A Warrior’s
Redemption
Book One
of
The Warrior Kind
Guy S. Stanton, III
Words of Action
Copyright © 2013 by Guy S. Stanton, III.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
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A Warrior’s Redemption/ Guy S. Stanton, III. -- 1st ed.
ISBN 978-0-9910565-0-7
Table of Contents
The Prelude
Hell is Hot
Branded
Hunted
Temptations Lane
Cliffside View
Campfire
Strength of the Past
Escape into Peace
Responsibilities
Beaten but not Broken
The Past?
Upheaval Begun
Bloodletting
Out of the Past
The Dark Ones
Breath of Life
The Plan
Crumbling
According to Plan
Last Stand
Wave of Creation
Awareness Begun
Queen’s Ransom
Dedicated to my wonderful
wife. You’re the best! You’ve always
been there believing in me and inspiring
me to do more. I couldn’t have made it
without you Honey. 143
― The Map of the Ancestor’s World
A long time ago…..
The Prelude
In the distant past there was a tribe of people on Earth called the Vallian. They were warriors, a people of the sword and they lived by honor and the integrity of their belief in the Creator of all life.
The world was changing all around them as it drifted more and more from the old ways of the beginning of time.
Their enemies hated them for their stubbornness not to change and go along with the wicked tide of man’s fall from grace with their Creator.
The Vallians prepared in secret to do the only thing left for them to do, leave Earth the first world. Sensing that a judgment was coming they prepared a way to escape the catastrophe that they felt had become inevitable, given the conditions surrounding them of the fallen peoples of Earth. With their preparations complete they left the place of their creation, two hundred years before the global flood sent by the Creator to destroy the earth save for one man’s family still living upon it, who was found to yet be righteous and of pure blood lineage.
The Vallians traveled far and long through the galaxies of the Creator’s handiwork until they came to a planetary system where they decided to make a new home. They were not the only ones there though. Other peoples from Earth in the more distant past, had found the series of worlds in this distant galaxy first and had settled there.
The Vallians claimed their spot in this new realm of space and had peace among their generations for over three thousand years in which they grew and prospered into a powerful nation above any other.
They made a mistake though and replicated the evils and fallen natures that they had once escaped from on Earth and an enemy, with a grudge three thousand years in the making, had no pity upon them. War broke out and millions upon millions died of the Vallian kindred. They could not win a war they had not been prepared for and so a surviving remnant of their once proud people fled the galaxy.
They knew nowhere else to go other than the galaxy where man was first created. They found the Earth and its resurgent peoples after the great flood a vastly different place than they had left. They had left in 2150 BC. And now they were back and the year was 1350 AD. So much had changed that they felt they could not stay, but they took the words of the Creator, which had been spoken in their absence and recorded, with them in their journey to find a new home where they could both hide from their past and forge a new future.
They found a solitary, uninhabited world, not far from Earth and this is where they settled. They abandoned their technology for fear of replicating the mistakes of the past, but inevitably civil war broke out and the Vallian people fractured apart and the new world became a place of factions, warring against each other in bitter envy and hatred of belief, where once had been brotherhood and unity.
Over seven hundred years passed as life continued on, bitterly contested among the descendants of the Vallian. They as a people had now split apart into many and were without any clear knowledge of the grandness of their ancient past. They had no real hope for what lay ahead in their embittered views of what life had to offer. They only fought to survive as brother warred against brother. However, there comes a chance in every people’s existence to make a change for righteousness and to adopt the justice of the Creator’s path.
One of the factions of people broken off from the tribe of the Vallians still adhered and fought on among their kindred to see this accomplished and for unity in belief in the Creator of all life to once again be restored, but they needed a leader to help accomplish this quest and one day they found him.
Chapter One
Hell is Hot
The sun was hot and I felt a drop of sweat make its way down through the grime of days of built up dust that I hadn’t so much as had a chance to wash off yet. I was doing well to still be alive, but I hated the smell of stale sweat that I reeked of.
Still it was better to be alive than a rotting corpse left out for the vultures to dine out on somewhere in a lonely gully. I didn’t have any spare water to wash with anyway now that I did have some time to think about how bad I smelled.
Water at the moment was the most pressing problem I was faced with. The Hagathic Wastelands were just that, a wasteland without drinkable water. It was a good place to lose a posse of enemy riders in or die of thirst. Take your pick, but I didn’t want any part of either option.
