He was a mortal once, a human. Every sort of being I’ve encountered has a kind of symmetry, a beauty to its own kind. The man approaching us it twisted, disfigured by the slow, awful work of unseen hands. One eye sits higher and wider than the other, making him almost a cyclops, but his dark eyes rest clearly on us. His armor, its dark metal crude but sturdy-looking, is cut for a stout straight frame. Made for him before he mutated. In cavalry style, it’s strapped on tight over muscled, misshapen thighs. The odd angles of his arms don’t look any weaker than mine or Callista’s when he idly spins his blade.
“I am Halkor, man-at-arms to Empress Maeve.” He nods over me and Meridiana. “You have come to die in glory.”
“Uhhh…” Let’s not be so hasty, Halkor. First things first. I want the lay of the land. “I was told Lysperia is a realm between other worlds.”
“A simple explanation. Lysperia is a world,” he lisps between thickened lips. “Our place in the heavens is far from the worlds of champions who come to fight.”
A wave of shouts crest overhead. Dust pounds in trickles from between the ceiling planks. Halkor glances up and turns a broken smile on me and Meridiana. “Sounds as though it’s almost your time. Do you require a weapon?”
“Do people arrive without weapons?”
His awful grin twists wider. “For some, the arena is a surprise.”
Huh. “No, thanks.”
“Show me what you have for blades,” Meridiana utters, not bothering to hide her disdain for the place.
Halkor leads us between two of the columns to a row of sad, splintered chests sitting lidless against the wall. Leather peels from each haft inside, and while blades are sharp and tended, they’re ancient-looking, steel pitted and cloudy with the tarnish of time more than use.
Meridiana picks up several with her tail, flicks the blade’s edge with a finger, and throws them back. I don’t blame her; the weapons look tended enough to retain some fatality, but they’re not an item of strength or pride.
While we stand examining the sad makeshift armory, other combatants gather in the aisle, not hiding that they’re openly sizing us up. Only one looks anything like me, and he sits half in the shadows at the far end, polishing his gladius, maybe not caring because I look the least like competition.
Meridiana stuffs a knife into her belt. “I hope we have a lock or three to pick; this wouldn’t cut a plum.”
“Your tongue is sharp enough,” I tease, coaxing a smile.
Halkor beckons. “Come and meet your arena mates. They’ll fight with you in the Ring of Strife.”
The ring of what? I can hardly wait.
“Oh, fuck me,” scoffs one of the champions before we’ve reached the group. “A mortal relying on a pet.”
“A what?” Meridiana and I ask.
“Nothing like starting properly hobbled.”
“I’m not a mortal,” I throw out.
“And I’m no one’s pet, lovely,” Meridiana finishes, words strung taut.
The lovely she addresses stands almost my height, cobalt skin glowing against the shadows. Lovely doesn’t do her justice. Her black curls are thick and glossy, reminding me of the beautiful women we’d catch glimpses of in hot, citrus-soaked ports along Loria’s southern coasts. Her tits are bare, no armor or cloth, just an array of jet-black scales that glitter like dark diamonds where her areolas should be. They taper down her ribs like jet beads over blue silk. Scales arc again over the mound of her pubic bone, fanning to her full hips and sheathing her length to a tapered tail flicking the dirt behind her. In fact, from the waist down, she’s not human. She’s snake.
She sees me looking and narrows hot, azure eyes, resting long-fingered hands on her jeweled sword-girdle. “Had your fill of the abomination?”
I glance at Meridiana, who’s comparatively human looking but still…” You can’t be talking to me.”
Her heart-shape face twists, turning the point of her chin sharp. She’s about to thrust and I’m not in the mood to parry. “You’re nothing but a–”
“Sure, you don’t have bear ears, or alicorn wings, and you’re not made of slime, but it’s nothing to feel bad about. No need to get jealous.”
“Jealous!” Her thick waves rustle around a gold diadem set at her hairline, and I realize that half of what I took for hair is snakes, slender and sequined in the same black scales.
Halkor cuts in with a nervous hack in his throat. “So now you know Theriss. Here is Torvik...”
