The space beyond was wide and empty, save for a massive cage sitting in the exact center. The sides of it were interwoven bars of metal, even on the top; thicker vertical bars were lined all the way around the basic structure. But even from here she could see the figure crouched inside it—he sat up, looking in her direction. In the low torchlight Calla caught sight of matted white hair.
“Hiran!” She rushed towards the cage.
It took him only a moment to realize it was her. He sprang towards one side of the cage to meet her. Calla struggled to put her arms through the narrow spaces between the metal bars, trying to grab him in an awkward hug; it took him by surprise but he attempted to return the gesture—it was harder for him, as his arms could barely fit through the small square openings of the inner framework. As Calla tried to pull away the upper part of her left arm got stuck in one of the openings. Hiran immediately started pulling on the bars on his side holding her, widening the opening enough for her to slide back.
Calla sat back on her heels, holding onto the metal with both hands. “Hiran, what happened to you?” she asked as quietly as she could, afraid some of the guards would walk in on them at any moment. “How did you end up in here?”
He sat back, folding his legs in front of him. “I have been here,” he said bitterly. “They caught me two weeks after I left you. I have been locked away down here ever since.” Hiran looked right at her. “And what of you, Calla?”
She saw the look in his eyes, saw the mixture of pain, sadness, even anger reflected there. Calla had an idea of what he was thinking: he thought she was now in league with the Council.
She laid her hand over his on one of the bars. “It’s not what you think,” she said.
“Is it?”
“That isn’t true, now stop that—stop that thought right now!” She leaned in as close as she could despite the metal barrier. “Hiran, I’ve seen Her.”
He blinked, the mixed emotions being replaced by surprise.
“I’ve seen Her—Elenia. I was able to get to Her on the mountain.”
His gaze didn’t let up for a moment, his focus on her face intensifying. Metal screeched as he made another hole in the bars without looking and reached one hand towards her face. His fingers just touched her left temple for only a second, then he took his hand away again. He suddenly scowled and dropped his gaze. “I have been in here too long,” he said with a hint of sadness. “It is starting to get to me.”
“You don’t belong down here; this all has to be some kind of mistake.”
He laughed halfheartedly. “Good luck trying to convince the Council of that. If the guards come and find you here, the Council would surely have you join me.”
Calla shook her head in dismay. “Hiran, why do they hate you so? I only just heard something of their attitude towards you tonight—it was the first I had heard of you since you left. Was this what troubled you about coming back to the city? Did you know this was going to happen?”
He shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand—no one would.”
“Wouldn’t I?”
Hiran just looked at her in silence; she saw the doubt on his face. He leaned against the side of the cage. He let out a sigh and shook his head.
Without thinking about what she was doing, Calla reached one hand through the bars towards his face; she touched his chin with the tips of her first two fingers. “Won’t you trust me?”
He said nothing about the touch, just reached up with one finger and started to trace the veins in her hand, seeming to be lost in thought. “You would hate me like everyone else for it,” he said at length.
She grabbed at his wrist, holding on to it as tightly as she could. “Why won’t you let anyone in?”
He didn’t try to break her hold. He looped his fingers around a bar and pulled himself upright. He ran his free hand through his matted hair.
“For you,” he said with a sigh. “So that you might learn the truth from me rather than someone else, about what I really am.”
XXVII
Hiran
Hiran rested his head against the metal bars and closed his eyes for a moment. He felt exhausted, not physically but emotionally. He was tired—of everything.
He glanced back up at Calla. The girl had pushed herself as close to him as she could, squeezing through the outer line of thick vertical bars that had been put in place last night to reinforce his cage. He had tried to break through them at another side where he had bent the original framework, but these were much thicker and stronger; they were spaced too close together for him to squeeze through them. The Council must be desperate to try containing him like this, even to work to keep the girl from finding out he was here.
He was surprised they hadn’t confronted her about him; they had to know by now he was the one who led her here.
He kept staring at Calla. The lighting down here was poor and yet it still made her beautiful; just looking at her was enough to make his heart skip beats. She seemed to have grown a little thinner since he last saw her, every bone more pronounced. The dark dress she wore was clearly much too large for her, slipping quite far off of one shoulder and down her arm. Smiling half-heartedly, he reached one hand through the bars and slowly lifted the fabric back up to cover her, careful not to touch her skin. He felt the shudder that rippled through her, but she otherwise held still.
He could sense she held some kind of emotion for him, something deeper than he had seen in her before. But whatever its nature, would it still be there when he told her the truth that so few really knew?
His heart said no, she wouldn’t. To learn of the past that made him feel such shame would be enough to drive her away like everyone else; she would never trust him the same way again, would even hate him. But still she was here, wanting to hear it all from him. “Why won’t you trust me?” she had asked. Would it really be so hard for him to share some of his darkest secrets with this girl, whom he felt something for?
Didn’t he trust her?
