered why someone had named them spider wolves; sure they were a mixture of the two, but poisonous-hairless-eight-eyed-wolf was a more accurate description.
She saw her boys coming down the lane to their house. At seventeen and eighteen they were relatively new to their powers. She’d wondered why people like her and her boys were called Afflicted when they should be called Gifted or Talented, because without her talent for taming first animals and then Afflicted animals they would’ve died decades ago when there was no work to be had for a woman, save those jobs that required her on her back. And I won’t ever do that!
She saw that her boys were riding mountain wolves as if they were ponies. The wolves easily held the weight of her nearly full-grown boys as the wolves were almost the size of a full-grown horse! The boys bounced along and held on for dear life. The two wolves came to a halt and both boys rolled off, groaning, and holding their groins. Her youngest accused, “You said, you’ve done that before, and that it was fun!”
Her eldest said, “I did, but I guess I never ran downhill before.”
Both of the wolves’ and the spider wolf’s head swiveled to the lane, and Spidey Wolfie thought, riders, as a dozen riders came down the lane fully armed.
“Boy’s go inside!”
It was too late to try to hide the spider wolf. Normally they would have had warning, but the two boys had spoiled any warning the sharp senses of the spider wolf would have had, and the mountain wolves for all their size didn’t have the intelligence of a spider wolf. She sent out a mental call for help to all of the animals near their house.
The horsemen came to a stop several dozen feet from her. A tall thin man with black hair graying at the temples and two sword hilts sticking over his shoulders dismounted and stepped forward. “My good lady, I’m happy to advise you that a band of Beletians, elite Beletarian warriors, are dead no less than three miles from your home. That is the good news. The bad news is we saw that you are Afflicted and we cannot let you live.” As he spoke, dozens of wolves, spider wolves, and hundreds of birds and small woodland creatures like, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, and mice attacked the horsemen.
Her front door banged open and a man threw out the body of her eldest and held a bloody sword to her youngest boy’s throat. She halted her animal friends and said, “Let my boy go and I’ll come quietly.”
The man laughed and said, “I’m sorry. You see, you’re going to die, and so will your Afflicted children. I just needed to shock you so that you’d use your powers to halt the creatures long enough that we could kill you.”
She felt a crossbow bolt strike her neck and as she fell she saw the man who held her son slit his throat. Spidey Wolfie snarled and leapt for the man, who easily side-stepped, stabbed her friend into the ground, and pinned it there with his sword.
She tried to command the animals to attack, but could not grasp the power due to the pain she was in. Somehow she croaked out, “One day you’ll run into an Afflicted that will be able to beat you with or without powers! Then what will you do!”
The man squatted in front of her and said, “Well I’ll tell you what I won’t do. I won’t waste a surprise attack if it only has a chance of success! Instead, I will just wait until they hurt themselves, or are injured and kill them while they’re too weak to defend themselves.”
One of the men on the horses coughed and said, “That’d only work if you knew the Afflicted. What if you didn’t?”
The man stood out of her vision, laughed boisterously, and said, “Overwhelming force!”
The other man asked, “What if it was your wife or daughter?”
The leader said, “That’s really the only way I could see the first plan working. So you know me! They’d get the axe too!”
The man who’d murdered her babies walked into her vision cleaning his sword with a rag and said, “That’s our Thulmann! No mercy for the Afflicted!”
All the men cheered their leader as her world dimmed. Thulmann removed his sword from Spidey Wolfie and the other two mounted up and congratulated themselves on a well-executed raid. They rode off and she felt a tongue lick her hand. She saw a trail of its blood from where Spidey Wolfie had been stabbed to her side. With effort she moved her failing body until she held her dear friend, who had died, trying to save her.
It is alright, She-friend, he thought to her, I am old and my pups will live on. Someday someone somewhere will get revenge on those He-enemies and that one She-enemy. Ten in all, they won’t live past another ten years. She felt its tongue lick her nose and she smiled sadly as her vision went black.
III. A Day in the Life of
Four months left
Uktesh woke to a vision of beauty. He could scarcely believe she loved him as much as he loved her. Laurilli was in front of a full-length mirror. She was clothed only in her swimsuit and a pareo, a skirt made of transparent material that covered her swimsuit. Her golden blond hair shimmered in the morning light as she rotated her hips and wrists, eyes closed, and bobbed her head to an internal count. Uktesh knew she still needed to count the steps of the dance that she was practicing. He also knew she refused to practice with him in the same room and wo
uld only break this rule while he was asleep, which fortunately leads to mornings like this when I wake up to this beautiful scene in front of me.
