Amaro wrapped his arms around Sancta protectively, closing his eyes. He heard a clang behind him.
“Arm yourself Amaro.” his father said coldly.
Amaro looked, eyes watering as his father’s sword was resting behind him.
“You think you're man enough to challenge your father? I will show you mercy.” His voice boomed so that everyone could hear him, “For my eldest son is so laudable that he would be willing to endure the lesson of restraint for himself and his sister. Already so bold as to challenge his father. And yet you are about ten years too soon.”
Amaro clutched his chest, his heart beating like it was being strangled, “What?”
“Speak now, Amaro. Do you wish me to punish you and your sister? Or do you wish to arm yourself and learn this valuable lesson so that you may teach it to her with a more gentle hand later?”
Amaro swallowed, he snatched up his father’s sword. It felt so heavy. Far more than any weapon he’d ever held before.
His father held up a hand, snapping his fingers loud enough that it clicked through the entire venue, “Lorshiir, your sword, if you would.”
In a gust of wind, a slender, blue-skinned xio with dark graying hair tightly pulled into a wolf’s tail appeared at his master’s side. He gave a careful bow to Kadmus, “Forgive my insolence my lord, but are you certain? He is just a boy.”
“You are forgiven, Lorshiir. I understand your concern, but this is a lesson of restraint not a lesson of weak forgiveness. Now…” He snapped his fingers again, “Your sword, if you would be so kind.”
Lorshiir relented, unsheathing his saber and handing it over. Kadmus swung once in front of himself, a rumbling clap of sundered air collapsing in on itself as it chased behind his blade, “You feel it do you not, Amaro? The weight of your father’s blade is burdensome is it not?”
Amaro grit his teeth and raised it in front of him, his arms trembling. There was no way such an unwieldy and heavy sword was practical. It was the same size as any other broadsword and yet its heft had to be tenfold that of anything he’d ever carried before.
“You lack the strength to properly hold my burden, much like the sword you are attempting to raise before me. And yet you try anyway. Admirable for one so young, but utterly foolish.”
CLANG!
Amaro was just barely able to raise his guard in time, a clang of metal ringing in his right ear as he deflected his father’s opening strike. His stance was put off kilter from the force of the blow, only to feel his leg pulled out from beneath him. Amaro crashed to his side, gritting his teeth in anger and rolling up to his feet.
CLANG!
Another cruel blow rang Amaro’s sword as it was knocked above his head from the forceful strike. The hum of his blade made his hands go numb. He staggered back.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Amaro could just barely keep up, his father pushing the pace faster and faster, Amaro’s arms already starting to burn from whipping such a heavy blade around to defend himself. One finally slipped through his defenses, stopping just shy of his ear, and popping his eardrum with the booming wind that chased after his blade.
Amaro fell to the ground, his head ringing sword clattering at his knees as he clutched his bleeding ear. He’d almost been killed.
“Get up. You will not embarrass me further with such weakness. Show your resolve. This lesson is only just beginning. Unless you would like Sancta to take responsibility instead?”
Amaro glanced over to his sister who was now being held by his mother, sobbing in her arms. The smell of ozone filled the air, that unnatural serenity overtaking his heart once more. Amaro rose to his feet, blade in hand. The same vengeful purple eyes his father had passed down to him now glowing with magical power and intent to kill. Amaro was dizzy, but the wound in his ear was already closing.
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His family members conversed with the members of the other houses.
“The look in his eyes. Now something like that should take years to master, and yet he shows the focus of someone twice his age.”
“Yes, quite the poise when pushed in the right direction. To think he’d be so calm when facing one as strong as Kadmus.”
“Such potential. Perhaps there’s hope for the Xirxus after all. We shall see where Kadmus’ can lead him.”
“But what of his daughter? Surely she needs to learn proper manners?”
Kadmus, hearing the whispers, once again addressed the crowd of his fellow noblemen and women, “Behold my eldest son, the next candidate to uphold the mantle for which I now so humbly carry upon my shoulders. Let this be a demonstration of the new order. That we may be taught, so that we may teach others. Accepting the burden of our fellow family members’ mistakes, and shielding them as we so graciously shield the peasantry beneath us.”
Amaro hated the show his father was putting on for the rest of those nobles. All in an effort to save face. To show off how grand and worthy he was, and justify what he was about to do.
“A gentle but firm hand, shown restraint and mercy, but not forgiven until properly punished.” Kadmus cast off the robes and pointed his sword to Amaro, a cold and uncaring gaze stabbing into his son, “The tarnishing of our history shall not go unpunished, but we must all be reminded by the next generation that the future is far more important. New robes can always be made to honor new legacies, after all. But I will be damned if I allow a fool to inherit mine.”
There was a rumbling in the crowd. A reluctant agreement between them all, “Amaro, now that I have shown you the limits of your strength, I will now show you the limits of your mortality. So that you may forever know the consequences of disrespecting those above you-”
CLANG!
Amaro had already charged, he’d had enough of such a hollow performance. Even then, even as young as he had been, Amaro had known his father’s speech was just a pleasant way of telling everyone he was about to be beaten within an inch of his life in front of them.
Electricity arched from Amaro’s body, he wouldn’t let his father get away with something like this. Not without at least a scratch to remind him that his kids weren’t something he could just beat into submission to satisfy his anger.
BZZZZT! CLANG! KLKCLANGCLKINGK!
With all the vicious ferocity of a lightning bolt, Amaro struck at his father in a rapid flurry. Each and every strike deflected with such ease. Amaro still remembered the unimpressed expression his father had at the time. Amaro hated that look. Being seen as something so far beneath his own father. As if nothing he did was ever enough.
KLKCLANGCLKINGK! CLANG! “Hrk!”
His father snatched his throat. Amaro’s hand shot up, only to be batted away by his father as a bolt of lightning burst out of it and crashed into the ceiling.
CRASH! WHAM!!!
Kadmus bounced Amaro’s body off the ground so fast that Amaro had to wonder if he hit it before or after his lightning bolt hit the ceiling. The wind was knocked from his lungs, his body rising into the air before being brutally stomped into the ground a second time. Amaro turned to his belly, hacking and gasping as his father gripped his hair, “I do not take pleasure in this, Amaro...”
He was thrown like a ragdoll. Amaro didn’t know which way was up or down until his head smacked into the floor, tumbling head over heels and crashing into a wall. He finally managed to get a strangled breath of air into his lungs.
Amaro staggered to his feet, only to find himself lifted off of them by a punch to the gut.
He hadn’t even seen his father coming. How could anyone move that fast?
His family looked on. His cousins, his aunts, uncles, grandparents, and everything in between. They just watched as Amaro was beaten within an inch of his life. Even if his body regenerated quickly, his father’s blows outpaced it with ease.
Just raising his guard up, he could feel his father’s heavy strikes breaking the bones in his forearms.
To think such a brutal and public beating could have ever been considered the ‘civil’ way of reprimanding him. And yet Amaro remembered what they’d said just watching it happen.
“Such is the way of things. That’s proper punishment for sullying tradition so brazenly.”
“Hopefully he learns his place and grows from this.”
“A necessary evil, but the head cannot show weakness, nor bias to his own.”
“Perhaps we were too hasty in our assertions. Kadmus appears to know how to discipline his kin well.”
“Quite merciful to allow his eldest son to take the beating for both of them. Would have been dreadful to see such a young girl getting punished.”
As Amaro’s broken body crumpled to the floor at his father’s feet, he heard those words again.
“Get up.”