It was the worst concussion Kiur had in three years.
The blood flowed from the back of his head and over his face, filling the river he was lying in face-first.
Mud, sand and ash mingled into an emulsion and touched the base of Kiur’s lips.
He couldn’t see far from the shallow river or beyond the ashen sands, but he could make out the figure of his delusion. Kneeling, she mumbled something in his ears, though he couldn’t hear from the throbbing in his ears.
“I feel tired,” coughed Kiur with the muddy water entering his burning throat. His entire body was burning up, aflame from the inside out, starting with his thrashing heart. “I don’t feel like myself. I feel sick.”
A hand travelled gently through his hair, or at least it was an attempt to.
His delusion’s hand was shaking, her entire body trembling. Unwillingly, Kiur imitated that feeling.
Disappointment, depression and longing were the emotions Kiur felt from her touch. Fresh droplets of tears fell on his head.
She was sorry.
“I abandoned those children. I promised to watch out for them.” Kiur tried to move his head, facing his delusion. He fell back down. “You were abandoned too, weren’t you?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she hid her murky face in her hands and cried. Kiur’s hand moved to comfort her.
He instinctively pulled back.
Behind her manifested the giant figure of a woman who was much more vivid than any of his delusions. And much more terrifying.
A twisted crown adored her head, her downcast wings spread over them like a canopy. The aura she emanated was gloomy, but her enormous hand rubbed the back of his delusion, comforting her.
“Who are you?” Kiur asked the figure, who looked at him with closed eyes and a smile before she and everything else disappeared.
“I’m Xander. Now get your head off my shoulder!” Kiur felt the voice and a hand of a foreign man pushing him away, banging his head against the iron bars of a caged wagon.
Hissing a silent curse under his breath, Kiur held his poorly badly bandaged head, feeling the blood flowing again. “That hurt, argh.”
“Good, you slobbered all over my mantle,” complained the man, angrily rubbing off the saliva residue. Then he stopped in sudden realisation, “Wait, you can understand me?”
“What?” Kiur ignored the foreign man and focused more on their cuffed hands. People of various ages and places occupied the caged wagon, but none of whom Kiur knew.
Outside were more wagons, each pulled by horses with natural chitin armour, horns and flaming teal legs.
Barefooted or with barely a shoe on, the Reiszer slaves followed closely behind the wagons. The other, higher-ranked, Reiszer soldiers sat on the aforementioned horses as guards.
The sun glared down on them.
Kiur touched the back of his head. His fingers had traces of fresh blood.
“Hey, pay attention to me,” the man snapped his fingers before Kiur’s nose. “I’m Alexandre, though friends call me Xander. I noticed you can speak my tongue, meaning you can speak my Western dialect. What’s your name? Where are you from?”
“I’m-” Kiur paused. The answer was right on the tip of his tongue, but he hesitated. His memories were gone.
—☼—
Travelling for days on end, Kiur concluded several things.
According to Xander’s intel, there had been attacks throughout the central continent.
Many years prior, the Western and Eastern Reiszer formed one unified nation by absorbing their neighbours.
They then launched dozens of raids on its two immediate neighbours, Idaris and Hellas, the Western Kingdoms south of the Reiszer.
That’s where Kiur’s new companion was from.
His pale white skin, navy blue hair and bright blue eyes were indicators enough. His accent and clothing were nothing familiar to what Kiur knew.
Xander wore a dark blue robe with thick materials and coloured green from the insides and stuffed with white fur and lined with golden marks. He looked formal and distinguished alongside his white boots and gloves.
Though it wasn’t suitable for the desert.
“Isn’t it hot for you to wear those clothes?” asked Kiur, seeing Xander sweating profusely as his face turned red from the blazing sun.
“I’m a wizard from the West. I have to wear it to symbolise my status.” Xander held his chin high and panted for air.
“You will die from a heat stroke if you keep that up.”
Rubbing his head again, Kiur felt a stinging pain. He somehow forgot his name, but thankfully, he could remember most of the details of the situation.
He knew he had failed to keep someone safe.
Children came into his mind. It made him insane that he forgot who he was supposed to keep from harm. More so than forgetting his identity.
“Did anything come back yet? Your name?”
“No, yes? I can’t tell. It feels like I am lying by answering either way.”
