by Jani Griot
Epistem
Rise of the Slave King’s Heir
Jani Griot
Infinite Era LLC
Copyright © 2020 by Jani Griot Infinite Era LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Prologue
1. When Flowers Roar
2. Elemental Flares
3. The Slave Games
4. A Taste of Rage
5. Free Fury
6. Directing the Rampage
7. Skyscape
8. Service Secrets
9. Real. Not Recognized
10. A Hint of Subterfuge
11. The Consciousness of a Waking Warrior
12. The Sun Lion Diamond
13. Damnation
14. Master's Task
15. Silence is Golden
16. The Pleasure of Revenge
17. Deals with Darkness
18. Night Terrors
19. Ruminations of a King
20. Through the Eye of Omnipotence
21. Foreshadowing Trial
22. Honoring Vassilious
23. Robbery of Choice
24. Ochloc's Treasures
25. Sacrifice
26. The Creed of Service
27. The Sleeping Lady
28. Death Defying
29. Unearthing Legacy
30. Sand Mountain
31. The Dragon's Curse
32. Long Live King Avery
33. What’s in a Name?
34. The Ire of the Forgotten
35. The Reign, the Rage, and the Cloud
36. Where the Beginning Ends
37. Endless Cycle
38. Out of the Gallows, into the Wave
39. Frozen Peace of Existence
40. Caged Furies
41. Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to all the people that worked on this with me. Mom, Mary and Jeff, Tim, and of course, my grandmother.
Prologue
They dragged Vola past the room in the castle he’d known as his home for nearly five cycles. The two men doing the dirty work had once saluted him when he returned from relic hunting. The only relic still in his possession was the cloak he wore. The cloak in which he would die.
The golden-runed manacles around his wrist would not allow for a single drop of univers to leave his hands, nor would he have tried to use such magic without his gauntlets.
The ghost of Vola’s father flickered at the periphery of his vision. He shouldn’t have been able to see that man without his equipment, yet there he stood, shaking his head in grief. He wore far more pieces of the family’s armor than the doomed man ever had.
Nothing could stay Vola’s execution. Not his connection to the king and the prince, not the men and women he’d built ties to as a slave—not even the nobles who owed him their lives.
The guards pulled him along until they made it outside. His toes dug parallel lines into the sand. The lines ran from the gate they’d just left all the way to the hanging post. The group of nobles and Honorborn who gathered about was far larger than Vola expected. And he was to take center stage. Just another actor, another player, in their show.
Each of them had come to view—with hate-filled eyes—his execution. The bitter stares belonged to those whose leaders steered their own anger—and thus the anger of their charges—toward faceless enemies; chastising groups of defenseless citizens rather than persecuting rotten power. So long as the Honorborn controlled the structure, that would never change.
“What we have seen here today has shown me everything I need to know.” The man at the head of the group spoke in an uncharacteristically somber tone.
“Many of my fellow Honorborn have died today. Brothers and sisters. These unforgivable acts cannot go unpunished.” The man looked down at Vola just as Vola looked up to meet the man’s eyes. An act that only fanned the flames. Gasps and murmurs rippled through the crowd at this action.
“Even now, the worm defies his station,” said the man as if he were lost in thought. He wasn’t.
She will never love you Loc, Vola spoke the words into the king’s mind. Only he could tell how his words affected Ochloc, whose tone grew angrier as he tried to ignore them.
Vola shouldn’t have been able to speak to the king in this way, but the duo had long ago shattered those rules. That behavior had become the foundation for Vola’s execution (thought it was only a snippet of the myriad acts and words that formed the cause of his death). Giving slaves weapons to defend their masters was far from blasphemy—until the weapon was powerful enough to be a danger once turned back upon them. Being the first slave to not only know the language of his masters, but to also know a few words of the dialect that came before them, quickly turned Vola from a tool held by the master into a weapon pointed at the wielder’s throat.
You will never forgive yourself for this, Loc. What you take from me will be taken from you. By the name of my ancestors, the next to take this mantle will be your end.
Loc momentarily made eye contact with the condemned man. Loc stood still, seemingly unaffected by the threat whispered into his mind. The man spoke aloud, letting fire fill his words. Vola could not discern whether the king was angry or intended to incite a burning passion within his listeners. Perhaps it was both.
“None who stand before our Honorborn kingdom seeking its destruction will find anything but their own demise!”
He ended his speech before signaling the men to lift Vola onto the platform. Vola barely registered the flicker of Loc’s beckoning hand as they pulled him up the steps.
She will never love you, Loc. I never meant to steal her heart. I need you to know that, regardless of what is to come, brother.
With his life dancing away by the second, everything he’d ever wanted to tell the man flooded to the front of his mind at once. He couldn’t keep it in any longer—a lifetime of unjust treatment fueled him. The two guards stood him up so that he was on his feet.
