Exordium

by Tyson Jordan

  He felt his body suddenly press into the hard metal plates before him. His father had come to an abrupt halt, having sensed something, some foulness spreading in the air and in the earth. The man’s muscles instinctively tightened before they remembered their cargo. He set the boy down on his feet and glanced to both sides. He decided on his right and sent his son running to hide behind a crumbled slab of concrete. The orders were simple and nonnegotiable: the child was to keep his eyes shut, and he was not to open them until told to do so.

  The boy disobeyed his father, peering up and over the crushed roadways and fallen towers, and saw those charcoal wolves again, monsters made more from fang and claw than from flesh and bone. There were three of them, circling the green knight slowly with their heads bowed low, waiting for an opportunity to make easy prey of another. Tears began to flow down the child’s cheeks.

  There was a sudden burst of green flame from the father’s back. Out of nowhere, a hulking stone hammer had appeared. Darting at him in surprise and fearful of losing their victim, those few Malinvicta met a sudden, brutal end. With three thunderous yet unstrained blows, the knight claimed each of their lives, leaving their newly broken bodies still as he turned to face his son. Another flash of green fire was seen, this one dimmer than the last, as he placed his weapon behind his back and let it return to wherever it came from. Overjoyed with his father’s safety, the youth ran to him, only to be scooped up and placed on his father’s back yet again without a word.

  They were running, running through ruined streets and a choking heat that radiated from high above. They came at last to their destination. There was no one else in sight.

  The father’s footsteps were long and powerful, booming and echoing against an unyielding floor as he carried his son past the reception area towards what he hoped would be a functioning ship. Glass doors slid open in silence, as if to bow to his mammoth frame, and he stepped through into one of many docking bays.

  The youth had little real experience with ships, or with much of anything outside his home for that matter. However, he was bright enough to know how many people each ship could carry, and after a brief examination he began to sob uncontrollably. Sucking air in wild pangs, he climbed down from his father’s back and darted back and forth across the floor, panicked in his search to find a craft that could carry them both.

  No such craft existed. The child fell to his knees in anger, pounding the floor beneath him with his fists and heaving as he cried. His father calmly walked over and crouched next to his son. The boy looked up, hoping for consolation.

  A heavy, armoured hand abruptly struck the child across his face, followed by a few muttered curse words. The father had no sympathy to offer his son, least of all at a time like this. The boy swallowed his pain, and the man briefly smiled when the weakness was no longer evident.

  The knight led his son across the floor to a small, coffin-like vessel. It was long and cylindrical and grey, with an almost opaque violet hatch. He pressed a few keys on the adjacent terminal and the lid popped open. The father lightly tousled his boy’s hair with an armoured hand, smiling. The powerful figure reached up to a thick, powder-blue strip of cloth he wore tied around his forehead, fumbled for a moment with the knot at the back and removed it. He knelt and looked at his son, meeting him at eye level, and nodded. The boy took the weathered headband and tied it around his head, clumsily navigating the knot in much the same way as his father had done.

  A tiny console slid out from the side of the pod, and the green warrior punched its keys systematically. The ship responded to his touch, whirring appreciatively as it began to hover close to the floor. He finished his duty in a few moments, and turned to his son. Effortlessly, he lifted the boy up, placed his small frame in the vessel, and turned to launch the pod. When he moved his eyes, however, he did not focus his attention on the control panel. There was a monster standing in the doorway, very different from the ravening dogs outside but a monster nonetheless.

  He looked much more like a man and less like a wolf, although his features were too perfectly sculpted, too symmetrical, to belong to any normal person. His beauty, gold skin, and perfectly crafted smile were unsettling, and stood in clear contrast to his sword. It was a wrathful thing, long and thick and jagged. The edge emitted a brackish, brown fume that drifted to the floor, slowly corroding it.