To the east about fifty miles off was the edge of the Attorgron forests. There was good water to be had there and it was closer than the other source of water I was heading for, but it came with its own problems. For one my pursuers would be expecting me to head off for water there, not to mention the cover that the forest could offer us as we made our way north, but running into the Attorgron people would be unavoidable at some point along the way.
To them I was a wanted man with a bounty on my head that made me more than worth the trouble it was to them to hunt me down and stick one of those poison darts they were so fond of into me. No thanks; I’d take my chances out in the open as opposed to dying from some poison burning my insides out.
Decidedly all my options were somewhat grim. When had it ever been any different? Not for a long time.
I glanced back through the shimmering heat waves over the way we had come. I didn’t see anythi
ng amiss so I decided to stay where we were for a while longer. Both I and the boy needed the rest.
It would have been nice to get some sleep, but the thought of a Zoarinian lance point being rammed through my middle, while I slept kept my eyes open. I hadn’t seen any signs of visible pursuit in two days, but I could feel them out there all the same. It was like an itch that wouldn’t go away.
Rats! I smelled and now I could add itching to the list of maladies of neglect that I was suffering under. The chase was definitely starting to get to me in a bad way. Going without sleep for days and being responsible for a kid would do that to you.
How had I got suckered into doing this fool’s errand anyway? It was one thing to be a man alone and be chased, but carrying along a kid laid down a whole new array of problems to contend with. I didn’t know anything about kids! Taking this kid along hadn’t been a part of the plan, but he was here and that was that. A chase was tough on man and horse alike, but on a kid it had to be especially tough and I was grateful that this kid exhibited a lot of toughness.
The kid’s toughness reminded me of my own tough childhood back in the lowlands of the Hills of Ernor, near the Zoarinian city of Cassis.
My family was not of Zoarinian lineage or of the Ernorian people either. My father had brought us to the hill country to get away from some difficulty of the past. No one knew us there from before and that seemed to be what my parents liked most about the place, only I could tell that my father hadn’t been happy to be there. The land of his birth, which he would often wistfully look off towards in the north, was where his heart seemed to have stayed. The Ernor Hills were the closest he could come to the mountains of the Valley Lands, which could be seen in the distance on a clear day.
My brother and I had grown up largely alone and had few friends as our parents kept us from mingling with the local people for the most part. The most we had seen of the outside world was when harvest time came and we would float our harvest on rafts down the Tegre River to the hungry markets of the Zoarinians farther down the river.
Though my brother and I were kept from much interaction with others we still had the love of our parents and the security of the home they had provided us with.
Those had been golden days, but I hadn’t known it then. Those kind of days weren’t likely to be seen again by either myself or the poor lad, who lay curled up in a ball over by the small fire fast asleep.
The journey from Kharta had been rough. We had been chased from the onset and it had been a near thing for a while before I was able to buy us some time and distance by losing our pursuers temporarily in a swampy stretch of territory that I was familiar with. The boy had stood up to the task remarkably well and my respect for him had grown daily. I hadn’t directly told the boy yet that his father was dead, but I didn’t think I had to as he had already guessed it. I’d seen him crying quietly at times, mostly at night when he had thought that I wasn’t looking. I had respected his wishes and had not let on that I had noticed him crying.
I decided to let the boy sleep a little longer. It would be better to travel after dark now anyway. Settling into a semi more comfortable position against the bank of a long dead stream I continued to rest. I let my mind wander back to the past again, when I had lost my family and the innocence of my youth.
All I had left of my past was my name, Roric Fortigar, the son of Lorn and Ni’isha Fortigar. My brother’s name had been Faron. While we had lived peacefully enough in the Hills of Ernor the world around us was not so settled. The world outside was cruel and merciless and grew more so with every day that passed.
I had been naïve to the ways of the world, until one day when it made its harsh intrusion in a way that changed my life forever.
My parent’s raised my brother and I differently than the hill people around us, who had in large part adopted the Zoarinian way of life. Unlike our neighbor’s kids, we were taught the old ways. We learned of the Great Creator, who had made all that we saw around us. We learned how man had fallen and how he had been redeemed and much more.
As boys we didn’t really understand the concept of a fallen sinful world, and what it meant that all things would be made right some day. At the time I hadn’t been convinced that there was all that much wrong with the outside world. From what I had seen in the fall of each year, when we had taken our goods to market, the greater outside world had looked rather exciting, especially when compared to our humble little home in the hills. Our parent’s adherence to the old ways caused us to be looked down upon by those around us.
