The Abandoned Sorcerer

by Nefarious

  The Abandoned Sorcerer by Nefarious

  Category: Original

  Genre: Action, Adventure, Anti-Hero Lead, Fantasy, Grimdark, Magic, Male Lead, Mystery, Secret Identity, Strong Lead, Supernatural

  Status: Completed

  Warnings: Gore, Traumatising content

  Chapters: 57

  Summary:Orion Zakari is an Ice Sorcerer, the last of his lineage. He’s got no clue where he is or how he got there, but he knows one thing for certain: he is being hunted.

  His home and family are gone: razed and massacred. He will be next when the hunters find him. But if he can put enough pieces together, maybe he won’t have to follow his family down to eternal damnation. Maybe he can avenge them. And maybe, just maybe, he’s got a destiny waiting past that.

  Monsters and men, merchants and mages, hunters and the hunted. This is the story of the abandoned Sorcerer.

  Prologue

  “We are the greatest,” the Zakari always cried. “We will not be broken,” the Zakari always cried. Then they all cried together. Then they cried no longer.

  - Eira, General of the Pirosian Empire, in Why the Empire Fell, page 5, line 12.

  * * *

  The House of Zakari towered over its surroundings, its walls snow-white. There were four spires saddled upon its halls, their bodies sickly thin and eerily tall, able to cup a handful of the clouds without strain.

  The House wore a looming facade that protruded over the front yard like tusks. Colourful plants filled the garden despite the gravelly soil. These bright colours dulled towards the edges of the house, all but washed away in the countless white flowers that encamped the surrounding fields.

  But these flowers had decided to rosy up as they darkened in the smoke billows. The House was now aflame, its walls a flaky charcoal-black as licks of the fire fizzled across them. The stench that besieged the building pressured those nearby to wheeze and choke to death, the smell mocking the immense fortunes exchanged for the oils.

  Moreover, the plants that had blessed the House with their presence were little more than trampled trash as great swathes of soldiers stood at attention. Of course, the great Zakari lineage wouldn’t entertain such humiliation standing, and to their dubious luck, they didn’t have to as their corpses were stacked into mounds and set alight.

  Today was the day when the illustrious House of Zakari would fall to nothing more than a footnote in history. And as if representing the Gods, the almost-holy daybreak welcomed it…

  * * *

  A soldier wore a taut rictus as he lifted bodies and piled them. Clothes stripped, amulets torn, arms down, legs straight. There was a simple, albeit dark, rhythm to his job as he entered his flow.

  He knew each corpse he touched belonged to sorcerers feared and revered from east to west, people he would have been delighted merely glancing at. Now he pawed their bodies with sweaty, grimy hands.

  Their mortality scared him. But more than that, it was their eyes that frightened him the most.

  Black. Black. Black. Black. Black.

  Not one he had handled was white; they had caught the Zakari completely unawares. He understood the parasitic gear that wrapped itself around him was responsible for that, but it still broke him. This would be a momentous point in history: one of the great Houses dropping dead in disgrace. And worse still, he was part of that reality…

  Feeling sick at the high-stakes play he found himself trapped in, the soldier raised his head with vomit lurching up his throat. But as his eyes met with the horizon in between scattered trees, he saw a figure fleeing in the daylight.

  The bile that had threatened his dignity free-fell back down.

  “Sir!” he called out through pure reflex, uncaring about how raspy his voice sounded.

  “Yeah, Rods. What’s it?” came the response.

  “Sir, there’s a person there.” Rods answered.

  The officer kept his composure and squinted in the direction.

  “Naa, Rods. You got good eyes, I’ll say, but there’s nothing there.”

  The officer’s tone pronounced the matter over, but the whole event was already too frightening for Rods to now just ignore a glaring addition.

  “No, Sir. Please, there!”

  The officer didn’t even turn, let alone look.

  “There is nothing there!” he roared in a restrained manner, stretching each syllable to make up for the volume. His previous calmness had been lost to the storm. “Am I clear, Rods?”

