We Are Mayhem--A Black Star Renegades Novel

by Michael Moreci

  Cade felt the crowd tense, and even from his considerable distance, he could see Ersia’s face go dark.

  “And do you know why we’re, as you so eloquently say, hidden deep in this rock?”

  Cade sighed. His stupid smile hadn’t worked. “I have no idea,” he replied. “But I’m guessing you’re going to tell me.”

  Ersia responded, “Because you put us here.”

  Cade pursed his lips and rolled his eyes like he was giving the accusation a modicum of contemplation. He wasn’t. “No,” he said. “I didn’t. I think I’d remember that.”

  “You’re the Paragon, are you not? Then it is in your legacy. You are why we’re here. You are why our planet was destroyed.”

  “I’m not following,” Cade said impatiently.

  “Wu-Xia was one of us, as you already know. He was our greatest, most skilled warrior. He protected our planet back when it was still whole; he conquered worlds and made it so the Monaskins were feared for our power. But then it all changed, and the change came from Wu-Xia, our trusted leader, himself.

  “History tells us that Wu-Xia withdrew from his responsibilities and his people. No one knew why. All that’s known is that he abandoned us, and when he did return, he did so with a strange weapon—the Rokura, he called it—and a demand that Monaskis change its ways.

  “Not only did our proud forefathers and foremothers refuse, but they swore they’d bring war to the doorstep of every planet or moon that supported Wu-Xia. They threatened to deny him his peace through war—war the likes of which the galaxy had never seen, and when they were done, they’d have Wu-Xia’s head driven onto a spike as punishment for his treason. Wu-Xia was not amused.

  “He brought a reckoning to this planet that was incomprehensible. He used his power to break not only our home but also our legacy and our way of life in one single display of his might. And if that wasn’t enough, he leveraged our tragedy as an example to bring all his other enemies to heel. Seeing the ruins of Monaskis, nearly every system that defied Wu-Xia’s demands for peace relinquished their opposition. The wars over resources, the wars of conquest, the skirmishes over land and religion, they all ended. Wu-Xia had his peace, but it came through the death of everything Monaskis was and would ever be.”

  Cade listened intently, and he started to understand why Monaskis would hold a grudge against the Paragon. But the justification for it lasting this long seemed a little uncalled for.

  “Look, I get your beef with Wu-Xia. I’d be pissed, too,” Cade said. “But I’m not him, and what he did has nothing to do with me. You can’t kill me because we happen to both be Paragons.”

  Ersia corkscrewed her head, expressing her confusion. “But if you are indeed the Paragon, then you have nothing to worry about. We’d never be able to so much as lay a finger on you,” Ersia said. “But if you are not—if, say, you’re merely imitating the legacy of the man who set a radical new course for the Monaskin people for your own benefit, then you will die.”

  Cade wrapped his hand around the hilt of the Rokura and tore it from the ground. He knew there was no point in explaining to Ersia his complicated relationship with the Rokura. Someone who let a person’s fate be decided in the heart of a fighting pit wasn’t one for finer details, Cade decided, so he only had one choice: He had to survive whatever waited for him in this pit, and he had to convince Ersia that he was the Paragon in the process.

  “Nothing left to say?” Ersia mocked. “This is usually where people like you beg for mercy.”

  Cade groaned. “Let’s just get on with it already,” he said.

  Ersia laughed condescendingly. “So be it.”

  At Ersia’s raised arm, the entire arena quaked; Cade felt seismic movement beneath his feet, the shock waves tingling up his spine.

  “That can’t be good,” Cade murmured. He’d expected a duel against one of Ersia’s best guards. Maybe even a brawl where he took on a few chosen warriors.

  Whatever was coming was clearly not that.

  More tremors shook the arena, and Cade’s attention was drawn to a set of massive, reinforced double doors on the other side of the pit. He dug his heels into the earth beneath his feet and gripped the Rokura tightly. The tremors grew closer, more intense, and Cade looked up to Percival, desperately seeking a clue as to what was coming his way.

