by Heath Pfaff
“Everyone will take a pole and hold it. All of the poles with the exception of five of them have been coated in varying amounts of a substance that the local sea life finds particularly delicious. The toothy little creatures will eat through the poles eventually, causing them to fall into the ocean. If you’re atop a pole that falls, and you enter the water higher than your knee, than you have failed this challenge and you will return to the beach and wait for the others. Swim quickly, mind you. The creatures that eat the poles will sometimes eat flesh as well. In the end, only five of you will have a place. This will give you a small taste of what this year of training will be like. Though there are many of you, only a few of you will actually make it to the end. This will be your first chance to see who is stronger than you are, more skilled.”
The Warden grinned. “The only rule is that you may not kill one of your fellow students to take a pole. You may hold your ground by any other means. There are shorter poles out there, travel poles. They are narrow and much shorter than the higher ones. You may use them to get from pole to pole, but you may not stay on them for any long period of time. They are actually quite flexible, and will sink into the ocean if you try to hold onto one.
“There is a punishment for failure, and a reward for success. The punishment will be hard, the reward quite wonderful. I expect you all to work as hard as you can. We’ll be watching, even if you can’t see us. Now go, take a place. This event usually lasts at least a couple of days. Don’t disappoint us.”
I dove out into the water and climbed onto a nearby pole quickly, keenly remembering that he’d said there were things in the water that were hungry. The others all moved quickly as well. Soon enough we were all on poles, looking out across the water at each other.
“You’ll know when your pole is getting ready to go under. Remember, if you go into the water deeper than knee level, it’s over for you.” The Warden called, and then he was leaving, heading back out the door we’d come in through.
The world was quiet except for the sound of the water lashing against the beach, devouring it a few grains of sand at a time. The pole I was standing on wasn’t exactly wide enough for both feet to rest on at the same time. As a result, I had to switch my footing constantly, dancing back and forth when things became uncomfortable, though I eventually found that I could actually sort of sit on the pole, though it wasn’t easy, and the water lashed at me feet when I did. This seemed like a bad situation. Two days, he’d said. In two days I was going to be miserable.
The others all looked much as I imagined myself to look. We were cold and unhappy, our faces telling the story of our discomfort already. I was glad not to have hair in that moment, because those with hair were dripping water down their bodies in what I could only imagine wasn’t helping the chill in the air. No one looked like they were enjoying the proceedings. I managed to spot the lower poles in the water, the ones used for crossing space without falling into the waves. They barely stuck up above the surface of the water. You’d have to jump down to them, and then backup to a pole, making movement difficult, and they were sometimes covered by the waves as they came in, which made judging their exact position even more difficult.
I hoped I wouldn’t have to do much moving, but I had a good idea that was wishful thinking. As poles began to fall, people would begin to vie for positions and I had no doubt that things would get complicated very quickly. Of course, first we had to wait for something to happen. It was strange how quiet everyone was. We could have held conversations. We were near enough that it would have been possible to do so, but there was a general sense of competition and hostility that hung about us. Here, in the middle of this game, we had no friends.
I looked around for Zark and saw him quite far away. He was on one of the poles nearest the edge of the area set out for this activity. I thought it a poor choice of start locations. His options for movement were limited if things went wrong. I had two poles near me that were unoccupied if I needed to move.
Time passed, no sound but the movement of the waves against the beach. It was peaceful, almost relaxing. It was easy to let the mind wander and for a moment I actually felt myself becoming drowsy. I bit the inside of my cheek to snap my mind back into focus. That was a danger I hadn’t accounted for. The more obvious dangers were easy to deal with, but the threat of boredom and exhaustion winning out was perhaps a greater threat, at least at this point in the game.
A scream to one side of me snapped my attention around, and I turned to see a large slender man teetering on a suddenly very unstable pole. He looked terrified, and he took a leap for one of the small transfer poles between him and another nearby tall pole. He managed to hit this first one alright, but he missed the second one and toppled into the water roughly, slamming into the pole instead of landing on it. He called out in pain, and then a few moments later was swimming back to shore as fast as he could. He began to yell and scream about halfway there, and by the time he reached shore he had several bite marks on his body, bloody gashes about the size of a coin all over him. Whatever was in the water to eat the poles wasn’t uninterested in us. It occurred to me that they must not have been here when we first arrived. No one had been bitten on the way to their starting positions.
The tension rose and suddenly I wasn’t nearly as drowsy as I had been just a few minutes before. I was as alert as I could be. I wasn’t sure how long we sat in terrible silence waiting for the next pole to fall, but quite suddenly I saw someone jumping in my direction and realized that he was going to ram into me. He hadn’t made so much as a grunt as he’d left his pole. He was bigger than I was, and I realized that there was no way I could stop his momentum. I leapt out of his way instead, jumping for the crossing poles and heading to one of the nearest empty positions. The leaps were hard, and breaking momentum to stop when I got to the last pole was even harder.