  Nevertheless, Rods still peered into the distance with pleading, nay, begging eyes. Suddenly, a glint winked over and past the horizon, following the figure. It only went fast enough to trail the figure, not fast enough to actually chase down the figure, and Rods knew for certain it could run at several times the speed of a man. His jaw fell slack, his expression thunderstruck.

  Why hadn’t it killed the fleeing figure? What the fuck was going on?

  The officer didn’t wait for an answer, after all, Rods’s expression was more honest than any mustered-up bullshit. He liked the young soldier, so could only hope Rods had enough sense to keep his mouth shut. Forever.

  1. Alive and Kicking

  * * *

  Orion woke in the dark. His neck throbbed with pain, and the rest of his body was numb. But despite the startling conditions he woke up in, he still didn’t stir. Instead, he drowsily remained in the pose he had kept for hours, if not days. The only sign of him being alive came from the whistles of breath that bounced around the room, keeping him company in the gloom.

  A short while of whistling passed before he spluttered to life like an old engine, gagging while his head snapped forwards. He had choked for a few seconds, but what felt like an eternity, when he spat out a clump of vegetation. It splattered against the wooden boards and lay there as Orion gulped in air, strangely feeling worse as he gained more sense.

  His mind skipped its immediate concerns to torture him with his own memories: rushing into the trapdoor, his mum helping them down before following on, his dad freezing the trapdoor over and staying behind. His dad had wanted to fight without handicaps and without worry over their safety. Those were Orion’s last whole memories.

  Then, a blur. An ambush, in a passageway unknown to the world. His mum had died; he was certain of that. She had screamed at them to run with such an intensity the passage had partially collapsed, and so he had. He now knew he had survived, somehow. As for his sisters, or his brothers around the House, he could only hope.

  Spitting out sour saliva, Orion tried to push down his memories and his nausea. He looked around and saw slits letting in smoky-grey sunshine into the darkness, lighting up his surroundings: wooden boards, crates, fishing nets, a large mirror, and salted fish. And it all stank, whether it be the bristly mould over the damp wood, or the rotten fish.

  Rubbing his eyes, he walked over to the mirror and wiped the layer of dust off. His pale skin showed thin bags under his black eyes - he had slept well… There were dull-red scars from his left cheek to his jaw, seeming like cracks in dried ground, and his black finger-length hair had pasted to his head due to the moisture. His 16-year-old figure had slumped shoulders and a dazed stare.

  Turning from his reflection, he faced a wooden table with a large bag collapsed over it. Orion rummaged through the bag. Bread, cheese, water pouch, salt, a golden coin, and a wrist-to-finger length knife. General items, sure, but coincidently vital for the current-him; had someone left it here for him?

  He thought back to his final memory, looking past how blurry and spliced it was. He was running, no, stumbling, tripping, falling, rolling. Wherever he was now, he hadn’t gotten here by his own two feet. One of his family members must have saved his sorry arse and brought him to safety, so where we
re they?

  * * *

  Hours passed, and Orion had licked the aftertaste of cheese off his fingers, wishing for more. To distract himself, he had forced the door open, and heard a few bricks fall into water on the other side. Despite the fog crippling his sight, he had confirmed he was on a dock: the waves continously crashing against the shore had been a small giveaway.

  But instead of exploring half-blinded, he had decided to await his rescuer who was clearly more capable than him. Yet, despite his logical choice, his subconscious decided against it, demanding he went out there and cut down every last man and woman who had attacked his family. But who would attack the Zakaris? They were one of the four great Houses, uncontested in the Empire. Who would attack them but… another House.

  Shaking his head, he stuffed the coin and water pouch into his hunting trousers’ pocket. He used the knife to nick his fingertip, whispering arcane words while his eyes paled to a moonlit-white, before wiping the blood onto the table. A simple spell, one that lasted a week at most and would allow his Hero to find him. Placing the knife into the other pocket, Orion pushed the door and walked into the fog.