  The father turned his body and looked at his foe as if he were meeting an old acquaintance. He reached around his lower back and, with a flash of green flame, his hammer appeared in his hands. With a pause of only a single moment, the green knight slammed his fist on the control panel that would launch his son away forever. The boy yelled again and again as the engines of the pod picked up power, blasting out waves of light at carefully programmed intervals, and then he was hurled through the ceiling. The hellish sky opened up to him, and he thought he saw a glimpse of the two clashing as the vessel turned.

  The silver-stained sky screamed and burned as the boy’s pod evaded the shimmering lights, and it soon faded into an impenetrable ocean of nothing. This child, this one of few survivors of a once proud people, felt the colour drain from his face and a wave of nausea seized him. He wept for his father, hating himself all the more for so eagerly displaying the same weakness that he had been taught to hate during his short life.

  There was some hope in him, though, as he soared through space. His father was invincible, unstoppable. He would not be defeated by anyone or anything, no matter the contest. That thought gave him some solace, and an uneasy sleep passed over him.

  Strange hands, both rough and large, jostled him awake. He sat up, seeing himself in a sea of other refugees. He had arrived at his destination, and the window panes to the far left revealed that he was in his father’s second home, adrift in space on a manufactured continent. He looked around for the knight, but there was no sign of his powerful form; only broken, weary faces filled the refugee processing facility that had once been a docking bay.

  A blast of sudden white light erupted from the windows, and the masses cried out in sadness and fury as they shielded their eyes. Some began to flee, while many others pushed their way past the child, crowding around the windows and sweeping him up in the tide of flesh. Pressed against the glass, the boy had no choice but to see the horror that was Erasure.

  From here, Erde was a marble, its once green fields and many cities suddenly replaced by fire and spreading black smoke. The silvery-white tendrils took on definition, becoming shining gates that encroached upon the prey world, flaming and screeching as their evil wrapped around the surface, burning and shattering it. The waters were pulled in with the mountains and the deserts and the cities, and all the child could do was watch as his home was forever erased. He felt the sudden weight of his father’s headband upon his head, and with the realisation of the green knight’s death, his childhood ended.

  I was the child in that ship. My father had sent me to the Guild, a place filled with people like him: keepers of the peace and warriors and soldiers. He had intended for me to become like him one day, but I would become something both much different and much more, a beacon of light and fury and death. I would aspire, I would suffer, and I would come to change all things.

  1

  What’s Your Name?

  The droning screech of my alarm threatened to bore a hole in my skull as I begrudgingly arose from my slumber, decisively slamming a heavy palm on the chronometer to end its blaring wail.

  I stood, my muscles aching and stiff from another night of inconsistent sleep, and slowly rubbed my eyes, trying to give them an incentive to stay open. I looked back at the clock, which read 0632, and through the groggy mist of my mind came the troubling realisation that midterm grades would be posted in a matter of hours. This was my last term, the one that mattered most of all, and the final obstacle between me and becoming a Guild Sentry.

  It had been an intensely long three years, filled with damnably confusing mathematics and tedious histories of the worlds in th
is small section of the galaxy. The last year had been the worst as monstrous variables and equations haunted me in my sleep, screaming out my most dismal performances in a dirge. Had it not been for my extra-planar biology and physical conditioning classes, my candidacy to become a Guild Sentry would surely have been terminated, and I would have found myself an algae farmer, working thanklessly for some corporation on the blue world that is Grand Ocean.

  The fact that I used to be proficient at mathematics bothered me from time to time, but somehow that talent had left me a year before. With that, my chances of becoming a navigator were nonexistent, but that didn’t bother me in the least. Piloting was where my aptitude lay, at least on a ship.

  I stretched for a moment, reaching up towards the low ceiling in my cramped, overheated quarters, and ended my sleepiness with one last yawn. I turned to my left and took a few steps over to my closet. I opened the door and peered inside, cursing at the realisation that I had once again forgotten to retrieve my laundry. My frantic arm darted into the dark void, desperately feeling the far wall for any remnant or sign of a clean uniform. My prayers were answered when I found the standard grey shirt with matching pants. I quickly yanked them onto my sweaty body. With a quick glance in the mirror and a reassuring nod at my perpetually messy hair, I was out the door, leaving the clutter behind.