  “Don’t hesitate, Cade! Kill it! Kill it immediately!” Percival yelled, and his outburst was met by Xeric delivering a swift punch to his guts.

  Cade shifted his focus back on the double doors, which were sliding open. He was doing his best to overcome his terrified stupor when the doors burst off their tracks and flew across the stadium. And into the pit charged a gorgan beast, its immense paws chewing away at the ground as it charged toward Cade.

  “What in the—” a wide-eyed Cade started to say, but he had to get busy preventing his grisly death before he could finish.

  Cade sprinted to his left and dove out of the charging gorgan’s path, narrowly escaping its thunderous stampede. He somersaulted head over heels and came up looking at the luxury suite.

  “I told you we shouldn’t have come here!” he screamed to Percival, but he didn’t have time to wait for a response. The gorgan had stopped its wild charging with remarkable deftness, and it was already turned and staring down its prey. Cade eyed it in return, and one thing was abundantly clear: This was no normal gorgan.

  Gorgans were enormous, terrifying beasts. Measuring about fifteen feet from the tips of their noses to their tails, gorgans had the capacity to be one of the galaxy’s deadliest predators. Could they use the double row of teeth—and really sharp, pointy teeth at that—that ran the length of their narrow snouts to chew squishy humans into an edible paste? Absolutely. Could they use their massive paws to stomp said squishy humans into an edible powder? Without question. They could gouge with their claws, slice with their whip-sharp tails, or just smash with their heft. But gorgans did none of these things. They were vegetarians. They were pacifists. What shared the pit with Cade was not a typical gorgan. Something was definitely wrong with it; Cade just couldn’t tell what.

  The gorgan’s thick hide was scarred and marked with abrasions; its teeth, while still intimidating, had taken on a green hue, and many were missing. And the mane around its neck, usually a quality the gorgans flaunted with pride, had been reduced to a sickly-looking ring of wispy hair. If Cade had to guess, this animal had been badly abused and reprogrammed to be a vicious, dangerous killer. Its innate nature had been snuffed out like a candle’s light and had been replaced with a murderous rage learned through whatever mistreatment it’d suffered. Cade was suddenly filled with a righteous anger for whoever had done this.

  But while Cade was assessing the gorgan’s plight, it was positioning itself for its second attack. It charged Cade once more, its legs gracefully bounding through the air as it shortened the distance to its prey with remarkable speed.

  Cade thought fast. Though he was tempted to use the Rokura to slice the gorgan in half, he didn’t have the heart to kill it; his pity for what the gnarly beast had endured was somehow surpassing his desire to not be eaten alive, so he had to find a compromise between the two sides. Instead of using his all-powerful weapon to both save his life and solve his problem with Ersia, Cade decided on a different course of action. As the gorgan closed in on him, Cade charged directly at it, screaming a battle cry as he went.

  Just as the gorgan snapped its teeth at Cade, he spun away from its attack and slid feetfirst beneath the beast. As he skidded across the ground, Cade used his Rokura to slice at the inside of the gorgan’s legs as they passed over his head. The goal was to cripple the beast and end the fight without either of them dying. While Cade was proud of his noble design, he was less enthusiastic with its result. The gorgan repositioned itself on the opposite end of the arena, and as it did, it let out a shrill, piercing scream. The damage Cade had inflicted seemed to have only made the gorgan angry. Really angry.

  “Terrific,” Cade grumbled.


  Cade expected the gorgan to charge at him again, but it didn’t. Instead, the gorgan started racing around the perimeter of the oval-shaped pit. Cade backed into the center of the pit so he could stay as far away from the beast as possible. But by the time the beast started its second lap, Cade realized what was happening: The gorgan had halved the distance between itself and Cade. When Cade was on one side of the pit and the gorgan on the other, he had time to dodge, even counterstrike. But with Cade in the middle, he had half the time to react and half the time to move out of the way. Which meant the next attempt the beast made for him, Cade was dead meat.