  He quickly changed his opinion of the storeroom he had been in: the boards in there hadn’t been mouldy or rotten, at least relative to the creaking, breaking menaces he stepped on now.

  The docks were smaller than he had expected, hinting he was in a coastal village right now. The air was thick with the scents of seaweed and salt, and the waves crashing against the shore engulfed any sounds of the sleeping village. The sunlight was now cloud-grey, and Orion could finally see where he stepped, a high-step improvement from before.

  His subconscious obsessed over the distant silhouettes and how alike they were to the animals of men who had ambushed the passageway. The passageway was only known to his parents and his siblings, and it was far too well-hidden to be found by chance. It was just another question he didn’t know the answer to, and the answers that did appear in his mind scared him, frightened him.

  Refocusing, he looked for a man to talk to, someone who could at least tell him where he was.

  It was while walking across the dockside he finally saw a figure, one fiddling with a few crates next to a sizeable boat. He crept over with his eyes set on his surroundings, wary of any ambushers, after all, if they could find out family secrets like the tunnel, what would stop them from tracking him down? However, due to his fit of paranoia, when he reached the crates, the figure had already walked away towards a distant warehouse, its mouth gaping-open for him to follow.

  However, suddenly aware of the fact that the crates were awfully interesting, Orion instead opted to stay and wait. To distract himself from his fears, he leaned over the crates and looked inside. Forehead creased, he used his hand to unplug his nose and took another whiff of the nuts lying on parchment. They were larger than any he had seen, had a roasted orange shade with black burns, but it was the smell that arrested him the most.

  He remembered his sister, old enough to work for the family, being sent to City of Yupker. They had lost contact with her a year after, but she had thankfully returned a few days before the search parties had set off. What the Gods hadn’t cared about was the condition they had brought their lost lamb home.

  Her face had been sallow, her eyes spiritless, her body starved. She had time-drawn creases under her eyes, heavy bags for a 23-year-old to bear, and her clothes couldn’t even defend her figure from lecherous glances, forget the unforgivable weather. An outrage had followed her return, but Orion brushed past his sadness and remembered what he had smelled. The scene was unforgettable with the memory burned in his mind, the scent indistinguishable - a scent of addiction.

  Despite being roasted a ways back, the nut in his hands still gave off a toasty scent, fresh off the coals. It was sleek and his fingers slid over like over melted butter, but it also crumbled when he squeezed. Opening the nut bolstered the rich nutty aroma, the odd accompanying sweetness, perhaps of honey, and the subtlest reek of manure: all from the nuts.

  While Orion’s mind felt excited by the smell, his anger from his memory burnt brighter. He stepped back, put his hands on the crate and pushed. He ran the crates into the water, loud splashes following. From deep inside the warehouse’s stomach came a loud shout, filled with anger: anger from failing to ruin another’s life, surely. No one would miss such a man, surely.

  His eyes lightened, the surrounding fog thinned, and tendrils of water ran down his right hand, the chill from it breaking the disguise of water but the fluidity of movement reinforcing it. The strands of ice entwined together like twin dragons, producing a sharp point at their front.

  As the clumsy footsteps got closer, he realised his idiocy. His sister’s “friends” had been paid back in full with added extra. His family, however, hadn’t been avenged for the injustice they had suffered. No one could know he was a Zakari, and anyone who came across a corpse stabbed by several icicles would immediately think of his family. So, a good place to start was by not killing every scum he came across.

  Taking one last look at the fool thundering his way, Orion sprinted away from the scene and was soon lost to the fog, only stopping when he entered an alley a distance away. While he stood catching his breath, bells rang in the distance.

  Three slow chimes, a high-pitched one, and three fast hits. The ringing wasn’t particularly loud, but it was resonant enough to ride the whole city and past, or at least Orion had read years ago. Suddenly, it made sense: the City of Visgamar had thick fogs in the mornings; the city had a thriving underbelly; the city had many docks, big and small.