“Hiran,” Calla said quietly, bringing him back to reality, “won’t you tell me?”
Hiran absentmindedly started playing with a loose section of her hair, twirling it round and round his finger. The strands were so soft—they felt almost like silk. She really was quite the distraction…
And Calla’s fingers were curling around his wrist to stop him. She kept her eyes locked on his face, an impatient light shining in them. “Hiran, if you say nothing I can’t help you.”
Perhaps, he wanted to say, but he held his tongue. She meant well, he knew that, but he was still so afraid that she would abandon him all the same. But maybe she would see things from a different perspective than the rest of them.
She deserved to be given that kind of chance.
“It is a past,” he said, “that pains me every time to think on.”
Entha had been a Mirnin, a high-standing member in one of the few remaining ancient warrior clans of the Malc, followers of the Lady of Life. She was the daughter of the chief, who had done everything in his power to preserve the traditions of his people as the world around them continued to move forward. Though a princess, in a sense, she was good to everyone around her, treating everyone she met as a close friend. She, like many of the women in her tribe, was learned in the battle arts—for honor, for glory, for the pride of the tribe whenever the need arose. She married well, her husband a strong warrior from another tribe who had grown to be one of the most respected men in his village—enough to earn her hand and ensure the continued peace between the two tribes. They stayed in her village, but for some reason they never had any children. In the first three years that followed her life was perfect, with no signs these happy days would ever end.
One dark night the tribe was attacked while they slept. The night watch overpowered, everyone else was awakened by the cries of war and death that surrounded them as the monster soldiers poured in, killing the men and seizing the women and children as they went. Entha had stood her ground—her husband dead
, she was determined to go down fighting. But one of the beasts had managed to sneak up and take her from behind.
With injured pride and most of her people killed, entha had been brought directly to Triblan, the lord of the Brac people at the time and master of the monster soldiers. He chose to keep her and several other women, while the rest were given to his nobles and soldiers and the children sent to hard labor, never to be seen again.
Triblan made it a crime for anyone other than him to touch any of “his” women while he chose to keep them; if they failed to serve his desires or he lost interest in them altogether he simply sent them to others, despite the complaints about how he had already touched them.
Entha came to call him Nishtan, the Black-hearted, for his cruel nature and the evil he had done to her and others, and refused to address him by any other name—ordering the child he got on her to do the same thing.
For a child to be born from such a relationship was beyond disgraceful among her people; the tradition of her people stated that the boy should have been killed immediately and his spirit sent to the netherworld, where it would wait to be born again free of the evil that clung so tightly to him. But entha could not destroy him. Out of all the women Nishtan kept for himself she was the only one to bear him a child, which made him happy at first—she had given him a potential heir. Yet from the moment he was born the boy could not stand the touch of his father or any that served him willingly—he screamed endlessly at the top of his lungs until entha would take him back. For a child to hate one parent at such an age was unheard of; curious, she spent the next two years watching him. As he grew the boy’s attitude towards his father’s people did not change, but those he met of the surviving Mirnin he welcomed despite the fear they felt towards him.
He had more of her in him than she had first realized, and so much more that was neither her nor his monster of a father.
After seeing all this entha felt that Fate had sent him to her for a reason. She could sense something special about him that was not evil, and it made her spirits rise. She named him Hiran, Giver of Hope. But people promptly started to treat him worse and worse, openly beating him, sometimes right in front of her; chief among them was the boy’s half-brother: the little lord Dranl, born from a relationship between Nishtan and one of the noblewomen, seemed to take encouragement directly from his father. Entha knew they were trying to break her by targeting her young son. She had no intention of letting them succeed.
Shortly after he turned five years old, she took a serious risk and ran off in the dead of night, her young son clinging to her shoulders.
Back then the Dead Lands were significantly smaller, leading to only a few days of travel before they crossed the border to freedom. Another three days found them in a small city of the Malc—their kinsmen—home to what few survivors of the ancient warrior clans remained. For the six years that followed their lives were peaceful, both of them thriving in this place while their wounds healed, never forgetting what they had once been through.
But Nishtan’s doings did not end just because one of his slave women successfully escaped from him—tales of his dark exploits were soon arriving.
Hiran was close to eleven years old when word of the new troubles started coming. Villagers unfortunate enough to be close to the border separating the two territories were attacked without warning, most falling without having a chance to resist. The few survivors from each place kept pouring in, filling their listeners’ ears with tales of horror: liquid fire poured over person, animal, and building alike, living and dead; people hacked to pieces by the oncoming monster soldiers, even those who lay slain; bodies picked up to be used as shields—the tales kept getting worse.
The Council in distant Elenan sent notice through the entire region: no one was to retaliate on any condition; they refused to believe that anyone would even dare to come against them, even back then. Worse, they declared the villagers’ stories as false, followed by a decree that anyone telling such “lies” would be committing treason and sent to possible execution. Despite all warnings entha and others refused to follow the Council’s directions—they knew what was really happening, that it was something that couldn’t be ignored. Unlike the Councilmen, they had seen the horrors firsthand.
