“Alarion-Talon-Valentina-Green-Widow.”
“And again?” Valentina insisted.
“Alarion-Talon-Valentina-Green-Widow,” the young man reiterated. The phrase had gotten progressively more ridiculous in his mind with each repetition, and after his fifth attempt Alarion was almost at his limit. “I have it.”
“You have it now,” the goddess agreed. “But I want to make sure you have it when you need it.”
“Why is this time so different?”
Valentina pursed her lips and glanced to the sky. After a moment of silent reflection, or perhaps internal conversation, she opened up. “The sixth challenge is… different from the others. It is of Mother’s design, not mine. The key phrase is what makes it a test, rather than simply a punishment.”
“That is reassuring. Alarion said as he looked toward the nearby door marked with the symbol of endurance. If the previous two challenges, one of which was simply to endure pain, hadn’t constituted ‘punishment’ by her definition, Alarion was concerned about exactly what did. “Alarion-Talon-Valentina…”
The phrase was his ‘escape’, as Valentina had described it. He had only to say those five words in that order, and the test would instantly end. He would fail, of course, but that was the price of surrender.
Alarion had no intention of surrendering, but he’d be an idiot to ignore the warning.
“Alarion-Talon-Valentina-Green-Widow.” He repeated one final time without prompting.
Valentina nodded, a sad look in her eyes as they met his.
“If it becomes too much…” She began, then glared up at the sky before revising her thoughts. “It is alright to quit. There is no shame in failing this test. Most do. I would have.”
The words were not nearly as comforting as Valentina had intended.
“Are you ready?” She asked.
“Mm.”
With that confirmation, Valentina stepped ahead of him. She took hold of the door and pulled it open to reveal a nearly blinding white light beyond. “Just keep walking. You’ll know when the test begins.”
Squinting against the light, Alarion followed her instructions and stepped into the pure white void. It was awkward, walking without any frame of reference save for the position of his feet. Before long Alarion gave up on his eyes entirely in favor of his mana sense.
Unfamiliar mana coiled around him on all sides, a complicated web of interconnected arcana that he could not hope to deconstruct. About the only thing he could parse is that it was building toward something substantial, and that it wouldn’t take long.
His stomach lurched abruptly as the ground fell out beneath him. His mana sense shattered due to his sudden disorientation, and he was sent tumbling through unfamiliar planes of existence. He whirled through twisting eldritch dimensions. He was in too many places at once, hearing things with his eyes as his mind struggled to comprehend things it was not meant to.
In that singular instance of horrific distortion, Alarion tried to mouth the words of warning Valentina had given him. If this was to be the challenge, then he needed out, for the sensation was unbearable. But before he could find the air to speak, reality reasserted itself with a sharp crack and he found himself in darkness.
It was a man’s voice, one brimming with anger as he shouted at a sobbing woman. Her cheek was red where he’d slapped her, her eye already beginning to swell from the blow. She was babbling in an unfamiliar language, pleading with the man as he struck her again. This time the blow sent her sprawling to the ground and a moment later a young man interposed himself protectively.
The words were gentle and feminine, the voice distantly familiar, like that of a half-remembered dream. He tried to turn to face its source, but his eyes remained fixed on the violence before him. Not content with assaulting a woman, the thug had set in on her son for the temerity of his answer. The large man rained down blow after blow on the teenager as his mother struggled to explain.
Alarion felt his hands tighten on the edge of the wagon. He felt his body tense. If no one else was going to stop this, then he had to-
This time the girl was more proactive in her demand. Her slender arms wrapped around his body and pulled him back from the edge. He fought and squirmed against her, but it was no use. She was so strong. At least Rank II from the way she so easily manhandled him. She had him pinned against her chest, shrouded in darkness as the nearby violence escalated.
Those words angered him. Who were they to make that decision for him? Who even were these people? Alarion struggled with renewed furiosity, and with some difficulty he managed to free his head from the girl’s vice-like grip. He looked back to the old woman and the teenager, both bleeding on the ground in front of their attacker. A pang of terror flooded his body, and he looked to the girl restraining him.
Erda.
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They couldn’t be here. He couldn’t be here.
Alarion screamed his warnings. They had to go further. They had to break for the city, regardless of the danger. They had to throw themselves on the trafficker’s mercy or leave Alarion behind. Anything was better than what they had planned. Every regret and recrimination he had felt in the intervening years overflowed in an instant, but not one of them fell from his lips.
He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t move. It wasn’t the paralysis of fear but the unsettling restrictions of a dream. He had no agency over his actions, no control over the events. His body moved when it was supposed to, it spoke the words that it was destined to. He was not a participant in the moment, only a witness.
He’d seen the man. Why hadn’t he said anything?
Erda carried him down into the dark basement, a protective hand over the back of his head. She was always worried about him, ever since he’d come into her care. That was probably why he’d come into her care in the first place. Six months earlier they had been strangers in the same caravan heading south. He’d been alone and she’d taken him under her wing. Into her family.
With the benefit of maturity and hindsight, Alarion wondered if there was more to it than simple goodwill or pity. Had Erda lost a brother somewhere along the years, the way he had lost his sisters?
They sat there in the dark, whispering among themselves in an unfamiliar language. They’d been displaced the same way, twice victimized refugees who had fled to Ashad, only for Ashad to become a warzone in turn. He clung to Erda, silent as a ghost, shivering slightly in the evening cold. He hadn’t been afraid. He’d been too young, too exhausted and too confused for that.
The murderer’s footsteps preceded him, and the women went suddenly silent. He was just above them searching the house. The warm yellow glow of his lantern trickled down the stairs as he found them, then flooded the small basement as he turned the final corner. Alarion remembered the man as truly ugly, but he wasn’t. His nose was crooked, and he was missing two teeth in his wide grin, but he was oddly handsome despite those flaws.