  There was only one problem: the City of Visgamar was months away from the House of Zakari…

  2. Questions and

  * * *

  Orion’s legs lost their mental support and buckled over, driving his knees into cracked rock and his face into the wall. But before he made impact, he raised his hands and shielded his face. His mind registered little pain as his limbs got further numbed. He remained on his knees, resting against the wall with his eyes downcast.

  How? What? How? How had he crossed thousands of miles? Humans couldn’t create portals and the nearest one to the House of Zakari was a whole week away by horseback. Even if the whole journey to Visgamar had been made using multiple portals, it would still take a whole month at least. But, despite being the quickest route, portals were also dangerous to such a point it was unreasonable to use them. This meant that he hadn’t been conscious for at least over a month…

  How had his Hero made such a journey? How had they put him in a coma for so long? Why had they put him in a coma? Why had they chosen Visgamar? Why not the capital of the Empire, or maybe a small village to hide in?

  Countless questions barrelled around in Orion’s head, causing him a headache. He stopped thinking and took a deep breath. He hadn’t been the strongest Zakari, not by a long shot, but he had been one of the smarter ones.

  A paltry amount of pride blossomed in Orion at this, although it was engulfed by misery as he thought of his siblings, cousins, second-cousins, and so on. They were all utterly marvellous, and he was sure they wouldn’t be snivelling in a dirty alleyway if they were in his position.

  Wiping his tears away with his sleeve, Orion took another deep breath and stood up. He had to review what he knew and not get tangled up in the past. Unfortunately, the only thing he knew for certain was that he had woken up in a disused storage house by the docks. Thinking on the matter now, it seemed more likely he had been abandoned there on purpose.

  The crux of the matter was the abandoned bag on the table. From its quality and lack of dust, Orion knew someone had put it there recently, and that it wasn’t his Hero’s equipment, after all, there was no way in Heaven or Hell that anyone would travel from the House of Zakari to Visgamar with just a pocket knife and a handful of food.

  But despite being certain, he was still aware of other very-unlikely explanations for the bag. He considered wiping away the blood tracker but reali
sed if his Hero had just been out for a bit, it was still for the best he left it there. He did, however, sneak back into the disused storage building and steal the bag. It was dirty-maroon and had two straps to put his arms through. It sagged above his butt but other than that, it fit well. Then, he sneaked out and went back to the alleyway, walking onwards to find a main road.

  The part that bit him the most about his thought-track was that it seemed inconceivable why someone would put him in a coma in the first place, and why they would just leave him in Visgamar in the second place. In fact, it made a lot more sense if he had just misheard the ringing, or even if another town had copied the bell’s design. So, Orion decided to find someone less shady to ask.

  While this should have been an easy task, it turned out to be the opposite as right next to the docks were slums, or of the sort, finished with many dead ends and lack of directions. This meant he had to jump over many a wall and tightly grip his knife as he walked, as well as pray his nose would survive the pitfalls of shit and garbage littered about.

  Close to an hour later, Orion found the main road, a faint glimmer of sweat plastered on his forehead. It was early morning, and the fog had lifted enough it had altered into mist.

  The main road was well-lit with glass lanterns every few metres. The road itself was looked-after, and potholes and cracks were hard to find. It was about eight or ten metres wide and likely travelled the whole city considering how wealthy of an image it gave the area. Furthermore, after watching the road for a few minutes, he realised it was well-policed with both stationary units and patrolling teams. Seeing another team march past, Orion walked onto the road and headed towards a standing guard. Now closer and in the bright lamplight, he felt his hopes drop as he glanced at the soldier.

  The middle-aged man wore a gambeson with an insignia showing a boat amidst stormy seas. He had padded trousers and hard boots on, as well as a chain-mail hood. Only his hands and face were bare, and both showed wrinkled, cut, and scarred skin.