I landed and windmilled my arms to catch my balance, but realized I was going over anyway. I bent at the knees and grabbed the narrow stepping pole and swung forward with my momentum which very nearly sent me off into the water, but somehow I circled around and managed to get back to the top. I shot an angry glare the man who’d nearly taken me out of this game very early. He looked back calmly. I didn’t know him personally, but I’d heard his name.
He was Gaveech. He was allegedly always cool and collected, even in times of great stress. Gaveech had placed higher than me in test scores and in physical training in almost everything. Had I been the kind to do such a thing, he would have been a great choice for personal rivalry, but I was fairly certain I couldn't beat him. No one had so far.
As I looked at him I heard yelling in another direction and I turned to see more poles falling. One fell with no one on it, but another two had students scrambling to get to new positions. A small girl slammed into a much larger girl and knocked her into the water, and the other student managed to get to a new pole without much drama. He even avoided overshooting and almost falling off. My execution of switching poles had been the sloppiest with the exception of the first person who’d had to move.
I watched the girl who’d fallen into the water swim to shore, occasionally groaning in pain before she finally got there, dripping blood from wounds all over her body. They looked painful, but not necessarily life threatening. Still, I wouldn’t want to spend too long in that water. The waiting started again then. This time it felt longer than any other. Night fell full upon us. It was a bright night and there were three moons in the sky, a silver one, a red one, and a darker red one. It was a strange sight, distracting.
“This . . . it isn’t possible.” I heard one boy say. “I know this place is magical, but there can’t be three moons.”
“Things through the doors aren’t real. It’s all illusion.” A girl answered. “It’s belief in the illusion that makes it affect you.”
“How can you say that after all we’ve seen?” Another boy snapped. “How many people have you watched die? I don’t know what those doors are, but what is
through them is real, as real as anything else.”
“Quiet.” Another boy said, agitation clear in his voice. “You’re distracting me.”
“Do you think every battlefield you enter will be quiet?” The first boy asked with a laugh.
It was strange how they flipped from men to boys in my head depending on the moment. We were all still young, though life had certainly hardened us. All of us were marriageable age now, but that didn’t change the fact that there was still room for immaturity, wonderment, and other childish aspects.
“Shit!” Someone yelled, and I turned to see him jumping as his original roost toppled into the water. He made it safely to another empty pole, and then as he stepped on it, it collapsed forward and tossed him into the water. That one had been weakened as well. He screamed as he hit the water, and then he was clawing his way back to shore. His route took him past me and I thought I could see blood rising up in the water as he went, though it might have just been my imagination. It was dark, even with the three moons.
As things settled again my mind went back to the discussion of the nature of the doors. I remembered what Ghoul had told me about them. They were pieces of other worlds locked forever in reality, but only existing within the bubble they’d created. I could have shared that information, but I doubted anyone would believe me. Then it would be a fight to explain what I knew to be truth. I determined it wasn’t worth the effort and frustration.
It was hours before anything else happened, and standing on the poles had gone from uncomfortable to painful. They were narrow enough so that it took constant adjusting of balance to maintain a position, and that worked muscles slowly in strange ways, but constantly. Shifting feet helped briefly, but that wasn’t great either. You could position yourself to sit uncomfortably for a bit, but that was dangerous. If things started to fall and you were sitting, then the game was at an end for you. Things were going to get worse before they got better.
One woman even chose to jump from her pole into the water without it even starting to topple, and the sun hadn’t even started to come up yet. When the next fall happened, it was chaos. Ten poles went down, and more than half of them had people. Those people went scrambling off in different directions, and suddenly there were fights for different poles. A determined woman came charging at me across the stepping path, intending to use me to slow her forward momentum. I jumped to one of the side steps just as she was about to arrive, and then she had too much speed and just toppled into the water. I returned to my position quickly as she cursed and swam for shore.
I let out a sigh of relief, and then felt the pole beneath me shift. I dove for the crossing poles only to realize the next positions over were all occupied. I chose the smallest opponent I could and made a charge in their direction. I slowed as I approached. He knew I was coming, and he was watching as I drew near. I sprang not at him directly, but at the the base of his pole. I wrapped my arms around it as I came into contact with it and headbutted him hard in the shin, expecting him to take a fall, but instead he shifted and delivered a powerful kick to my face. I grabbed his leg and twisted, and he went down, but he grabbed my head as he went and suddenly I was falling into the water. Just like that it was done. I hit the cold water with a gasp, and even as I got my head about me and began to swim I could feel the creatures in the water beginning to feed on me, taking bites of my soft flesh wherever they wanted to.
I held in any screams and swam for shore in anger. I hadn’t lasted long at all. I’d needed to go much, much further. I wasn’t even in the top half. By the time I reached the shore where the other miserable students who’d lost were sitting, I was bleeding from several different places, including one of my nipples which was mostly gone. I looked at the bloody patch where it had been and thought that the healers probably wouldn’t fix that. I wasn’t that feminine already, and here was one more piece of that part of my identity that I would be missing. It was an agitating thought. It almost made me want to cry. For some reason my first thought on seeing it gone had been, “I won’t be able to feed my babies.”
