“Then why bring him here at all, Eve?” Grayson’s smile hardened into a thin dark line across his face. “His core is weaker even than his father’s, and we both know how that ended. Did you really think this pup would stand a chance against my champion?”
A fiery tornado of thoughts whirled through my skull. One of the five sacred sages, men and women so powerful they might as well have been another species from the rest of us, knew my mother. He knew my father.
He knew me.
“Because I thought you were a man of honor, Grayson.” My mother pulled me past the headmaster with no more care than passing a beggar on the street.
“Listen to your mother, boy,” Grayson called after us. “My champion will break you even more easily than I broke your father for his crimes.”
The words stung my ears like a swarm of angry hornets. Shame reddened my cheeks and forced me to lower my head. My mother never told me what my father had done to earn death for himself and exile for what remained of his family. My father was a ghost that haunted our family, a spirit that had cursed us with a dishonor my mother had never been able to purge.
And, now, when I was so close to my chance to move beyond his sins and make a new life for myself, his specter had appeared again to turn the headmaster against me. A cold certainty settled over me, and I knew that if I left the arena there would be no escape from the chains my father’s crimes had wrapped around my throat. This was my one chance to prove that I was worthy of something more than exile in the undercity, that I was more than my dishonored father’s weak shadow.
Fighting Hank Eli might get me killed, but leaving without even trying to win the challenge would leave me trapped in a life without hope or possibility. I’d spend the rest of my days as a virtual slave, my body breaking down under the strain of the thankless labor that would consume my days.
I’d rather die.
“I’m not leaving.” My words were as cold and unmoving as the floor beneath our feet. In all my fifteen years, I’d never defied my mother before that moment.
“Don’t do this.” My mother held my wrist so tight her pulse pounded against mine. “Please.”
“You deserve more than this.” I leaned in until our foreheads touched. I needed her to understand how important this was to me. I needed her to know what it meant. “I deserve more than this. And you taught me I can win despite everything that’s wrong with me. I can bring honor to our name. I have to.”
“I would rather have a dishonored son who is alive than a dead son who is exalted.” My mother’s eyes pleaded with me to hear the sense in her words before I got myself killed. “There is more to a man’s measure than his honor, Jace.”
“If I run from this, how will I ever know if that’s true?” My hand slipped out of my mother’s nerveless grasp and I left her there, alone, to face my fate.
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Copyright
Sages of the Underpass is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Aaron Michael Ritchey and Shadow Alley Press, Inc.
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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. For permission requests, email the publisher, subject line “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the email address below.
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About the Author
Aaron Michael Ritchey is the author of The Never Prayer, Long Live the Suicide King, and Elizabeth’s Midnight. He was born on a cold and snowy September day in Denver, Colorado, and while he’s lived and traveled all over the world, he’s a child of the American West. Sagebrush makes him homesick. While he pines for Paris, he still lives in Colorado with his cactus flower of a wi
fe and two stormy daughters.
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