He’s so massive that I missed him until Halkor’s introduction made me look up. Torvik is not so much a he as a what. He hunches beneath the beams, body like a ham and pale as Theriss is blue. At least, his actual skin is pale; beyond pale, white as snow. But from his thumb-shaped head to leather-and-steel boots the size of my body he’s as tattooed as a manuscript illuminated by monks. Above one straw-yellow eyebrow is a band of tiny but intricately-traced green trees; a forest that stands as one small part of a miniature map among a whole story covering his massive body. His tawny armor is crafted from beasts that don’t exist in my world. The chest piece is detailed with cut shapes, but the whole riveted piece is nearly seamless, cut whole from a creature Torvik probably fought and killed himself.
The long line of his pink lips firm, drawing in the ring of golden hair around his face. “I am Torvik, queen of Kelenth!”
Queen. I can’t help it. My eyes fall like a stone from his beard to the tangled verge of hair across his pale belly and knee caps leathery enough to be armor in their own right. If this is the Artifact...
Torvik bellows a laugh that trickles silt from above. “I can’t believe that fooled you!” He calms to a chortle. “I’m too pretty to be a woman of my people.”
“You have my condolences?”
“Goran,” says Halkor, nodding to a black-robed man hovering behind Theriss. Goran looks like my brother Tagan during the half-year he spent insisting he wanted to join the crypt tending-monks and only listening to lute tunes in minor chords. My father got him over it with two weeks of paces through the tilt-yard at dawn.
Goran’s body, what little of it shows from the swagged folds of his hood and sleeves, is pale and clammy as the flesh tended by those crypt monks. His liver lips tremble; not with nerves, but a barely-bridled eagerness to utter spells. He dabs milky sweat from his chin and nods – maybe at me, maybe at mad arcanist’s thoughts, dark whispers only he can hear. The movement of his arm wafts me with the sweet scent of arcane sugar, the Sorcerer’s Addiction, and a faint odor of burned hair. I glance at Meridiana and scoot a half-step away from him.
“Lotha,” barks the creature behind Halkor. Female? There’s something feminine in the shape of black eyes without whites or pupils. And the tint of rosy lips against the tawny hair of a deer’s sleek regal face. Otherwise Lotha is a puzzle, with the lean hips of a limber game animal tapering to two spindly legs with the small padded feet of cat. Tiny pink nipples bud her chest, peeping from a glossy white patch among the fawn. Hair twirls around the carved roots of antlers and velvet, leaf-shaped ears in brown tufts, but it’s not styled as feminine or masculine. She’s the most purely animal creature I’ve ever met. There’s something undeniably alluring, exotic, about her. Her fur isn’t concealing enough to hide it, and my breath comes a little faster as I examine her.
“Lotha. Good to meet you.”
The nostrils of her black damp nose flare. “You won’t feel so if we come man to man in the arena.”
She’s right. I bow. “Until then.”
“Crispinus.” Halkor nods to the man still seated on the bench, his blade-scraping an undernote to all our introductions. He hasn’t looked up once that I’ve noticed. He cradles the blade across knees like the knuckles of an ox. Broad thighs test the slack of his blue-grey tunic, tassets of his cuirass spread like gold-tipped leather teeth.
Crispinus makes one last pass with the whetstone before he looks up. Blue eyes blaze from beneath short-cropped black hair, from a face like cut bronze. He has the featu
res of ancient heroes; handsome, noble, ruthless. His single nod feels like the acknowledgement of a king. “Your armor is very fine,” he drawls. Jealous? Threatening? I glance at Meridiana, who gives the barest shake of her head. She can’t read him, or much of anything about all this.
Alien world. Her apology filters through my thoughts.
“And the last of your battle group, the Brothers Catastrophe.”
“Catastrophe?” I don’t see anyone else, so I don’t hold back on the derision.
“Yeah. Catastrophe.” The voices echo in unison from the far side of the chamber. I crane, then stalk closer. One wooly-haired man beast holds another on the floor in a wrestling pin. Their faces are not quite dog or bear or monkey, but the beast in their features stretches over a human shape. By size and age, looks and the gleeful way one holds the other to the dirt I’d guess they’re brothers. As the name implies.
“Say it!” the one on top grunts, grinding his brother with an elbow. “Say it, Mathu! Klenth is the prettier.”
