Bonus Chapter!!! The Butcher's Beginnings Part 1
The desert winds howled louder than any other night in the nearly 2 decades of the young bald Aygu's hard life, whipping up crimson sands that stung tear-streaked eyes. He squinted against the cutting currents, shielding his face as he trudged across the tall dunes of western Buriti, the weight of his rifle a familiar burden on his darkened back.
Even at sixteen, he was no stranger to the harsh realities of life in the arid wastes of Buriti-Vasca. A cry pierced the air forcing Aygu's head to snap towards the source. In the distance, a small group of his tribesmen clashed with a rival clan, their blades glinting in the unforgiving summer sun. Without hesitation, Aygu broke into a run, his body propelled by a primal urge to defend his kin from the never-ending water disputes that took over most of the native's time and strong warriors.
As he drew nearer, the cacophony of battle engulfed him --The clang of glinting steel against shining steel, the grunts of toil from the much larger men, the cries of the wounded being stolen from the mortal coil. Aygu's eyes locked onto a familiar figure, his uncle Razan, locked in a deadly dance with a towering adversary with red warpaint.
Razan's movements were sluggish, his age weighing him down to the point of purely relying on his honed defenses. The enemy warrior seized the slight advantage, his blade slicing through Razan's guards and burying itself deep in his abdomen with a flying splurt of juices. Aygu's breath caught in his throat as his uncle crumpled to the sand, his life's essence spilling forth in an almost spiraled pattern to the sand.
At that burning moment of loss, something primal unleashed within Aygu's young psyche. Every last semblance of fear tore from his soul, his rifle completely forgotten. He collided with Razan's bulky assailant, a whirlwind of fists and fury, driven by a singular purpose -- To avenge the fallen family taken from him once again.
The battle became a blur of unending bloodshed on both sides, a whirlwind of violence that consumed Aygu's every fiber in injury and trauma. He fought with the ferocity of a bottled bat, his knuckles splitting against flesh and bone but still never relenting in their aimed mashing of bone. When the dust settled, his clan's adversaries lay motionless, and Aygu stood victorious, his chest heaving with each ragged breath as he took in the carnage before him...All for a simple means of access to a day's drink, the dusty well they squabbled over was not slated with the blood of many of the older men the village needed for protection.
As he approached his uncle's nonfunctional arrangement of flesh and muscle, Razan's eyes fluttered open suddenly, a weak smile playing upon his shorn brown lips. "I l-lo, y...," he groaned sadly, his voice fading with each word into the scalding breeze of the desert. "Protect t-the children."
Aygu cradled his uncle's cracked head, tears stinging his eyes as Razan's life slipped away in his nephew's scrawny arms. A seed of rage took root within him, a burning ember that would one day ignite into an inferno of vengeance that would be unseen in all the searing sectors of his fatherland.
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Bitter years passed, and Aygu's reputation as a fearsome warrior grew. His skill with the blade was unmatched, his thirst for retribution insatiable. He carved a bloody path through rival tribes, his quest for vindication ever-consuming. Having united the southern front of villages within his own tribe's grasp through several skirmishes that left him toothless and desensitized to the seasons of death that followed his uncle's passing.
Stepping from the shadowed caves of the oldest settlement of Buritain power he was amazed by how easily the younger generation took to his cause...He only made the promise of water and shelter from any form of outside culture, the radicalized nationalist child soldiers were much harder for the other clans to fight. Many lost their children to Aygu's silver tongue and numerous more lost their fathers, uncles, and brothers when his forces swept through the dead of night.
Aygu made preparations for the yearly Festival of Scales, the only time the natives of the land put down their weapons and put together the bounty of the desert's yield. This was not done for want or extravagance but was entirely necessary for millions of interconnected peoples that fed off the center river's trade and flow. He gave the order to start hunting every animal in sight, the meat would be key to forcing some of the more remote Buritians into a much more favorable position.
Just as many of the older teens and adolescents in Aygu's camp took their grouped leave from the rocky outcrop's safe haven, a loud explosion sent him flying back into the sandy entrance of the cave. The singed screams of the younglings compelled Aygu to cover his ears and head from the different racing soundwaves and blastwaves. Above his cradled position, the heaviest bomber in the Vascan's borrowed arsenal let loose the final payload that shattered the caverns that housed many of Ayu's warriors.