Somehow that felt worse.
“Alarion-Talon…” Though he could voice no warning of what was to come, Alarion found that he could still murmur the key phrase. As the first two words left his mouth Alarion seriously considered finishing the phrase. He didn’t want to see this, to live this. Not again. Once was a time too many.
His new reality advanced despite his objections. The man was shouting, giving orders Alarion didn’t understand. Hana moved to meet him, to reason with him. There was a scuffle. Shouting.
Erda stroked his cheek and set him down.
If only he’d listened.
The next few moments passed in a blur. Erda’s words were soothing. Conciliatory. Then the man made some sort of demand and outrage leaked into her voice. They started bickering as Alarion crept at the edge of the shadows. The man pointed toward him, repeating the words. Erda began to shout. She swatted at his hand.
He struck her.
Alarion was on the man in moments. Punching, biting, scratching and kicking. He landed a solid strike to the man’s groin and nasty scratches along his face. For a moment it looked as though Alarion might win. It was a stupid thought, as stupid as fighting in the first place. The man was a thief and a brute but the four of them had value. He’d have beaten them bloody, maybe even sold them as slaves. But if Alarion hadn’t ruined his eye…
Suddenly there was pain. Then numbness. Alarion saw the knife sticking out of his gut, but the child couldn’t understand it. He collapsed in shock. Shivering. Sobbing.
And the butchery began.
He could only see a blur through his tears. Mira tried to intervene, her hands held up in a foolish attempt to deescalate the terminal situation. Alarion couldn’t see what happened to her, but the heavy thud of impact and Hana’s mournful scream told him enough. The older woman fought but she was no fighter, her cries of agony piercing through the fog of Alarion’s own while Erda desperately tried to staunch the flow of blood from Alarion’s wound.
Erda was the last to die.
She’d always taken such pride in the long chestnut hair that fell to her knees. It had been her one nod to vanity amidst a difficult life. It felt almost obscene that it was weaponized against her in her final moments, used to drag her away from Alarion even as she clung desperately to his side.
The man didn’t give her the dignity of last words. His short sword drove into her back, its glistening metal tip protruding from her chest as the impact drove the breath from her lungs. She looked down at it, incredulous for just a moment before the light left her eyes.
Alarion screamed in rage and hatred, and his body screamed back. He hadn’t recognized it in the moment, but this had been his Awakening. Perhaps he’d met the conditions weeks or months earlier, but in that blind Single-Minded fury he’d have selected anything just for a chance at revenge. For survival.
And the System had obliged.
The butcher was still trying to free his blade from Erda’s body when the boy tackled him. Alarion had no skill with a knife, but he was quick, and full of anger. He stuck the man in the hip as the two toppled together in a heap, then twice more in quick succession as he managed to worm his way around to the man’s back. Those three alone would have been enough, judging by the man’s sudden weakness. Alarion didn’t care. He stabbed again and again and again. Iron chipped on bone and Alarion cut a deep gash in his right hand as he continued to bury the blade in the man’s back.
Anger welled within Alarion, a blinding white fury of impotent rage. The man wasn’t Awakened. He wasn’t some great warrior, a spellcaster or a Governor. Even at his best he was beaten by a child!
How had a man who was nothing taken everything from him?!
Unfamiliar emotions and memories flooded Alarion’s mind as he struck the final blow. A green hill overlooking endless pasture. A bitter taste of almonds on a farmgirl’s lips. A night of drinking with friends.
They came faster and more distinct as the moment dragged on into infinity. Alarion remembered watching his mother scream and rage at the man who told her that his brother was dead in the war. He remembered the pride in his father’s eyes the first time he’d solved a riddle. He remembered a messy breakup and a brutal beating at the hands of her new lover. The phrase ‘do you understand’ rang heavy in his mind, shouted by a stranger warning him to stay down after a bar fight.
He held his child in his arms, then buried him six months later from disease. He watched as soldiers set fire to his field to deny them to the Vitrians and shivered through a winter alongside a handful of fellow traffickers. He drank too much, gambled and whored. He stabbed a brunette girl through the heart and felt a pang of regret as he did it.
A lifetime flashed in the butcher’s eyes as the light went out, that same lifetime relieved in Alarion’s mind as the boy continued to stab him long after he was gone.
The blade snapped off in the man’s body and Alarion looked down at it in bewilderment. That hadn’t happened last time. No, he’d kept the knife around for nearly six months before it broke. With a fright he realized that he’d regained control over his body sometime earlier, but that he’d been so full of rage he’d kept stabbing regardless. That he’d pulverized the butcher’s body into something that barely even resembled a human.
He hated this man. Every fiber of his being despised the man lying dead beneath him. But that rage had been poisoned with understanding. He knew the man lying dead beneath him nearly as well as he knew himself. It was as though he’d killed himself.
Alarion moved off the body and retched. What kind of a test was this, that made him see this bastard’s life?
When at last his stomach had finished revolting, Alarion opened his eyes to see a new portal on the far end of the basement, filling the doorway to what had been his bedroom during those hard months he had lived alone. Whatever the mystery of this challenge, he would only find his answers by seeing it through.
He started towards it, then stopped. He looked back at the bodies, tears welling up in young eyes at the familiar sight. This was only a nightmare, or an illusion. It would vanish the moment he walked through that door.
Alarion bent down and brushed Erda’s cheek. She felt real. She still felt warm. Illusion or not, none of them deserved this. Perhaps not even the butcher.
But they did deserve a burial.