“Rut yourself in every hole, Mando. Hipsa can never be matched.”
Fuck me. These are the last two members of our party? Two boys fighting over a woman.
“I’ve always had the better horse and you’re a jealous cunt!” cries Mando, flipping his brother and twisting an arm without mercy.”
“Fuck me,” I utter aloud this time. “A sodding horse.”
Mando snaps to a squat, hunches and stabs. A pike impales between the joints of a stone column inches from my face. He’s asserted himself over Mathu again before my brain can grasp what’s happened.
“The best horse,” Mando grunts at me, grappling Mathu into a more humiliating fold. “Say it, Mathu.”
I turn to Meridiana. She sighs and rolls her eyes. “Absolute circus of shite,” she hisses. I turn further, to Halkor, who shrugs uneven shoulders.
At least I know they can wield a weapon. And fight. Hopefully with someone other than themselves.
Crispinus spares me the barest glance, but it’s filled with weight. No one else takes charge of the Brothers.
I nod to Meridiana, whose smile is disproportionately gleeful. Compulsion, a single wave like an orgasm, pulses from her, washes over the brothers. Mando goes limp and rolls away onto his back. Mathu sprawls. They clutch the dirt floor like a pair of drunks fighting the spin of heavy liquor.
“Hm.” Theriss grunts. “Your plaything has some use.”
Meridiana’s tail cracks, whipping around before she does. It stabs Theriss in the chest like a finger. “I’m not a plaything. You may have the blades, but if you’d like a demonstration of who has the real power…”
Theriss’ cheeks deepen to a berry stain and her eyelids weight for the brief second Meridiana seduces her.
It passes. Theriss swats the tail aside, undulating deftly back. Her snakes writhe and her eyes burn into mine. “Keep it away from me.”
Well, she’s kind of hateful. “There’s only one it I could put anywhere near you, and I wouldn’t worry about that happening. If you mean Meridiana, she has ears and a mind of her own. Tell her yourself.”
“You’ve met,” Halkor announces before my last word is out, a little too excited, a little too diplomatic. “Make final prep–”
The crowd above goes beyond deafening. Jeers and cries punch my eardrums. Halkor’s disfigured lips glisten with spit, frozen around his last word for long moments.
“Preparations!” he shouts finally, backing away. No one moves at first. I think awareness has settled in that the crowd doesn’t cheer for victors.
I shrug at Meridiana and we move away from the group, back the way we came in. “I’m as prepared as I can be.”
“But not prepared enough. There is far more to this place than anyone is saying.”
“Good thing I’m a quick thinker, then.”
She smirks over me. “I suppose we wouldn’t be standing here together if you weren’t.”
Her words fill my thoughts with images of naked skin the color of plum.
Meridiana laughs. Her tail brushes beneath my tunic and tassets. “How much time do you suppose we have?”
She’s evil. “Never enough.”
“That’s what you said when we were leaving.” She leans forward and bites my lip hard enough to draw blood. “After, perhaps.”
“About that…” I glance at the others, hovering in agitated lines near the far gate. “I don’t have a good feeling about this. This isn’t a team.”
“I don’t think it’s meant to be.”
“Meaning?”
“Combatants, to the lift!” Halkor shouts.
We gather where an iron and plank platform rattles down from the ceiling, filling the hot, sweat-musked space with choking grit.
“You fight for the consortship of Maeve, and all the gifts she can bestow.”
There it is. Meridiana was right; we’re not a team. We’re fighting for the artifact. I glance at the others. Are they aspirants? I don’t think so; none of them have a partner from their own trial. Unless the brothers.... I shudder.
Theriss immediately sizes up the rest of us. Goran vibrates with an eager shiver.
“By the end of the Struggles, the two most worthy among you will fight to the death. But–” Halkor raises his fist. “You will need one another to have any hope of succeeding beyond the arena gate. I wouldn’t be too hasty with a backstab or betrayal.”
“Circus,” whispers Meridiana.
“Mm.” I only half hear her. The bare flesh of my arms and calves was prickling; now it burns like a too-hot bath. I scratch, glance at Crispinus and find him doing the same.