In an instant of fiery brilliance, the dreadlocked madman had let the edict for decimation stand even with the knowledge of the meatshields being deployed in the form of children. The warlord had never once encountered the country's cultural leaders let alone witnessed the intensity of a bomb; For the first time in years, he cowered in absolute terror while the screams faded under his rocky casket. Nothing had provoked this attack...King Vasca's ear had merely been clasped with the senates raving about the lack of penalty the non-capital sectors displayed when scraping with the much more heavily armed soldiers of the true military.
Dragging himself from the ruins of his once-bustling cave base was a slight feat of miracle, the broken bones unable to thrust him into the dark abyss like his family. Each grasp at the loose dirt and stone discharged fresh agony to every nerve ending he existed with, yet nothing stopped him, Aygu would never forget nor forgive anyone who threatened to make him fear while wanting nothing more than to live peacefully among the sands of his fatherland.
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Months dragged by with little reformation of his once-unified power structure, each small gain in numbers was quickly beaten back by the constant river raids and ariel bombardment sent by the capital at a bi-weekly rate at this point. The only gleaming light at the end of the tunnel was due to the Vascan military's overconfidence, or perhaps the fact that many of the surrounding warlords took the raids as a sign to take their infighting to the maw of the noble centerlands. In all 70 years of Vascan occupation no one tribe, clan, or warlord had dared to take aim at the puppeted elite of the capital.
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A blitz strike of the combined 90,000 war-men of Buriti's bravest of natives was meant to be the final nail in the coffin of sovereignty. Aygu had traveled the circumference of the entire nation in his quest for dominance, any weaker village was either razed or simply stripped of its most loyal and healthy males; Compared to the undersized Vascan troops sitting at roughly 6,700 specialized standing units of ruthlessly trained operators, the civil was would be over quicker than it had begun.
Aygu marched his own personal charge of 10,000 handpicked soldiers both well versed in Buritian blade dance and the use of the stolen firearms of the oppressors deep into the capital's boundary line. The cover of night and camouflaged sand garb allowed them a much easier time moving silently into position than many of the other native clans had been able to achieve--The fighting already breaking out a dozen miles to the north which made Aygu's infiltration perform almost too perfectly.
He made sure to check almost each ranked man leading their own small squadrons for anyone unfit to take up this momentous eruption of civil war. The crowd of thousands had unified so resonantly that their hearts almost seemed to pulse in unison as they slowly slid their way into the last dunes before the half-mile sprint to the Capital's outer slums. All was quiet as many were tucked into bed long before due to a curfew meant to root out any rebellion in the budding metropolis.
The once expansive oasis that Aygu had visited many times with his family as a small boy had been transformed into a barely functioning monstrosity of forced modernization that mainly benefited the nobility, the natives had no monetary system only a short 2 decades beforehand and never truly adapted to the many different currencies now flooding their pockets--Without any central bank or exchange of their own moneys they were left to toil and sell off their land for nothing more than a few months wage.
Had any care gone into the Vascans' planned takeover of the archaic tribal way of life after the slave trade ended, there would be multitudes less battle-ready men of arms taking the fight straight to their hanging jowls. Aygu knew once the war began he would have only a minute window of opportunity to strike the king down himself...This would be the only way he saw forward through the coming age ahead, his balded toothless face the grand overseer of all that is just and fair in Buriti.
Aygu could taste the ashy chalk of the emblazed palace that hung stories over the tallest slum as if even the base floor could not be seen intertwined with the filthy desert and its people. Each stair another rung father from the searing sands that connected all Buritians to a single cultural juncture. Nothing lived without the dry kiss of the land, nothing died without the embrace of the swelter of the burning blue skies.
"Au'te, I want you to stay back," The 34-year-old warlord turned to his son with a slight apprehension that he hid from the bulk of the men behind the two. "If I am to fall in battle and meet the Doutros...You are the only one I trust to carry my blade." Aygu quickly switched their vastly differently carved swords in an instant, swapping his ornately carved obsidian chopper for his son's much lighter steel straight sword.
Au'te shot his father a furious scowl as he spat a hunk of snot proudly on the cracked earth below. "You worry too much--We will be sitting on a throne of their skeletons before daybreak, father." He attempted to press on with the forward branch of troops that did not take base in the dried embankments that now served as their trenches. His father stood with a scowl on his face, the screaming souls of their displaced forefathers shot through his bones. "No, you will stay here with the reinforcements...IF I am unsuccessful--Regroup with your mother's clan in Nak."
Hundreds to thousands grouped in a broad line of frothing combatants, the splinter cell of 7 thousand men said their goodbyes to their brothers that formed the thin outer shell of their invasion. "I will not sit back while--" Au'te knew better than to argue with his father while his blade was still in hand, a major sign of disrespect that he would never forgive, even if it was from his son. Without another bitter word, Aygu left the teenager to take charge of relaying the smoke signals and flare rounds meant to serve as communication between the encroaching clans that had not yet appeared to aid them.