  Energy began crackling at the Rokura’s head. Whether he’d realized it or not, Cade had made his decision. Conflicted as he was about obliterating the gorgan, it was the only choice he had. He held the Rokura out as its energy danced a circuitous, circular orbit at its tip. He followed the beast intently with his eyes, and drowning out the arena’s hollering crowd and the occasional screech from the gorgan, Cade fell back on his Rai training and slipped into a meditative state. He let every distraction that looked to cloud his own thoughts come into his mind. He didn’t wrestle with them; he just let them come and then go. There were the expectations Cade had placed upon himself for meeting the standards set by his brother, Tristan, as the rightful Rokura-bearer; there were the expectations placed upon him by Percival, demanding that Cade learn to control himself and, therefore, control the Rokura; there were even the strange expectations as explained by Ga Halle, about certainty and binary absolutes. Cade let all of these things fade from his mind. He cleared his thoughts, and he considered what he wanted to become—what he needed to become—as he wielded a weapon that could change the course of history. In the quiet of his meditation, Percival’s voice crept into his ear. Don’t believe in me, Percival had said. Don’t believe in Tristan or the weapon. Believe in yourself.

  From the center of the pit, directly below Ersia’s luxury suite, the gorgan charged. Cade was ready.

  He focused his will into the Rokura, and he captured the massive beast in a surge of energy. The gorgan was halted in its tracks just short of striking distance from Cade; it snarled and hissed as Cade held it steady, though he wasn’t certain how long his hold would last.

  The Rokura fought Cade. Cade had seen the weapon use this power before, back in the Quarrian spire. It held the Fatebreaker in a stasis field right before it peeled off his skin, then his muscle, and obliterated his bone until where there was once a man there was nothingness.

  But Cade didn’t want to kill the gorgan. He wanted something else.

  As the gorgan remained trapped, time slowed to a crawl; in that drawn-out span, Cade considered the mercy he felt for the beast. None of this was the gorgan’s fault. It’d been made this way, transformed into something it was not. And that was where Cade’s sympathies were found, in transformations. Like the Monaskins had changed the gorgan, like the dark seeds had changed Ga Halle, so, too, was the Rokura working to change Cade. He thought back on the horror he’d felt at his friends seeing him warped by the Rokura’s will when he was just moments away from atomizing Ortzo. That was not who Cade was, and Cade had no intention of altering his identity in order to claim mastery over the Rokura. Especially not under the conditions the Rokura offered, promising all the ends Cade desired—peace through the destruction of the Praxis kingdom—but through means that were unforgiving, gruesome, and frightening. Should Cade fully open that door, he couldn’t even guess what would come out.

  Cade wasn’t going to succumb to the Rokura’s nihilistic appetites, and he knew he would never transform into his brother or learn to dominate the weapon through the power of his will like Percival had wanted him to. The only chance Cade had was to tap into the part of himself that was right and true. The part that would fight for the galaxy, the part that would die for his friends if it meant keeping them safe. He used that to appeal to the goodness he felt deep in the Rokura. It was in there, somewhere. Cade felt it in the times when the Rokura saved his life; he felt it, dimly, when he meditated on the demands, dangers, and pressures the weapon had brought into his life. The pull of the Rokura’s harsher and unforgiving tendencies were louder, and stronger, too. And while Cade knew he was far from being a saint, he was even further from being a power-hungry monster like Ga Halle. Cade wanted to do right with the power he’d inherited, and if he couldn’t use the Rokura in that fashion, he’d sooner see it dismantled than have it become another tool to bring misery to the galaxy. There were plenty of those already.

  With that in mind, Cade focused his energy into the gorgan—the beast that’d been so anguished by its physical and mental scars that it’d become something it was not. The light from the Rokura turned an iridescent white as Cade continued to concentrate despite the strain it caused. He wouldn’t kill the gorgan; he wouldn’t serve up its body to Ersia as proof that he was the Paragon.