“Energy and magic,” he mutters.
“Fatal?”
“No.”
Thank the gods. I exhale.
“Ask Halkor the mortal whether that’s a blessing or a curse.”
I stare at Halkor and try to imagine him as a human man, and swallow down bile at an inability to make the connection.
The astratempus may be suspended, but it looks as though my clock is still running up.
We crowd onto the lift. Darkness parts, streaming blinding light that burns behind my closed eyes and deep into my brain like the last moments before crossing into the afterlife. I hope this isn’t prophetic. Squinting at my companions, bodies rigid and set apart from each other, I feel I know the answer.
-The Ring of Strife-
Maeve
Twin suns burn down on us like a pair of outraged eyes. My heart pounds. There’s no fighting in light like this.
The lift grates into place and an archway greets us like the opening to a drydock. No coincidence with, a river at our backs; it’s been diverged to a bridge beneath our feet by pilings where a blonde wood barge sits moored. Its silk canopy flags in an emaciated breeze struggling through the fertile green ribbon along each bank. Beyond this? Nothing. An expansive waste of dancing sand gusts off to a white-gold horizon. The view is a bracing antidote for any temptation to flee. My odds of survival feel more certain beyond the archway. Halkor shouting us in is almost a blessing; barren flatness leaves me with the irrational sense I could slide from the face of this world into the heavens.
We march into the arena, each unapologetically gawking. Except Crispinus, who seems too proud to be overwhelmed by anything. There’s too much for my sight to see, too much for ears to hear; the space is a smear of noise and color. Maybe because it’s all inconsequential; there’s only one place for my eyes to fall.
On the arena’s far side an onyx pyramid juts like a broken bone of the world, protruding from somewhere deeper than Helheim. Its tiered body is truncated at the peak, a platform canopied by the same white silk as the barge. Two figures occupy the thrones set beneath it but only one is made to be noticed, and for a moment I’m struck dumb by her perfection.
Maeve.
Her blond mane is gathered high, helped by a helm-crown of pointed gold. Thick curls spill over one shoulder, almost the same shade as the silk robes she wears. Her face is u
nnatural perfection, large upturned blue eyes, slender nose, and a pout that turns her full lips from tempting to sweetly vulgar. Gold chains ring a slender neck and hang like pendulums, weight crushing silk between breasts that are bare under the thin fabric, too full to be restrained. Where Meridiana’s seduction is manufactured by her will, Maeve exudes it naturally, an inherent force. She’s impossibly beautiful, sexual, perfect. Her body and bearing signal just enough contempt that I look forward to the challenge of winning her. For a moment, I imagine her nude beneath me, clutching me as I drive deep inside her, claiming her.
My mouth is dry as I tear my gaze away.
At each rampart, torches blaze with phosphorus-white light, casting a sheen on Maeve’s guards. Sildreth, sons of the scorpion. They wear tabards in her signature white, off-putting against exoskeletons so black the creatures are almost invisible against the pyramid’s stone. It magnifies the electric tips of their spears, crossed over a staircase cut into the structure’s face.
Maeve’s pyramid stands as a back wall of the white-block coliseum, but doesn’t belong to the building. Polished black stone feels ancient, a piece of the machine of creation. The arena, while a feat of engineering that towers up from sight into a binary blaze, seems built by men around an object not of this world. Cheers and fevered adulation are a religious veneration more than the crowd’s enjoyment of bloodsport. This is holy-day mass and we are the sacrifice.
My conclusion is driven home as my eyes adjust to the sun. Mortal men twisted as Halkor rake and sweep the arena floor, shoulders hunched in deformity but something more - the braced posture of a creature waiting to be struck. They scurry, smoothing sand and chasing away splintered wood.
Other beings move about with less open fear of retribution. I’m not sure what punishment could be leveled at them. Despite relentless sun their bodies are pale. Not like Torvik; not white but an absence of color. Their bodies are narrow and formless, featureless, pulled taffy without as much substance. Working by pairs they wilt in half, bend and flow around the mangled limbs of corpses, punctuating each crimson spatter and streak. Two carry away the nearly bisected body of a dragonkin; one drags by itself while its companion twines glistening entrails around its arm like ship’s rope.
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