In minutes the first firing of homebrewed IEDs took flaming embryos in the womb of the Capital of Buriti Vasca, Aygu had sent many spies to gauge the willingness of the populous to rise with their rural brothers to no avail...This was total civil war, and no one would be spared from the wrath of rejection of caste. Loud screams of women and their unprepared husbands sounded off with celerity once the bomb's ring turned to connected pockets of slum world conflagration. Air-raid sirens let loose just as Aygu planned.
The king's response of thinking they had been hit by a rogue plane or Svet extremist group was all too easy to guess when it had been proven to be such a knee-jerk reaction that even a small bump in the night sent him clambering to his underground bunker. Many had taken to their baser instinct and instead of pushing deeper into the Palace's territory made time to begin slaughtering their brothers and sisters who did not stand with them that night just the same as the very occasional Vascan Noble that masqueraded as any sort of defense unit.
In a far-off locked chamber of the spiked tower of the palace that housed sanctioned treasonous to a nauseatingly hot form of oubliette where small mirrors were placed at different angles to not allow for the prisoner to get a moment of coolness during the Buriti day heat, a head-shaven woman pulled herself fitfully to the roof bars of her cell. Her ears could hear the many signs that there was something horribly wrong happening beyond the crumbling walls of her almost forgotten location.
The younger sister of the Queen pulled with all her strength in order to jostle the bars free from their cemented seatings, Vascans were not a people of grand architecture or ingenuity, much of their time was spent planning a cunning political scheme rather than seeing it through; She had received a public ban from appearing in anything more than a broadcasted radio show that her sister made her speak propaganda through just to secure herself another meal that seemed to be coming less and less.
Queen Marna Vasca was truly a beauty of the Old World, unlike her sister, having the marred features that made her more akin to that of the Buritians than the normal towering and large-eyed Vascans that birthed her; Bala's hair barely curled, her skin much darker than her sister complexion. All culminated to a head when King Vasca came to the Old World for reprimand and caught a glimpse of the two women out nosily indulging in gossip of the Vascarian Old Guard.
Though Queen Marna was a culturally elegant symbol to those of the Vascan elite, she was barren, a fact that was unfortunately found out after her so-called tutor made a depraved attempt to sire multiple children with the at the time underaged Marna. Her trauma never healed much like the terrifyingly upsetting prospect that she may never be able to find a true place among her people with all her accelerated beauty and courtly knowledge.
This created an amazing opportunity for the king and Marna but for Bala, this was nothing more than a forced concubine role that their own mother had seen through until their father had her banished for taking too much food from their homestead's vast stores. She put up a long fight with both her father and sister for many years before the pressures of Vascaria losing more and more borderlands to the sanctions placed on them.
None of that seemed to matter now as the 2nd year of her enslavement and outright mental torture from Marna rounded its corner with the symphony of the civil war ushering the tidings of the new year. With one last exertion of the food-starved muscles in her body, the metal bars took flight from the shattered cement that housed them. Bala fell with a hard slap of her bare head to the floor of the prison, her vision swam with the blackness of agony.
After a much closer charge's soundwaves made their vibrational dance through the cobbled walls of the tower, Bala regained her determination and flung herself onto the chipped ceiling of her cell. The need to escape blinded her to any other sensation but one of freedom from the hell she had been put through. Bala froze in place as the silhouette of a figure stood motionless at her approach, she would have burst into tears if she hadn't been praying to Dhira that the person did not yet see her.
The black outline in front of her did not react to her escape attempt, only reaching out to outstretch the unnaturally long blade-like fingers they sported toward a small window out to the chaos around them. Bala could not place the strange feeling that radiated from its tilted and lanky body, it was almost as if without even a single word, it both expressed its intent to help not harm, and made her confident in the idea that they would not become the newest torturer in a line of many who chose to abuse the powerless noble.
"Come here darling, come see what the natives have been planning against your people." Bala began to shake from the unwavering venom that wiggled its way into the ear of the courtier, the voice itself was not the issue, it was the way that it suddenly pinpointed from her front and within an instant was beside her. Bala's weakened eyes blinked hard sending her falling back when not finding the figure at its original space at the end of the hall. "The Buritian god of war is culling the weak from his staple...But what do we have, my dear? Dhira is ailing--His heavenly body ceaselessly spinning in the cosmos...Do you not feel the void in your peoples' souls?"