The central culture of the world as we knew it was the Zoarinian Empire to the south, with its many great cities by the sea. They went about their lives far differently than my parents did. Surely so many people couldn’t have gotten it so wrong in life to be worthy of the scorn directed at them by my parents? Maybe the Zoarinians had a good reason for abandoning the old ways my parents still adhered to.
At the time I had begun to wonder if my parents weren’t the ones that needed to change. How naïve I had been then I thought now as I looked back on that period of my life.
The Zoarinian culture was presented as a free society, where one could do as one so pleased, as long as it had the approval of the ruling elite, who rarely denied self expression to take place in whatever form it took just so long as it didn’t obstruct them from making a profit from it. Excesses were encouraged and the old ways of honor and self control were discarded as useless virtues that shouldn’t apply to life anymore, as they were outdated. Dissenting voices were very few to this new self styled destiny of life, as it had something for everyone to like about it. In fact the only dissenters I knew of were my parents and it had brought unwelcome attention to both them and my brother and I. I hated it most, when because of my parent’s beliefs I was pressed by others of my own age to defend those same beliefs that I wasn’t sure that I believed in, but out of loyalty to my parents had to defend.
The real trouble seemed to start when my father refused to visit a temple priestess, who requested his presence in her private chambers at the city temple, after she had seen him while out walking in the marketplace during the harvest festival. Such a refusal was little heard of as few would turn down a sensual evening with a beautiful temple priestess behind closed doors. Priestesses rarely made advances to commoners and to refuse such an offer was regarded as an insult. I had always respected the relationship my father had with my mother, even though it was old fashioned to be committed to only one person. Turning down the priestesses offer had been the right decision for father to make and yet the cost of it had been high.
One warm summer morning they came for us. I had almost finished with my morning chores, when I had seen my father walking toward me across the barn lot stumble and gasp hard as four brightly colored arrow shafts slammed hard into his chest with dull sounding thuds of finality. Horrified by what I had just seen I dropped the bucket of water I had been carrying from the well and started running towards father, but he had waived me off with a violent gesture of one arm.
Several mounted Zoarinian lancers started to converge on my father from opposite ends of the barnyard. My father still upright on his feet had yelled to me.
“Save your mother and brother, Roric!”
My eyes had locked with his for a moment and in a dazed realization I had sensed the weight of the responsibility he had just conveyed to me, as if it was a crushing burden I was unfit yet to manage. I had not been overly close with my father, but in that moment I felt like I knew my father in a deeper more powerful way than I had ever known him before.
Frozen in place, I had watched him turn to meet the onrushing lancers boldly. I had come unfrozen with a jerk of consciousness then, as I remembered the responsibility he had conveyed to me to protect the family. I’d run for the house with all I’d had in me then. As I ran, I watched what became of my father; I had no choice but to as I had to run past him to reach the house.
He had stood there tall
and proud and I had watched as somehow he was able to grab a hold of a lowered lance and rip it from the hands of its mounted rider. Balancing the lance overhand he had thrown it like a spear at the next rider and I’d saw it impale the rider through his middle, causing him to fall backward off his horse. A third lancer, who had come up from behind my father’s blind side, impaled him through the back with his lance. Tears streaming from my eyes, I had looked away from father and run even faster for the house determined to save my mother and brother.
My mother had already fled the house and was at the stable pushing my brother up onto one of the two horses there. She then swung up behind him, and spurred the horse forward. My mother had been a strong woman, but her face had been awash with tears, as she fought to save her youngest son. She had to have known that father was dead, because she would never have left otherwise.
“Mount up quickly Roric!”
She had screamed at me gesturing towards the second horse before she was gone in a cloud of dust. I had jumped the rail fence of the corral and leapt onto the back of the second horse. Wheeling the horse around I had kneed it forward brutally in order to catch up with her. After several minutes of fast riding I had narrowed the gap between us, when I saw a group of riders coming out of a low creek bed ahead and off to our left.
There sudden appearance ahead of us threatened to cut us off from our only chance at escape. I remembered what I had seen in my father’s eyes just before his death. He had passed the responsibility of protecting the family to me and I wasn’t going to let him down! I clenched my jaw hard; not at all sure I was doing the smart thing, as I veered my horse away from my mother’s and towards the group of riders, who were gaining on us rapidly in an effort to cut us off. I heard my mother scream.
A Warrior's Redemption (The Warrior Kind) Page 1