“By the blood you spill today, my vengeance will be had!” Vola screamed toward the unexpecting onlookers. Fury saturated his face in a crimson hue as if he had been drinking stores of the most intoxicating Lionsblood.
“None of you will ever experience true power. Your end is as close to you as the shadows you cast. For, under the blanket of darkness that your oppressed live, so lurks the demon that will cut you down!”
He didn’t simply shout the words. He also projected them into the minds of every person before him, so that no matter where they tried to hide, the words would be there. Omnipresent. The reactions filled Vola with a sense of valor as he faced down death. For the fear he saw… it was the fear he’d once felt when looking at those same people.
“We will—” Vola began, but his words were cut short when his lord, and oldest friend, struck him across the face. He finally spoke back into Vola’s mind, a secret he would never share with anyone. This was how the two had almost always communicated, but they were forced to be careful, as there was nothing more treasonous than teaching a slave something above the position given to them by their family’s birth right. And communicating with others through language had long been a verboten act for slaves, or others holding lowly stations.
After what you did, I would lose everything if I didn’t kill you here. My reputation! My family’s wealth! My title! You may have been tricked into helping me, but you couldn’t have seen any other result. You killed a god, V
ola! These people thirst for your death, rightfully so from their perspective, and, as their leader, I am the one expected to deliver justice. Freedom is for those who pay for it, not those who fight for it, boy.
The words resonated within Vola’s mind. Hearing them from the only person he trusted weakened his knees. He nearly fell as the king turned away from him.
The doomed man, in his last moments alive, desperately wanted to believe that his king turned away because he was ashamed or couldn’t watch, but that naivety died the moment Vola saw her. What his master had seen.
She stood at the far edge of the audience with a group of castle slaves, who had been permitted by his lord to watch. She held a yellow-eyed baby who smiled in the sunlight. Vola stood, frozen, staring at her. He spoke to her across the distance—his last act as a slave.
Ark? He asked hesitantly. Tears filled her eyes as she nodded, holding the swaddled infant up for him to view. His master’s gaze fell upon the baby before he looked back toward Vola.
Your son will never rise, Vola. By the name of my unborn daughter, I promise it. She will not live in a world with the Fury!
Ochloc’s words invoked Vola’s inner rage to bubble up and nearly spill over, but the boy before him transformed his hatred into something else entirely. It wasn’t until the hooks were lowered before his eyes that he even blinked.
“For the three gods!” yelled Ochloc. The grip around Vola’s arms tightened as the men lifted him. The woman at the back turned away. Ochloc signaled to proceed. To give the insatiable mob of high folk what they wanted. The death of a faceless enemy made visible.
Two hooks sank deep into the apex of Vola’s eye sockets. Unspeakable pain filled him as his lids were forced open and pinned back by the device. He screamed. It was not something he could contain. A reaction of pure helplessness, pure anguish.
This was how they showed those who misbehaved the light. They hung them by their skulls—their eyes in an endless upward gaze as the sun loomed above, overloading the senses until the light became unbearable. Normally, the pain would end as the lord or lady’s wrath died down. But Vola was a killer of kings and queens. Those hooks would be the last thing he felt.
The men at his sides fastened his chained hands to the platform below. His feet twitched as he dangled there. Silence swept through the crowd as he swayed. People threw sandstone and rotten food at the man, as if he could be disgraced any further by the kingdom he’d fought for.
A welcome voice broke through the overwhelming pain.
Repeat after me, my son, said Novast. The apparition stood at Vola’s side.
He inhaled deeply, and through gritted teeth, he did as instructed. “With my last breath, I leave this message…”
Ochloc, and everyone who was around to hear, remained silent while Vola hung, speaking the words his father had spoken to him. Bloody tears soaked the fabric of the relic that dangled from his shoulders.
“The world is yours, my son, and it will fight you for control, for you belong to it as well. Never let light cast you in darkness and never let the dark that touches all men’s minds consume you. We will not break by the will of others. Instead, we must be as strong as the pillars on which the gods themselves stood. Smile, my child; your family stands with you always. As you carry this mantle, the power of Vassilious is yours.”
As he spoke, his body warmed, and just beneath the darkness that had crossed his eyes, a glow beamed through the air. Its origin was his own body. A white-hot heat formed like a thunder cloud above him. Ochloc took a step back, as did the guards. Those who watched in the sands in front of Vola grew fearful of what was to come.
“Live in the dark to shine the light.”
A flash of light pierced the sky in a golden beam, like harnessed sunlight. It flooded Vola’s limbs with uncorrupted energy while his life played out in slow motion before him.
His last breath caused an explosion of force and light. His existence was reduced to a vaporous outburst of roiling lifeblood, which was immediately swallowed back up by the cloak he’d worn. His existence ended as his new life began.
