“Alarion.”

The boy woke with a start, his hands coming defensively before blurry eyes recognized Sierra’s blue-lit face. “Wha…. how long was I?”

“A few hours. I let you sleep slightly more than I got to, since we had to wait out your timers,” She smiled slightly. “Check your status. If your penalties have not worn off, I can let you sleep a little longer.”

Alarion scoffed. Calling it sleep was overly generous. He wasn’t sure if Sierra had a skill, or just significant practice, but he’d been unable to replicate her sudden slumber. He’d shifted and tossed, unable to get comfortable upon the stairs for nearly an hour before he’d drifted off into a fitful slumber. If anything, he felt more exhausted than when he’d started, but thankfully the system wasn’t willing to hit him with another penalty for an uncomfortable nap.

“Potion sickness penalty has reduced to slight now, only 1%. It will be gone entirely in about twenty minutes.” He glanced down the imposing staircase. “We might as well just go. See what is at the bottom and wait there if we have to.”

“You are probably right,” She grimaced at the sight of so many steps. “Get yourself ready and we will go?”

“Mm,” He agreed in his usual taciturn fashion. Five minutes later, he had finished walking off the weariness of his nap, collected his things and was ready to go.

Which was when the true struggle began.

Ten minutes into their descent, with no end in sight, Alarion was glad they had not bothered to wait out the last of his penalty. At twenty minutes he could no longer see their entrance when he looked back, but felt no closer to the bottom. By thirty minutes his legs were burning, and he could no longer stand it.

“This isn’t magic, is it?”

“What?” Sierra asked.

“The stairs.” He pointed ahead, as though she could somehow miss his meaning. “When Elena first put me in the Void Arena, I was able to run in any direction, without ever getting anywhere.”

“Ah,” Sierra replied, catching his meaning at last. “It could be. There are certainly illusion spells and spatial magic that could have that effect. But to what end? We were already trapped in the chamber above, trapping us in a staircase feels redundant. Besides, we did pass the top half of that fiend quite a while back. At least that far must be real.”

Alarion considered her words. Then, seemingly satisfied, he changed the subject. “I leveled very fast.”

“Congratulations?”

“That isn’t-” He scowled as he realized just how conceited his choice of words had made him look. “I was more asking, is that normal? It took weeks to gain the class, and less than an hour to level it multiple times.”

“Completely normal,” She reassured him. “Getting the class is far and away the most time consuming part of the first rank. For those less blessed than you are, it can take years or even decades to gain the class in the first place, but considerably less time to reach the pinnacle of Rank I.”

“Really?” Alarion asked, his voice skeptical.

“Indeed. I reached both my classes shortly before my induction at fourteen. I am very near my summoner cap, and not far behind with my combat class. And that is with a training regime less… extreme than yours has been.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“How so?”

She laughed slightly. “It is not Vitrian custom to throw our trainees to the fiends by themselves, even with someone to guard them. When I was on subjugation duty, I was part of an organized team, expected to take on no more than a few fiends at a time. Safe and steady progress as opposed to rapid and dangerous.”

“Safe sounds nice,” He said, lapsing back into quiet now that his questions were exhausted.

They walked for several more minutes, for hundreds more steps, until Sierra broached a thought of her own.

“Tell me about yourself.”

“Hmm?”

“I read what Mistress Elena wrote to the Governor about you, but there was almost nothing in the file about you as a person,” She explained. “Where were you born? Where did you grow up? That sort of thing.”

Alarion eyed her cautiously. Her question seemed sincere, even banal, but somehow it clearly bothered him. Yet despite those misgivings, he eventually shrugged and began to answer.

“I was born in Imuria. On a little plot of land a few miles away from a larger city. Redburn, maybe, I cannot remember the name. We grew something on trees.”

“An orchard? Pears? Apples, maybe?”

“Yeah,” He nodded firmly, delighted she found the word he’d been searching for as a vivid memory came to him. “Apples, that was it. Small little sour apples. My sisters once tied me to a fence and threw them at me until I cried. I was very young when we left.”

“The war?”

Again he nodded. “We were supposed to visit the city for market. Then my father came home in a panic. We needed to leave. The numbe- the Vitrians had declared war.”

“The Imurians declared that war when they-” Sierra stopped herself as Alarion’s face showed a total lack of offense or even interest at her pushback. “Sorry. Go on.”

“There wasn’t much more,” He shrugged. “We went south along with a lot of others, it took us a long time to find anywhere to stay. No family left in Ashad. No gods either, my mother used to say. The new house was small. I cried a lot for having to share a room with my sisters. Looking back, they were still the good years.”

“What happened?”

Alarion gave her a look. “You did. Another war. My dad was born in Ashad so they made him fight.”

This time Sierra had the good sense to say nothing.

“After, my mother couldn’t pay for even the small house we had. Not while feeding us. She sold everything she could. Jewelry, my father’s tools. The few animals we had. Eventually she sold us. My older sisters and I.”

“I am sorry.”

He shook his head. “Don’t be. We agreed to it."

She spit him with an incredulous look.

"She had to keep my little sister safe. None of us could make our own way as a family. But the money she got from from us was enough to get the two of them somewhere safe. At least I think. It was a good trade."

Sierra bristled. “Alarion. You can not-”

“We were treated better by that first family anyway,” He interrupted. “They fed us. Kept us from starving through a bad winter. It only got bad when they sold us again. Separate lots. I don’t know what happened to them after that.”

Sierra frowned in confusions. “Wait. I thought they found you with your family?”

Alarion gave her a quizzical glance. “Why do you think that?”

“There were-” Sierra’s uncertainty deepened as she studied his face. “Mistress Elena’s report says that you were found with four graves. In the Old City.”

“Those weren’t my family,” He explained. “I ran away after the second time I was sold, I wanted to find my sisters. I couldn’t. Eventually someone took me in, then sold me again. That family abandoned us when the fiends came, and I went with a small caravan to the Old City.”

“There was a family, a mother and two daughters. They took pity on me because I looked like their son. I liked them because they reminded me of my family,” He continued. “When we got to the Old City there was an argument about payment and papers to get into Ashad-Vitri. A fight broke out and we tried to escape. We hid in a house, in the basement.”

Sierra’s eyes were fixated on Alarion as he spoke. There were no tears in his eyes, even as her own shone slightly in the white-blue light of the stairway walls. Only the slight set of his jaw marked a difference in his usual demeanor.

“The man wanted to hurt them. I tried to fight back. He beat me bloody. They tried to stop him from killing me, one of them cut him with a knife and he went berserk.” Alarion looked away from Sierra’s eyes then. “I stabbed him in the back with the knife she'd dropped. A lot. But too late.”

"Then you buried them? All of them?"

"Just bodies at that point," Alarion said. "Did not seem right to leave him for the birds. He was just as desperate as we were."

“And you just stayed down there.”

Alarion’s eyes snapped back to her, a flash of anger glimmering behind them.

“Where else was left for me to go?”