They had been on the Isle de Tramanto for nearly two months and Laurilli still had not received permission to learn the Mujra. Legend said if this dance was done it was right would captivate a man’s heart forever. Uktesh had told her she didn’t need to learn it because she already had his heart forever. She wouldn’t admit defeat even though she had been told that the Mujra was passed down only from mother to daughter, but she had been offered the chance to learn the Raqs Sharqi, and if she could master that, the Raqs Baladi. Uktesh found the Raqs Sharqi hypnotic, and he could not imagine how the Raqs Baladi or the Mujra could possibly be anymore captivating.
Laurilli opened her sapphire blue eyes and saw that he was awake. She stopped her dance, turned around, slowly walked toward him, and she rolled her hips in a way that did not allow him to look away. She said, “Future husband of mine, you know you’re not supposed to see that until I’m ready,” as she slid into the bed with him and settled comfortably with her head on his chest, and her left side draped over his.
Uktesh lied, “I didn’t mean to,” and fought his to quell his rising excitement. “I woke up just as you looked at me.” Although technically true, he hoped to always be awakened this way.
She asked, “Are you feeling better?” She began to massage his right hand the only part of him that still had residual damage from the tournament. His use of the perfect form without a balanced or imperfect buffer had nearly killed him, but it had saved Laurilli’s life. That was one trade he knew he would always be willing to make.
He was beginning to feel a little too good, so, in order to distract himself he thought about the unarmed balanced forms. “Yeah, I think I’m going to begin my workouts, to get back to where I was during the tournament.”
“Good,” she said and snuggled closer.
He swallowed hard and began to mentally recite the more difficult imperfect forms of dual welding maces. “Your mom will be happy once we start to spend more time out of the house.”
Laurilli murmured into his chest, “Her ‘surprise’ visits wouldn’t fool anyone.”
“I don’t think that they’re meant to be subtle,” Uktesh moved his left arm out from under Laurilli and started to twirl her golden hair around his fingers, then changed his mind and started to rub her back. “Have I mentioned that I like the swimsuits they sell here yet?”
She laughed and said, “Only once or twice a day! Just be glad they sell tops, or my mother wouldn’t let you near me.”
“I think swimming would be much more popular back on the mainland if people wore what you’re wearing.”
“Sure it would, but can you imagine being the first person to walk to a lake in Sinai dressed like this?”
“Well, I’d be in my shorts and no shirt which would be pretty normal. However, I honestly don’t know what I would have thought if the first day we met you were wearing that and Baloce or Dekan were there.” He paused, “No, I know what I would’ve thought. I would have thought that they’d already forced you out of your clothes and I probably would have attacked them.”
“So then if you had found out after slaughtering them,” she ignored Uktesh’s sarcastic laugh, “that I had been dressed like this for a swimming excursion, what would you have felt then?”
Uktesh thought about it, “Probably guilty for beating up those two jackasses, and then I would have wondered if everyone dressed like that to swim.” He gently put his left hand over her mouth to forestall her argument. “And once I found out it was only you I would wonder where you’d picked it up from. Once I knew that, I would probably think that it was exotic, but nothing more than that. However, I don’t think Sinain mother’s will approve.”
“So it’s settled, no fashion changing in our future.”
“I guess we’ll have to live here forever then, because I don’t think I’ll be able to live without the vision of you in your swimsuit.”
“Hello the house,” came Heathyr’s voice from outside the house.
“You may want to take care of that,” Laurilli said to Uktesh, who realized that he had stopped thinking about the forms and had thought about Laurilli in a swimming suit for too long. She grinned with victorious mischief as he got up and went to their bathroom. “Come on in, Mom,” she said as Uktesh shut the door. Even after almost two months he still wasn’t used to being able to bathe or relieve himself inside the house they shared.
“Hi honey!” Heathyr cried from the other room. “Why is he always going to the bathroom when I show up?”
Laurilli’s laughter caused Uktesh to smile and he wondered what story she would tell to avoid revealing that most mornings Laurilli was able to excite him right before her mother showed up. When he finished he washed his hands and joined the mother and daughter in the bedroom. Heathyr was a vision of the beauty that Laurilli would one day become. With her smooth skin, golden hair, and blue eyes, she looked only slightly older than Laurilli, and not the nearly two decades older Uktesh knew she was.