“This sounds like a bigger mess than what we are in,” Xander went with his hand through his long and by now messy hair falling over his face. “Good thing I have someone who can speak my language. That makes things easier to plan and escape.”
“You plan on escaping? That seems highly risky,” commented Kiur, and translated for the other prisoners, but they dismissed it. “Weren’t you caught like the rest of us?”
“We’ve scouted the territories in the Northeast and got ambushed. It was supposed to be my curriculum to finish the academy, and now, this!” Xander gritted his teeth and kicked one of the metal bars.
One soldier shouted at him and Xander withdrew closer to Kiur.
“I’m a water mage and a trained wizard. Even in this desert, I could pull off an escape with everyone’s help here,” Xander whispered to them. “I promise to negotiate with my country if you help me.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“So you plan on using us without a proper plan?” Kiur didn’t translate the following conversation with Xander. He seemed smart and confident enough to know what he was doing, but acted arrogant and not particularly trustworthy.
However, they had to stick together.
The prisoner groups changed regularly and seldom stayed the same.
It explained why Kiur didn’t recognise anyone. His memories were returning, but he still couldn’t find the children he was supposed to watch out for.
It nagged on his conscious more than his lost identity.
“I’ll take back what I said about planning an escape.”
“Why’s that?”
Xander pointed to the approaching glades.
Having grown up in the mountains of Idaris. The furthest Kiur had ever been was the neighbourhood country of Navarre with its flatter terrain and access to the sea.
Now they have left the desert plains, making the difference in temperature and climate all the more obvious. Their captors have brought them right into the veldts of the West.
And closer to the Reiszer Borders.
From above the cliffs, they could see the magnitude of the entire operation. Caravans over caravans with thousands of people covering every place of land in their view.
It was massive, busy and horrible.
“Why were they out there capturing all these people? What’s their end goal? War?”
“Retribution is coming,” Kiur remembered the voice of someone. It upset him. “Watch the world getting thrown upside down.”
“Hey, buddy.” Kiur turned to his fellow imprisoned companion. His demeanour had changed from confident to awestruck. “Promise me something; Whatever happens in those lands, we’ll work together.”
Surprised, Kiur looked at Xander’s pale face. “Are you getting cold feet?”
Xander scoffed, his smile a faint one. “You wouldn’t believe how close you are to the truth. So, can you promise me that, or not? I mean it; I don’t think we can survive without relying on each other.”
“What about the others?” Kiur pointed to the other prisoners in the wagons.
“I can’t say they will be of much help. No offence, but most of them lost their heart to keep moving.”
“Lost their heart?” wondered Kiur. “What makes you think I didn’t lose heart?”
“Hm?” Xander gave Kiur a dumbfounded look as if he was faced with a stupid question. “How should I know that? I just think having someone who can speak my language here is convenient.”
That’s why Kiur thought it was odd.
Xander was arrogant, hiding his true colours behind harsh comments. He was scared.
Then something clicked.
“I just remembered my name,” began Kiur, surprising Xander. “It’s Kiur. My memories are still hazy, but my heart tells me that’s my name.”
“I know that feeling.” Xander simply nodded to this revelation, not questioning Kiur any further. “Call me Xander; that’s what my friends call me,” he offered his hand for Kiur to shake it, who stared at his gesture blankly. “Don’t let me hang there, or is this not customary in your culture?”
“Not really,” Kiur shook his hand to his prison friend, though he couldn’t be too sure how long this relationship would last. Or how it came in the first place, but it was nice having someone on your side to trust.
—☼—
Weeks went by as they settled into the caravans, spending their entire time in the caged wagons.
They still had to switch with other prisoners from time to time. On some occasions, Kiur and Xander ended up separated from one another, only to end up in the same wagon again or in a wagon next to each other.
Kiur’s memories still haven’t fully returned to him except for the details of the raid.
He remembered his home city and, in all detail, what had transpired.
His fears and emotions reached an all-time low.
Apathy gnawed at his heart. Who else had he forgotten? His family? His friends? Were they taken as well? Kiur couldn’t explain any of his feelings, his turmoil of emotions, or why they still lingered with him.
“What did I forget so badly? What am I missing?”
“Anything new from your side?” asked Xander from the other wagon, his back facing Kiur’s.