  The bright halogen lights just above stung my eyes slightly as I turned right and begun taking longer, quicker strides down the sterile, metallic corridor. I joined many others like me a few moments later, those prompt individuals who rose early, prepared themselves well, and had no need to rush towards their obligations. The tiles reverberated with the soft impact of a great many footsteps, all of them headed to one session or another. I was on my way to extra-planar biology, where we passing Guild Initiates would learn more about the physiologies of various Malinvicta, and, more importantly, how to kill them.

  It had been a long fourteen years since Erasure, and I resented myself more and more every day for being too weak to help my father survive those Shining Gates. I was only five years old at the time, yet the trauma was with me every time I closed my eyes. The tides of time would not wash away those horrid stains of memory. I unconsciously reached up and touched the thick, treasured headband that was wrapped around my head. From the day he had given it to me, that hero’s relic had never left my sight.

  Suddenly, my ears picked up heavier footsteps, both clumsy and confident, coming down the hall, coming closer to me. I looked ahead at two Guild Initiates who should have found their way into military service the previous year. From the day I had arrived at the Guild, Bir’ Nak and Jaf’ Rah had taken a sadistic pleasure in making my life hellish. My eyes reflexively darted down to the floor, my posture slumped, and my pace slowed. I made it past them, miraculously enough, and I breathed a short sigh of relief. Suddenly, a huge, dark grey hand landed on my left shoulder and effortlessly spun me around.

  “Hey there, how’s things? You’re looking … good as always.” Bir’ Nak’s meaty claw didn’t leave my form as he flashed a smile filled with the glistening teeth of a predator. His race, the Bra’ Hca, were revered as the most physically powerful soldiers the Guild had to offer.

  The two creatures were standing side by side, Jaf’ Rah shorter and leaner than his otherwise identical counterpart, robed in the same light grey I was wearing. Their maned heads seemed to stretch all the way up to the glaring lights; Bir’ Nak’s royal blue hair had been tightly braided, falling to shoulder length, while Jaf’ Rah’s crimson mane was unkempt and burst from his head in all directions. In spite of my own considerable size, I barely stood at their chest height, always in awe of their sheer mass. Their dull yellow eyes tormented me with an awkward silence. I finally decided to break it.

  “Uh, hey, guys. Yeah, I’ve been doing okay, I guess. I have to get to class now, though, so I guess I’ll see you some other time, okay?” I made a quick attempt to turn, hoping that the claw on my shoulder wouldn’t hold me in place. My hope was short-lived as Bir’ Nak’s grasp kept me in place.

  “Just one second there, Erdeson,” Jaf’ Rah’s gravelly voice rolled into my ears, “because we have a question for you. Well, more of an order really.” The white, razor-sharp incisors flashed in a twisted grin. I could see the cracks in the tough grey skin, and I could even feel the hot, fetid breath escaping his lungs. I had no choice in the matter, and it was infuriating.

  Bir’ Nak stepped alongside me, putting his massive arm around my shoulders while keeping his iron claw in place. He spoke. “Y’see, we need you to come meet a friend of ours. Our boss, even. We told him what your name really was, and he wouldn’t believe it! I mean, who would? After all, it’s not every day when you meet a guy with such a peculiar name, is it now?” I shook my head submissively, all the while burning inside, hoping for the day when I could have some small revenge.

  “Can it wait? I’m going to be late for class.” It was a feeble effort.

  “Fine, fine. No need to get so upset—we can always deal with a dreg like you later!” With that, the two thugs loped away, laughing at their meagre wit. I sneered for a moment and lapsed into frustrated silence. Everyone who had filled the hallway just minutes before had found their way to their courses.