Laurilli still hadn’t answered, and Uktesh noticed that they wore matching swimsuits and pareos. “Hey Mom,” Uktesh said, and realized he was more comfortable with the title now than when he had first used it.
“Morning honey. The boys and I are heading to breakfast if you would like to join us.”
Uktesh looked a Li, who nodded her approval. “Sounds good. Let me get my swimming trunks on and I’ll catch up with you.”
“It’s okay we’ll wait, Esolc, and Repus have to make their goodbyes to their lady friends they had over last night,” she said primly.
“Mom,” Laurilli said. “You don’t have to phrase it that way, Uktesh and I are adults, well practically in my case, and we know what they’re doing.”
“That must be my cue to exit stage left,” Uktesh said as he went back into the bathroom. He’d learned that phrase during rehearsals for the play that Esolc and Repus had forced Heathyr, Li, and Uktesh to join. Both Esolc and Repus had joined because they each wanted to date one of the girls in the play, fortunately not the same one. Uktesh was glad that Esolc seemed to have gotten over his crush on Heathyr, but was saddened that Thulmann wasn’t here for Heathyr to have someone special to spend time with. He tied off his shorts and exited the bathroom only to have a towel thrown in his face.
“Took you long enough,” Li said, and he had to laugh at the reversal of their normal roles.
Uktesh stepped into his sandals and the three of them exited the house just in time to see Repus kiss Leilani goodbye as she left to begin work for the day. Leilani was tall for an island girl at five feet and eight inches, which suited Repus who was six feet and four inches, he was the second tallest of the tournament group, just slightly shorter than Larut who stood six feet and eight inches tall.
Leilani had brown eyes, long jet-black hair, and the dark tan skin like all the islanders. The two had met sometime during the second week, and after a full month of pursuing her she had finally relented. They had been dating for nearly two weeks. Repus locked his door and walked over to them. Uktesh followed suit and locked his and Li’s door, as Repus said. “Morning!”
“Morning,” they said and Li continued. “Did you have an enjoyable evening?”
Repus smiled without a hint of a blush. Uktesh was jealous of that ability to stay cool. “Yes I think I’m in love with that girl.”
Heathyr asked, “Wow! Do I hear wedding bells in your future?”
“Woah, I don’t want to think about marriage yet. I’m still young. I’m only twenty nine, I still have to sow my wild oats,” he said jokingly, but then added with a grin as he watched Leilani walk away, “But maybe.”
Esolc left his house with Pamfilo, who, like Leilani had dark skin, straight black hair, and brown eyes. The biggest differences between them were their height, Pamfilo was barely five feet tall, and the fact that Pamfilo could only be described as extremely well-endowed, w
here Leilani had a more athletic build, although still well endowed.
Pamfilo stood on her toes and kissed Esolc as he leaned down and pulled her in close. It had been love at first sight for both of the, or so Uktesh believed, given how much time they spent together.
Esolc started to walk toward the group, but watched Pamfilo until she disappeared behind his house and began her walk to work. He shook his head and walked back to his door and locked it before joining Laurilli and Uktesh again. He saw what we were wearing and said, “Are you guys are swimming after breakfast?”
They started to walk toward the breakfast area, and Heathyr said, “Yeah. Laurilli and Uktesh are going to swim by the docks to wait for the midday boat. If Basam is on it they’ll show him where he and his kids will be staying. I don’t have any plans so I’m going to join them after breakfast, though I don’t think I’m going to swim.”
“Care for some company?” Esolc asked Heathyr. “Not that I’m going to be swimming, but I’ll sit and watch, or maybe go in for a minute.”
“Don’t forget you four have rehearsal at the amphitheater after supper. We’re going through Act Two, Scene Three so bring your scripts,” said Repus. He hadn’t gotten a part in the play, but he was there at every rehearsal to see Leilani and he had started to help the crew who were building the set.
“I wouldn’t forget that! That’s the scene where Laurilli kisses Uktesh before he he goes off to face the Afflicted monster.”
Uktesh felt his face heat at just the thought of it, and a quick glace told him that Li had blushed too.
Repus continued, “I want to know if they can do it in front of an audience. I mean look at the two of them. They’re growing a sunburn just thinking about it.”
“Of course we can,” Laurilli said and kissed Uktesh quickly. “See!” She laughed, although her face became even redder than before.
Esolc sighed dramatically, “How in the nine hells did they get the leads? When my voluptuous Pamfilo and I were forced to play Renkanto’s parents.”