That was a stupid thought to have. I didn’t have the option of having babies anymore. It wasn’t as though if I succeeded here I’d get to have a family. That part of my life was over. I really wasn’t even a woman anymore. Maybe I’d never been at all. I’d come here as a girl, and now I was just a thing. I shoved all of these dark thoughts deep inside of myself and locked them away. They wouldn’t help me.
I watched the rest of the event unfold. In the end it came down to just three despite there being five standing poles. Zarkov, Gaveech, and a woman I didn’t know with short cropped black hair and a boyish figure that was chiseled and toned.
Warden Shaw returned near the end of the second day. He’d made the winners stand out on their posts for hours. He came forward and tossed a handful of something into the water, and then a few minutes later he ordered Zark, Gav and the woman back to shore. They swam without being chewed upon.
“Today you’ve learned an important lesson. You now know who among you is strong, who is clever, and who is willing to do what must be done to win at any cost. If you were wise you watched every encounter you could and you learned from what you saw. Almost every year the competitors who survive this event, also survive to the end of this difficult year, which means that it is even less likely for any of the rest of you to make it. Those who fell in the first half, your chances of making it to the end of this are the lowest.” He spoke flatly, but upon hearing that, my heart fell. I had fallen in that first half. Did that mean I was doomed?
“You make your own fate. Going forward you should remember that you can lose at any time, and that losing will mean death.” Shaw walked up to the first boy who’d fallen, and in a flash of motion so quick I could barely see it, a bright streak of red exploded across the boy’s face and blood poured out of a deep and terrible scar Shaw had opened up with a knife. He screamed and fell back, clutching at his face. “I might as well have killed him. Losing is death. Failure is death. If you want to live you will not let yourself fail. Get dressed.”
We rushed to our clothes and put them back on, blood soaking into the fabric from our wounds, at least those of us who were freshly wounded. A few of mine still bled when I moved. The bites had been deep and vicious.
As we finished dressing, Shaw turned and headed for the door which he opened without touching. A moment later we were filtering through after him. He took us down another hall and led us to a place where there were healers available. It seemed so routine that we all fell into line and went through the old familiar pattern of being healed.
My bites were closed, but the scars left, as I’d come to expect. We were given an hour to gather ourselves, sleep, and to prepare for our next task. An hour. Though those who’d finished at the top of the last event had the day to rest. I returned to my room and found new clothing there, so I stripped off the old. I found myself looking down at my body as I did so. I was covered in scars after all of my training, and each one came with a different story. I looked at my missing nipple, a faintly different colored patch of flesh where once I’d had a functional piece of anatomy. This training was taking everything.
I didn’t sleep. I spent the next hour in a state of high emotional stress. I dressed myself and sat on my bed, waiting for time. There was a small windable clock on my nightstand, and as the hour flipped over I headed back into the hall.
Shaw was gone, and in his place was one of the Fel Clerics. She waited patiently until everyone had exited their room. As the last of us joined the group, only a minute or two after I’d exited, the cleric spoke. “Follow me.” She said, and then she led us through the halls. “There is no pattern to your training here. You will be put to the tasks that are needed to make you the men and women you must become. It is important that you understand what you are, and what you are not.” She stopped in front of a room. “You must understand that your body, the things that your body experiences, the pain, the pleasure, the tension and
the relaxation, these are all just moments, spun stones glancing across the surface of the water. You are the water. Experience is the stone. You may ripple, but you’re always there.”
She pushed open the door and gestured for us to enter. “Step inside and take a seat.” She said. We did as we were told. It seemed to be all we were good at doing, following directions. I stepped inside and took a look around this new room. There were chairs all around it, though not typical chairs. These were immense, heavy oak chairs that were bolted to the ground, and they had straps and buckles on them. There were other Fel Clerics in the room, at least twenty of them, maybe more.
“Sit!” The woman who’d brought us in commanded with a cold, hard voice that sent a chill up my spine. I jumped into the nearest seat as others did the same. There were plenty of seats for all of us. A few moments later one of the clerics approached me and began to fasten me into the very uncomfortable seat. My arms and legs were bound hard in place, and then my waist, my torso, my upper legs, and finally my head. I couldn’t move at all. The straps were so tight that they hurt.
“You are all very fortunate today. You’re going to do something that is forbidden for almost everyone who doesn’t wish to join our order. We’re going to allow you to commune with our goddess, Kerrigona, for a few hours. She will help you to understand what it means to surpass the physicality of sensation. You will get to see our world in a way that very few do.” She said, and the way she was talking scared me. I understood a little of how these clerics worshipped their goddess, and I really wanted no part of it.