  I rushed into my class, twelve minutes late, and was greeted with several sets of judgmental eyes from the more punctual Initiates. Instructor Natrium Ferric stood at the front, irritated that his lesson had been so rudely postponed, and I grimaced.

  “Late again, Initiate Fortuna! Let me guess … Jaf’ Rah and Bir’ Nak again?” Ferric chuckled to himself while the rest of his quaint little drones mimicked his laughter. I sheepishly nodded my head and found a seat near the back of the lecture hall. There were over seven hundred of us crammed into a grossly undersized room, the chattering lights above occasionally flickering and buzzing.

  Instructor Ferric was a stooped old man who was nonetheless powerfully built. His greying hair was cropped remarkably short, as if to compensate for the bushiness of his overgrown eyebrows. A permanent scowl was set into an intimidating, square jaw, and if he ever smiled, it was so faint and brief that you could not help but question whether you had seen it at all. Like the rest of us, he was clad in a uniform, although his was startlingly white and crisp. His pale blue eyes had faded somewhat with age, and black half-circles stretched from their bottoms onto his face. He always looked as if he hadn’t slept in decades.

  Despite his harsh nature, I genuinely liked the man. I could learn from him with ease, and his demanding nature somewhat reminded me of my father.

  Ferric walked across the front of the room with a limping gait, placing a great deal of his weight on a simple walking stick as he moved. His left leg had clearly been injured many years earlier. It was a story that the teacher had no interest in sharing, but his service records were a matter of public access. Before I was even born, and before my father was born, this man had waged one brutal campaign after another with the Malinvicta on Rck’ Hara.

  The aging terminal before me beeped and slowly loaded its operating system, acknowledging my presence textually. I concentrated intently, hoping to catch up on what I had missed. Ferric was the type of person who started promptly and finished promptly, after all.

  “Fortuna!” My posture straightened immediately at the sharp sound of my name.

  “Yes, Instructor?” I had painstakingly become somewhat accustomed to my instructor’s demands over the few semesters I had spent with him. Nevertheless, his voice seemed to bring fear with it.

  “We were just going over a few review topics. Would you care to impart your wisdom upon us regarding the various types of Malinvicta in existence?” His tone was harsh and demanding, his lips pulled back into a permanent scowl. A question of this calibre was a nonissue, thankfully.

  “The Malinvicta we know of,” I began, knowing that Ferric enjoyed students who didn’t confine their knowledge to texts, “Instructor, are divided into various classifications: Alpha, Be
ta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and Zeta.”

  “I see. Which of them would you consider to be the most dangerous?” My answer quirked his eyebrow slightly; it was a sign of minor approval.

  “Arguing which is most dangerous is irrelevant; they all pose a threat.”

  “Excellent reasoning. Do try to be on time tomorrow, would you?” The class flooded with a mocking murmur, but I was unfazed. To date, Ferric’s classes had been a point of personal pride, and this was no different.

  The droning, low-pitched hum of the bell revealed itself in an hour, and having no class for the next period, I decided to wander the halls alone as I always did. I did not have any acquaintances to spend time with, and studying during my spare time was not one of my strengths. I left the lecture hall and decided to turn left, only to walk face first into Bir’ Nak and Jaf’ Rah.

  “Time to see our boss!” The two Bra’ Hca laughed loudly as they stood on either side of me, and escorted me from the lecture halls back to the residential blocks, to some unknown destination. Their claws were latched tightly onto my upper arms and threatened to lift me off the floor entirely as we passed through innumerable corridors and quick shafts. It all blended together into the same brightly lit grey metal.

  A few passersby stared at the three of us as we walked. Their eyes locked onto my headband for a moment and they stared either curiously or disdainfully. A few groups we passed were conversing about the latest Coliseum match or examination. Generally, the conversations were light in tone. I did not understand why.

  We soon arrived at living quarters that looked no different from any other. The number 6416 was printed in bold white characters at the top of the darker grey polymer doorway.