Epistem- Rise of the Slave King's Heir

by Jani Griot

  “Calm yourself, boy. Fear doesn’t suit you. To address your question, since I’m feeling generous; I am the manner of demon that trades, not the type to imprison or kill. Such paltry acts benefit those who are weak of spirit. They are of no use to me,” said Carter as he lowered the flower, placing it in the center of Khalif’s chest. The Sky prince looked between the merchant and the relic and gritted his teeth. Carter only extended a hand in the prince’s direction, waiting.

  “Are the terms the same as when we last addressed them?” asked Khalif. Carter nodded and his smile deepened. The initial deal would be sustained. The man would require two flowers for every one he lent to the gods and their offspring, making a grand total of three that Khalif would owe the man after he’d used the flower on his chest. There was no other way. Khalif lifted his hand to shake that of the merchant king’s. His stomach was pitted as he did so. He suppressed the urge to spit on his hand first, or in the man’s grotesque face. The feeling of Carter’s thin-skinned, chilled hand sent Khalif to the brink of a barely containable rage. I swear to all the gods. I swear, Khalif thought, only to himself, that I will never find myself in a position where I will shake that man’s hand. Never will I promise him another damned thing.

  “Thank you, boy, though the pleasure is mine, as always. Tell your father I’ve sent my greetings.” Carter took a kerchief from inside his cloak and wiped his hands with it. “I will be waiting offshore while your horrific plan explodes, and I will laugh will glee when I see how the mighty Thinker of Volantes falls.”

  Khalif closed his eyes in defeat, wanting to leave and return home but knew failing his father would cost him far more than any debt owed to Carter. Then he felt the impossible.

  Khalif, can you hear me? Synapse interrupted his rage. Along with the message, Khalif felt the strength of his family’s blood. It burst through his mind as well as his veins.

  Images of the young silver-haired boy flickered in and out of the prince’s mind. He could see the boy meditating in his mind. The image grew clearer as he concentrated on it.

  More synapse shot into Khalif’s brain. Come on, come on. Khalif urged himself to connect with that soundless language and to think it, but no matter how he tried, he could not respond.

  “Come on, boy, just a bit more and I can find you,” mumbled Khalif with a grunt as he strained. Wherever his brother must have found himself was far enough to distort Khalif’s abilities. Much like how he had been forced to use the full extent of his mind to create a rune of dominion; he was now shocked to again need the same level of devotion to this task. Then an image of his brother came into his consciousness like a framed portrait and he seized it.

  His chest alighted with the storm cloud rune of his family before he found himself surrounded by darkness.

  “If you can’t hear me then no one can.” The boy’s voice came from behind Khalif as he sat up, clutching his side. He wouldn’t be hurt for much longer, but pain was still pain to the godling.

  “I can hear you boy,” said Khalif, standing to face his younger brother, staring at his brother, but they were not in the same room. He could not reach out or touch the boy. When Khalif turned around, he found himself just as frozen as he had been by Carter’s experimental magics. It was as if his younger brother was no longer a factor, nor was his survival.

  Blinded by the brilliance of the countless flowers that surrounded his brother, Khalif felt anger, wonder, pain, and fear. Not even the horrors he experienced in Pandora could compare to the grief he felt in that moment as he pinpointed his brother’s location. He’d made a contemptible pact with a contemptible man for two of those precious blooms, and yet here was the boy. Surrounded by them.

  “How?” Was all Khalif could ask. The boy shook his head.

  “Father would kill everyone in Vassilious to find this place, and I don’t even know where exactly I am, and to be honest, I don’t feel strongly about making it out,” stated the boy within the bright room, coming to his feet.

  Khalif was but a ghost in this room; he could not physically interact with anything unless he opened a gateway. Using his Elementalist’s gauntlets, the Sky prince created an oval-shaped portal to traverse whatever distance separated him and the boy.

  Khalif approached the portal, both pained and dazed by his cumbersome efforts. All of which turned out to be in vain.