  Cade felt himself reaching out through the Rokura and into the gorgan; he drew from his simple desire to end the beast’s suffering. There was a blinding flash that sent out a wave of light throughout the arena, and then it was over. Cade opened his eyes, fearing that what he’d attempted had been totally ignored and the Rokura had ended up splattering the gorgan’s guts all over the audience just to prove a point. But as he peeked through one eye, Cade saw that the gorgan was still there and still in one piece. More than that, it was healed. Gone were its scars and abrasions. Gone was the feral, menacing look in its eyes. The gorgan lumbered toward Cade and bumped its gigantic snout against his hip. With some apprehension—the gorgan still had those teeth, and it had been trying to flay him two minutes earlier—Cade reached out his hand and petted the beast. The gorgan exhaled contentedly, and Cade heard a purr rumble from its belly.

  “This is an unexpected turn of events,” Ersia called out, her voice big and imposing over the arena’s din. Cade shifted his attention up to her suite and found her standing at the edge once again, her hands raised to silence the murmuring crowd. “You are an unconventional Paragon and certainly a strange one, but a Paragon nonetheless. As such, I grant you your release and an offer of my help, should you still need it.”

  “I appreciate it, Your Majesty, but you’ve got it wrong,” Cade said, catching his breath. “I’m not the Paragon.”

  The crowd gasped and started chirping like birds to one another. Ersia waved them down, silencing them once more.

  “Explain,” she said, eyeing Cade curiously.

  “My brother was the Paragon, and this weapon belonged to him. He pulled it out of its stasis in the Quarrian spire, but he was murdered soon after. I claimed the weapon because, well … I was there when it all happened, and I’ve held it since because I guess I’m the only alternative to Ga Halle, a maniacal warlord who wants—”

  Ersia raised a hand, silencing Cade. “I know all about this Ga Halle,” she said, her words dripping with disdain. “I don’t need to hear of her deeds.”

  Cade threw up his arms, not knowing what to say. “Look, I’m just … I’m trying to do my best, and I don’t feel right lying to you about myself or the weapon.”

  “But you cured the gorgan,” Ersia said. “We all witnessed it. What kind of sorcerer are you, then?”

  Cade laughed. “I’m not a sorcerer, though it would be awesome if I were. I can control the Rokura … sort of. I control it, and sometimes it controls me. But that’s why I’m here; I need your help.”

  “Help?” Ersia scoffed. “After you just admitted you’re a fraud?”

  “You know Ga Halle. That means you know what she’s doing to people—to families, to children, to anyone—throughout the galaxy. She can’t be allowed to continue to rule this way. I have to stop her, but I need the Rokura to do so.”

  Ersia was silent for a moment as she studied Cade. As she did, the gorgan stumbled next to Cade and heeled at his side.

  “You really healed the gorgan with the Rokura?” Ersia asked. “That wasn’t a trick?”

  “I’ve
never done anything like that,” Cade replied. “But what I did was real. I know it.”

  “And what is it that you need from us?”

  “I need to learn anything I can about Wu-Xia—how he created the Rokura, what it is, anything. If I can learn how this all works, maybe I can learn to control it better. And if I can do that, I can stop Ga Halle.”

  There was a pregnant pause as Cade stood, the gorgan panting at his side, waiting for Ersia’s judgment. She eyed him up and down until finally she spoke.

  “There’s a passion in your voice, an authenticity in your words,” she said. “I believe what you say is true, and because of that, I will help you.”

  Cade felt every muscle in his body release unbearable tension. “Okay, then. Okay,” he said as he let out a deep breath. “So, how does this work? Is there an archive or something that we could access and get Wu-Xia’s memoirs, journals, whatever?”

  “Archives? No, we have no such thing. We have no need.”

  “Oh,” Cade said, confused. “Then … where?”

  “There’s only one place that can give you what you seek,” Ersia answered. “The Chamber of Memories.”

  * * *

  Cade followed Ersia through a narrow tunnel where thick, green roots grew over the ceiling and walls. They clung tightly to the smooth stone surface and were so abundant Cade could barely see anything other than what looked like a sea of emerald-colored fingers gripping the world around him. Cade had asked where the roots came from, but Ersia had dodged his question.