The cloak dropped to the floor as if no man had ever stood there donning it.
And the world continued to spin
When Flowers Roar
I wasn’t yet the person I would one day become. I was unformed. Nameless. Names were unnecessary on the brief list of commands a slave must know. The world in which I lived had given me little as far as an upbringing could be considered. My mind had been made small, beaten into a state of numb silence at that point. I didn't even know what a mind was, or why mine seemed to have so many questions. All I had was my work and my masters.
By that time, one of the few things I could grasp was that I’d experienced the passage of fifteen cycles. I felt as tall as any other, though only a few of my masters’ heads rose above the level of my shoulders when I stood upright (as rare as such a posture was then).
It was my duty to clean up after the fifty Royals of the manor as well as the same number of slaves in the compound. The Royal Guard took pride in cleaning their own quarters but keeping the rest of the grounds was enough for me to maintain a lean frame. My muscles weren't defined, but I was at an age where lifting anything of decent mass for longer than thirty seconds could fix that.
The cold sandstone chilled my face and bare torso. I curled up, shivering in the dark, and turned my back against the elements. I slept at the outermost ring of the herd. The resting position was a custom of all boys nearing their sixteenth cycle; it was how we shielded our elder slaves against the gusts of sand whipped up by the wind.
I had once obsessed over wearing my hair short like my masters. I had taken a few lashings for cutting it with sharpened rocks. There was no reason for me to wear my hair short. I had no concept of fashion, or the proper way to carry myself. Perhaps I was jealous of my masters and their positions. It was only when I stopped rebelling and allowed it to grow past my shoulders that I recognized the benefit of a warm neck in the frigid night.
My bangs lay draped over my face. The full moon (which came before the hot days) was near blinding. I needed sleep, but my mind raced. That day is vivid within my memory for one reason: I had just broken my golden rule. I forbade myself from ever gazing upward at the beauty that was my master’s kingdom.
“Beautiful isn't it, slave?” a young voice queried.
I dared not steal a glimpse. Like the art hung in those grand halls, Lady Ezra was the height of elegance. To be caught with my eyes upon her would be a costly mistake.
Memory prompted images of her white hair contrasting her lightly tanned skin. Her large eyes boasted battling shades of green and blue. She had been trained since birth to fight by the finest warriors sculpted from the sands.
My eyes shot farther downward, and I quickly returned to scrubbing the stone floor. The hallway was long—one of the longest in the castle—and filled with mesmerizing artwork. I caught a glimpse of a particularly detailed mural.
“You’ll never learn, will you? It shouldn’t be hard for a slave whose sole duty is to clean the floors to keep his eyes upon them,” Ezra said, adopting her usual mocking tone with me.
I did my best to bow as I scrubbed the stones in front of the heiress. I was nearly as tall as she, even on my knees, making it difficult to show her the respect the Honorborn required. I had been caught looking at dozens of my master’s other paintings, tapestries, sculptures, and statues, among other architectural blueprints and additions to the home I was raised to clean. Each of those incidents earned me a beating.
Ezra sighed. “Telling Father or my brother may be a waste for an ignorant problem child like you,” she said, leaning against a polished suit of armor, one hand on her hip as the other dangled by her side. A chill ran the length of my spine as she spoke those soft and merciless words.
She crossed the hall and clasped her hands together. “The Sun Lion Diamond! One of the rarest relics of the Old World.” Ezra spoke with admiration—a rare emoti
on for her to express. “It’s been said that the mother-flower roars as it blooms, like the long dead, majestic lions of the ancient world. One hasn't been seen in almost a hundred cycles.” She described the tapestry that hung before us, the painted image she’d caught me staring at moments before.
It was a beautiful flower, formed from what the Elementalists called univers. Elementalists had the ability to bend the will of the world using such magic. Long ago, one of them had created what Ezra referred to as the Sun Lion Diamond. A pure, golden flower with the body of a rose and buds that glimmered like diamonds in the sunlight.
I sensed that, whatever she was plotting, it couldn’t be good. I expected her to send me for lashes, or to the Royal Guard’s training yard to serve as fodder. One of the instructors coined the term “example dummy” after I’d endured a particularly gruesome beating.
I’d been caught peeking at a well-sculpted statue of my lord at some point during my tenth cycle. I had not looked away fast enough and was caught laying my eyes upon something of which they were unworthy. My punishment was a visit to the yard. That first beating—it didn’t seem too bad. Until later in the evening when the welts wept, and my body grew sore from having taken many direct hits from swords and shields. The blows from such instruments were scarcely lethal, as the weapons were for practice, and thus made of wood. Even so, it was difficult for me to finish my cleaning the following day. It wasn’t too long after that when the term “dummy” became the command used to summon me to the yard. I quickly associated the word with pain. Thus, I formed that golden rule—to never look upward.