  “I wouldn’t try that…” the boy warned, as he watched the various runes flare to life around the opening between himself and Khalif.

  Khalif had only one aim, and he was not listening as the boy told him to stop.

  For the third time within a single night a loud bell rang clearly through his mind. The image of a blinding star, Ark’s luminescence, filled his mind with light shattering all thoughts the prince held temporarily. An unbelievable pressure threw Khalif from the entryway. He smacked back first into a wall at the end of the hallway he’d been in.

  “Khalif, Khalif!” The boy yelled down the hall as the sky prince collected both himself and his pride, while he slowly flew back down the dark hall. The boy’s eyes went wide as Khalif floated back into view. Then he erupted into laughter.

  The boy took a step backward. “Wow, I’m not going anywhere near you while those are lit up like that.”

  It was then Khalif noticed the sleeping slave behind his younger brother and his focus was almost entirely jolted.

  “We cannot let the old blood live. Kill him. Now,” demanded the prince of his sibling. Khalif looked to the boy who flinched slightly at the words only to scrunch his brow before looking back at him.

  “Kill the only person who has apparent access to wherever we are, where this garden is located?” asked the younger man in a way that shook Khalif almost as much as his interaction with the merchant king had. How long would it take him to recover from that? He was unsure. He had to brush it all off for the time being.

  “No, I say if you truly want access to all this, you’ll let me figure out how to get out alive and back here safely,” said the boy with an inflexible determination. Khalif took another step toward the boy, his gauntleted hands blazing with power as he once again came close to the trim of the entryway. He smashed his hands against the barrier and roared his frustration at his younger brother.

  “You dare defy me? Do you have any idea what sleeps next to you? The suggestion that rather than die by quicksand, he managed to pull you here is enough for me to know he is exactly the type the realm doesn’t need to rise. KILL HIM NOW!” exploded Khalif. Waves of force pushed back on Khalif as he pressed his two hands flat against the barrier. The sound of a bell rang on a short loop within his head.

  It was in that moment. Khalif gained a sense for the magic in a way that led him to believe that he could mimic the effects of the barrier magics used on him throughout the night. He was also aware that the area he was in had to be connected to the Sandmaker and even the archaic univers the merchant king dabbled in. His hands dropped to his sides and he looked at his younger brother who was only smiling at him.

  The boy snickered. “No. I don’t think that I will.” He paused to smile at his brother. “But I will admit I truly only feel this brave for two reasons. One, because of the ancient runes separating us and two, because of that,” said the prince as he pointed to a wall near the entryway. There, Khalif saw an ancient counting system.

  It was a numerical structure that utilized circles. The total number of circles set in a ring was the total number of the item being counted. Where the number of circles filled in, was the number of the item’s place within the count. He counted twenty-one circles and eleven were filled in. When Khalif looked back at his younger brother, realization struck him like a smack to the face.

  This garden. It wasn’t one garden. Well it was. But it was one of twenty-one gardens just like it.

  “If we can get any of these out of here, Fury can live as a freed slave under the contract of clans. We can pay off the flowers we owe to the merchant king before Father ever knows you made a deal
with him, and I can potentially receive my name. Everyone wins, no one dies,” said the boy.

  Khalif only looked at him, silently wishing his brother was right. Life had taught Khalif long ago that blood would always be shed, and lives would always be forgotten. Discarded. He just wanted to free himself of the world’s expectations of him and live by his own hands, something he believed was impossible without power; the most fragile resource he’d ever touched.

  “I don’t know what has invaded your mind and given you these thoughts, boy, but father doesn’t name his bastards when they feel they have earned one, only when he feels they have, and it doesn’t matter how many of those flowers you present to him, he would give them all away to kill that slave,” spat Khalif.