“Same as always. Nothing new.”
Every two days, Reiszer wizards would come and inspect the prisoners. They clad their mouths in dark cloth, with tattoos lining their arms and necks and around the eyes. An octagon-shaped purple crystal gravitated on the long ends of their staffs, emanating a strange purple or orange hue.
Their sharp eyes assessed each individual. When they found someone, they grabbed them by their chin and stared them into their eyes, and into their souls.
They took them away and put the rest back into cages.
They repeated the same process over and over.
“No idea what they are searching for. There are at least over a thousand prisoners here,” Xander pointed out the obvious. “All from far away borders and of different races, mostly humans, therianthropes or dwarves. Whatever they are doing, it must be worth the diplomatic risk.”
“I don’t care for politics. Did you see any of the two kids I described?” Kiur pressed the matter of finding them, but so far, nothing. It was as if they disappeared from the face of the earth.
Granted, they had thousands of prisoners here, but Kiur was desperate and impatient.
“No, but there was a strange girl. About our age, but younger,” Xander sneered. “She was asking for someone with golden hair. I dismissed her since she was a thrall.”
“Did you suspect she would tattle on us? Why was she looking for one with golden hair?”
“Who knows?” Xander shrugged. “Slave or not, I didn’t trust her, so I shooed her away. She had the meanest eyes you could imagine. Typical for someone from the middle-west.”
As their conversation ended, night had come.
Kiur couldn’t fall asleep. His memories were still in shambles, trying to make head and toe on the scenes and emotions.
There was always this one particular woman in his mind.
He couldn’t make out her features, but her heart was either screaming, silent or boiling with emotions as if she were on fire.
It was an ordeal having to experience them, keeping any sane person from sleeping.
Another scene was that of a man. He stood next to the now bedridden woman. His eyes were cold and sharp, devoid of any emotions. He listened to whatever she was saying.
Before Kiur could make out what she said, the man’s gaze flicked on him. Kiur thought he was facing a dreadful wolf, disguising himself as a human and ready to pounce.
The memory was cut short. Kiur realised he had fallen asleep.
Nothing was making sense to him anymore. He could barely keep himself together.
“Leave you damn Reiszer!”
“We don’t know who you are looking for!”
“Go away!”
Kiur heard annoyed yells from the nearby wagons and a faint trace of light hush between them.
The light disappeared from Kiur’s inferior position of view, so he moved further up in his wagon.
Everyone was sleeping, even many of the more lax soldiers. When Kiur accidentally startled the black horse, he calmed it down by going over its mane.
“Do you know where the sound came from?” Kiur asked the horse, not expecting an answer, but the horse snorted in a particular direction and flicked his tail.
Light footsteps and the rustling of grass drew his attention to a woman with a lantern in hand.
She was a thrall, dressed in rags for clothes that barely covered her scrapped knees. No shoes or additional clothing to protect from the usual chilly nights. Her long black hair had tints of blue at the tips but was a mess from the lack of care.
She was malnourished to the bones and looked overworked.
When she spotted Kiur, she quickly rushed to him but stumbled over one of the wagon's wheels.
She face-planted herself on the ground and startled a horse. She quickly gathered herself up and clung to the metal bars of Kiur’s wagon.
“You have golden hair!” she exclaimed enthusiastically with another strange dialect Kiur couldn’t place. Her stormy eyes fixed themselves on Kiur. “I was searching for you.”
Her free hand suddenly went underneath her clothes. Kiur turned away his gaze from the uncomfortable situation. “What are you doing?”
“I- I can’t find it. Give me a moment.” She placed down the lantern and pulled out a piece of parchment from underneath her clothes. The material was the same as they used in Navarre, a papyrus scroll.
It was a secret letter she carried with her.
“He asked me to find and give this to you. In exchange for helping you escape, please, take me with you.”
Character Profiles
Name: Alexandre “Xander” Galanis
Age: 23; Height: 175cm; Gender: Male; Race: Human
Magic: Water
Xander, as he prefers to be called by friends, is a wizard from the southwest. Taken prisoner by the Reiszer, he finds himself working together with Kiur to escape back to his home nation.
Likes: Magic, making theories, winning arguments, shaved ice, cereals with milk and ice cubes