But entha knew something everyone else didn’t—even young Hiran had no idea: the true driving force for the Brac was their chief deity: Bralon, the Flame of Death. It was not a case of extreme religious belief, but the actual involvement of a higher power. Entha had sensed His presence, heard His voice echoing out from the shrine Nishtan had set up in his palace. Those were enough to fill her with fear unlike anything she had felt before.
Entha spent her spare time brushing up on her combat skills, taking some time to teach what she could to her son. It was only a matter of time before this place fell like all the others.
Hiran had just turned eleven when the city was finally attacked and fell. The Brac army, along with their new Brilken allies, stormed through the streets, burning everything as they went. Most of the people managed to escape the carnage, fleeing along secret routes to a place of safety some thirty miles away. Entha had told Hiran to run, that they would find each other later, but the Deathmaster himself had come and cut the woman down without a thought. Young Hiran witnessed it all, and with his mother’s death seared into his mind he fled.
He wandered aimlessly, his mind unable to let go of the loss of his mother, letting his feet decide where to go for him. He never saw any of the people he passed, never noticed the trees whose low branches scratched at his arms, and never saw the rocks that rose into the sky high above him. He never acknowledged that he had wandered all the way to Elenia’s mountain until he stumbled onto a small spring where a young girl was washing her feet.
Mai had not been much different back then, her hair dark blue with a few streaks of red; she had only just started learning how to use her talents. She took one look at him and immediately brought him to a small cottage on the outskirts of the city. A middle-aged woman lived there on her own, and when she saw the boy covered in dirt and who knew what else she agreed without hesitation to take him in. She had a child once, but lost her when she was still quite young. She did everything in her power to raise Hiran as one of her own, and it did make him a little happy.
But the boy could not forget any of what he had been through. This woman could stand in for his mother, but not enough to replace her. He yearned for that brief period of peace that had been stolen from him.
This new near-peace was short-lived for him anyway. He was still adjusting to this new life when word started to spread of his presence. Shortly afterwards strange things started happening: people around him would sometimes vanish without a trace by the end of one day; a mysterious illness swept through the city, lingering for a month and taking the lives of thirty people, some of them children; an entire city block was consumed by flames, stopping just within sight of Hiran’s house. Most people saw it as just an odd coincidence, and were content to leave it at that. Others thought it was the wrath of the Great One in response to what was going on in the world around them; they pitied Hiran and showed him as much kindness as they could, refusing to blame him for anything.
The Council had been anything but sympathetic towards him. In their eyes the strange happenings were more than coincidence, that he was directly responsible for all of their troubles; it all started right after his arrival. Somehow they seemed to have an idea about his parentage, and he was soon targeted—they called him demon, a bringer of chaos, not a child. They demanded that the people take action against such evil. If he was ever in the city the Guardsmen would seek him out, showing him the affection of their fists in the middle of the street while everyone else stood aside; they could only watch, fearing any consequences of openly trying to help him. They did their best to make it up to him at night, when there were fewer of the Guard to see them, checking to see if he was still all right and trying to cheer him up. But no matter how much they t
ried the abuse only got worse, and his mood grew ever darker.
The old woman caring for him could not bear to see him hurting like this. Unable to take any more of it she abruptly decided they were going to live elsewhere, loading him into a wagon with all their belongings and heading out to stay with a friend who lived closer to the woods—Ren’s estate. Hiran would now be away from the physical violence, but the Council threats still managed to find him.
Mai and other Nymphs started to visit him regularly, partly to comfort him as others had done and partly out of fascination. Around this time his magical talents were starting to emerge, though they were not much—incredible strength, an ability to look into the minds of others, and some healing. But while he took their advice and worked to build his natural gifts, it did not make him feel any better; the timing of this could not have been any worse. If the Council were to learn of this new development, he was surely doomed.
So at fifteen years old, he took matters into his own hands.
He was a burden to all of them—his new family, the few friends he had gained, even those who hated him. He was the reason their lives were starting to crumble. It grew to the point that he started believing the lies the Council told of him. Perhaps if he were to disappear from their world, everyone would be better off and their lives would return to normal. It still hurt him to leave. He could not help but glance back once more over his shoulder as he walked away.
His life was in ruins. It had been destroyed the moment he was born.
He roamed through empty country for two years. He felt the brutality of the elements as they beat down on him constantly. He did not care anymore—he just wanted everything to be over.
Until he saw her.
The girl had been unlike anyone or anything he had ever met before—she was the kind of girl Hiran could only dream of meeting. She had a strange charm that pulled in everyone—almost everyone, anyway—including him, with little to no resistance. On his very first day in the area he found himself watching her, and one day turned into many. He sensed something about her, some power that lay dormant. So he chose to stay and watch over her.
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