  He shook his head and sighed. The boy had often formed quick connections with the youth of the kingdoms Khalif had invaded, but something was different with this slave and Khalif could see it clearly. The normally timid boy may have trained as a kingdom killer like his siblings, but the boy had always been missing something. A grit necessary to truly become an assassin. Now he saw the determination he needed to make the boy into a true weapon, only that same determination was reinforcing the wrong choices in the older prince’s eyes.

  “He fought alongside me after looking into my eyes only one time. How could he be so dangerous? He runs around in a cloak and uses wooden practice instruments. I could have killed all those girls today and not only did he get in my way, stopping me, he stopped himself. I saw it repeatedly. Someone like that is far from menacing,” tried the boy.

  Khalif continued shaking his head. He pointed at the slave behind his younger brother. “He is no longer holding a practice instrument. That shield in his hand is a relic and so is the cloak he wears. You don’t understand, as a mortal, you call to power as all mortals do. As old bloods, power calls on them, any who follow his path, or walk alongside him will never feel true peace.”

  The boy looked at the sleeping slave and balled his fists. Khalif wasn’t getting through to his younger brother. So he tried, once more, to take matters into his own hands.

  He looked into his younger brother’s eyes and tried to use his family’s mark and place himself within the room.

  Instead of bouncing back at Khalif as a physical force like the barrier used by Carter; the energy repelled by this barrier washed over Khalif and allowed the Sky prince to travel. Only his destination was not within the room that held his brother.

  Having seen that horrifically beautiful garden, which had initially gutted him of all hope, Khalif felt he had something in this realm left to cling to. He may have lost the obedience of his brother, his own pride, and a few battles with a smarmy merchant, but he’d gained something, too.

  Night Terrors

  The girls heard a yell in the distance. They looked at one another, feeling more insecure about where their chosen hiding place.

  They sat at the edge of jungle they had fled to after being attacked by the inhabitants of the wilderness around them. All five girls wondered at the lack of Ochloc’s army, and even more at the lack of their master’s guards. They may have been ruse boys, which was nothing more than a grand title for a trained slave, but they still had value.

  “What will you do first with your freedom?” the brunette asked her leader. The blonde girl only shrugged, keeping her eyes in motion, taking in as much as she could. She was overwhelmed with excitement and suspicion at the clear path before them and would not ease her focus until a true escape was made.

  “Grow out my hair, maybe. I’m used to it being short, but I don’t know, doesn’t make any sense that we can’t grow it out,” said the blonde.

  The brunette scoured the faces of her group, looking for either agreement or disagreement. “Most of the ruse boy’s customs are unlike any other I have come across— little to no hair, forbidden from having any contact with any source of univers, even healing runes and simple arcana are included, not to mention how they train us in the most unforgiving kingdom known to the realm.

  “My lady Dara said something to me once about Vassilious being the best place to grow because of the shifting jungles all around us. She said that every river that runs through the kingdom holds drinkable water because the small portions of sporadic jungle that twist through the sands are actually some sort of ancient system built by the old bloods to keep the water pure and the animals who inhabit the land strong.

  “Unlike ordinary trees, these are sentient,” said the brunette. She stopped speaking the moment she saw scrunched brows. Now that they would be free, the brunette thought it best that she teach the girls what she’d been taught.

  “The trees are alive,” said the brown-haired girl, gaining a few nervous glances at their surroundings that made her chuckle softly.

  “They’re nomadic. I mean, they travel rather than having one continual home. I mean, they move continually to the most contaminated or polluted, Ark forgive me…” the brunette grew angry with herself but knew the girls wanted to hear her out, as none of them were scouting anymore.

  The redhead groaned. “Come on, just tell us, girl, we all know you like to tell stories, just tell it already.”

  The brunette frowned then smiled, feeling a warmth in the words beneath the girl’s apparent hostility. “Okay, the trees travel through the sands in a circular pattern,” she said, pointing downward and rotating her wrist for her demonstration.

  “They move to the dirtiest areas in the land and burn the filth from the sands and rivers and use that energy to call storms powered by univers, and that is what keeps the waters here cleaner than anywhere else in any kingdom. It could also explain why slaves trained here seem stronger, and maybe why we’re sharper than others, even though we’re without education.” The brunette stopped speaking and gave the blonde an unintentional glance that made the leader roll her eyes.

  “Wait. You… you’re saying that drinking clean water is what made us strong enough to beat slaves from other kingdoms?” asked one of the twins.

  “Dara must be putting something in your water,” said the other twin before the two burst into a fit of giggles. The brunette smiled as her leader gave the two a look that silenced them. So, when the blonde’s nod for the brunette to continue came, she did so with enthusiasm.

  “The Sandmaker stole the seeds of these trees from the Sky Kingdom and used them to ensure that all who were born to the sands, or welcomed by them, would prosper.”

  The twins seemed to take in more of the message after their homeland was mentioned, sitting up straighter as the brunette explained further. She loved to share information, as did the blonde. The others threw up small protests during the occasional lesson by the two eldest girls, but never truly interrupted or went without questions of their own.

  “The water must have something to do with it, or the slaves here wouldn’t be any different, right?” asked the brunette. No arguments could be made by the group, as none could truly think of reasons to debate the idea proffered by the brunette. The purity of the water was the starkest difference between Vassilious and the other kingdoms.

  The blonde cut in. “I find it strange. In the stories the Sandmaker always steals something specific in its creation of grand value. He left valuable things behind, yes. Yet, today, those kingdoms seem to have nothing left as a result of the dead god’s pillages.”

  The brunette looked at the lead ruse boy and opened her mouth to speak, but no words came for what seemed like a dozen breaths to all who sat amongst them.

  “Dara Vivek has created some of the most ground-breaking magics and uses of univers,” blurted the blonde, surprising the group.

  “I never said she wasn’t marvelous. Don’t get so injured over a comment not directed at your lady, or are you forgetting we are trying to escape? I don’t think we will make it to Sand Mountain with you still wanting to be owned,” said the blonde. The twins and the redhead looked between each other and then away entirely.

  “How dare you!” yelled the bru
nette. The stare the blonde gave her filled the brunette with fear and silenced her; the others grew anxious under the weight of tension caused by the verbal posturing. The girls struggled to interact with the brunette often, but never allowed for the arguments to take away from what the young woman brought to their group. She was genuine and loyal. Loyal to a fault, some thought.

  The head ruse boy stepped toward the brunette. “Sometimes I feel like you are a scroll with all the histories of the realm, written in the order of a lightning bolt, chaotic but straight to the point, your point. You live in your own world. I can see between the lines.”

  The brunette had no equal in the group in knowing about the world, from its magical properties to its hierarchal design and seemingly unnatural chemistries alone. But as for secrets and the workings of people and even those who were—or thought—themselves to be above people; none of them knew more than their leader.

  “I will never belittle what you know, and what you have been surrounded by. Many of us would be lucky for Dara Vivek to find us worthy, but not all of us have your talents,” said the blonde kindly.

  “The talents we have are sold to the deepest pockets every cycle, they tell us to find a flower and we could be freed, they tell us come back alive and we may be spared, they even tell us that if we win enough, the Honorborn will see us as equal to them, but I’m tired of lies and the scraps.

  “We must escape by our own hands and let no one get in our way, simple as that,” finished the blond. She crossed her arms, folding them across her chest. When she looked into the distance all she saw were swirling sands and growing clouds drawing near. She wanted to sleep and as she looked at the other girls, she recognized that same exhaustion.

  “Should we wait for the sunlight?” asked the redhead. The blonde and brunette agreed. The other girls started a fire as the eldest two spoke.

  The blonde enjoyed that none of the girls held anything against her, even though she feared she treated them as lesser. Like their masters. But at least, in that moment, she felt safe enough to breathe. Safe enough to think. The most dangerous thing for a young mind in peril to do.