The third day didn’t begin as a day always did. Usually, the streets were flooded by merchants before dawn even broke. But today, the cobblestone streets of the town were empty save for the townsfolk and shopkeepers only just getting their stores ready for the day.

“Where is everyone?” one commented, only to be met with shrugs and confused head-scratching.

“What’s going on?” Marcus asked, stepping out of his house.

“Nothing,” a young man nearby said. Murmurs rose from the crowd. “No-one’s here.”

Marcus stared at the entrance to the village. “Check the roads.” He didn’t want to believe it was true. But a few minutes later, his fears were only confirmed.

“They’ve blocked all the roads!” said the boy who ran to check. A crowd gathered around him. “The Royal Guard is stopping anyone from travelling to the village. There’s posters all over the place saying this town has been embargoed!”

Everyone started talking almost all at once, trying to figure out what was happening. Well, everyone except Marcus, who knew exactly what was happening.

We will make this land dry once again.

He didn’t mean with water at all. He meant running dry of business. All of Tristan’s efforts meant nothing if no-one bought their produce.

“Marcus!” snapped an angry voice. “You know why they did this, don’t you?” And the gathering turned to face him. Talia and Tristan had left the house and now watched from a distance.

“They,” Marcus said. “They wanted Tristan. They said they’ll ‘make the land dry’ if we didn’t hand him over to them.” And he proceeded to detail the exchange from several days ago.

“Well, let’s give him to them!” a large muscular member of the crowd barked.

“What?” Marcus’ head snapped up in shock.

“Yeah!” the other man grinned. “They seem to be afraid of this Affinity thing. So if it’s a fight they want, let’s have Tristan show them what it means to mess with us!”

“No!” Marcus cried out, horrified. “We can’t win a fight against the Royal Guard. If they bring their entire force down on us, none of us will be spared!”

“Oh Marcus, Marcus, Marcus, you’re such a limp bean sometimes,” the same man guffawed. “They won’t stand a chance. What say all, men?”

Several cheers rose from the crowd, energised by the first man’s fervour. But the cheers were silenced by a single word from beyond them.

“Trying to start a rebellion?”

It was the squadron leader from the day before, now dressed in red robes, belts crossing his waist, badges on his chest, donning a rimless hat, hands behind his back. A sword hung from his belt, decorated in ornate carvings as if to show off his status. No other soldier of his battalion had a similar design.

“Treason is a crime punishable by death,” the Guard said. “I suggest you discuss nothing of it and hand the boy over, lest you wish your town wilt back into the sorry village it once was.”

The man from the crowd snapped a pike from a nearby cart and pointed it at the leader. By now, the rest of the crowd had backed off, leaving him and the man in red in a face-off on the street.

“You expect compliance from people you left to die out of disease and hunger?” the energy was gone from his voice, replaced only by malice. “People like you are the ones who should be punished by death!”

“Leon, please,” Marcus pleaded with him. “Don’t start a fight with them.”

“I shall warn you one last time,” the Guard said. “You don’t want a fight with me, or with the Monarchy of Aladeriv.”

“To hell with you,” Leon grumbled before throwing himself at the guard, driving the pike straight into the soldier’s gut.

Their size difference was chasmic: Leon, a massive brutish figure bulging with muscle, against the Guard, a lean frame under the fabric of his robes. But, seemingly against logic itself, the Guard’s left hand snapped out from behind his back, yanked the pike out of its trajectory and, with a flick of his wrist, snapped the spearhead off its shaft.

Leon stumbled forwards at the shock of the movement and dropped to his knees, astonished at the speed and strength had come out of the Guard within that split second. The man in red held the head of the pike in the air, his left arm glowing blue.

“Townspeople!” the guard barked. “The man you see before you is a traitor to the Crown of the land of Aladeriv. Thus, so is the land on which he kneels!”

“What?” Marcus snapped. And he wasn’t the only one. Along the street, shock and outrage rose from the crowd.

“I intended to end this peacefully,” the Guard ignored the commotion and continued, his voice booming as though it was being projected by a loudspeaker. “But by forcing an act of violence out of me, this town is now an enemy of the monarchy.”

“This is absurd, we didn’t do anything!” came a shout, alongside similar cries of anger.

“Hand over the child, and the rest of you may be spared!”

Leon’s head snapped up at “the rest of you”.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“I am NOT,” Marcus said. “Handing over. My son. And that’s final!”

The Guard, unfazed by Marcus’ anger, glanced across his field of view at the mother and son hiding in the door frame of a house. “Then your consent is no longer required,” the Guard said before beginning to walk towards Marcus’ home.

Leon got off his knees and threw himself at the Guard. The man in red raised both fists to his temples and slipped out of the tackle. Without wasting a second, he slid back into the bigger man, driving a reverse uppercut into his ribs, following with a hook across his skull. The hook knocked a dazed Leon off-balance. The Guard whipped a single leg around his body and at the larger man’s temple, whipping his knee right before contact. The spinning hook kick snapped the bigger man’s head to an inhuman angle, dropping him to the ground only moments later.

The crowd around the Guard watched on in horror as both of his arms as well as the leg he’d attacked with glowed blue. A similar blue that would leave Tristan’s limbs when he worked in the fields.

This was Encastry. But some different kind of Encastry that allowed the frail-looking Royal Guard to match up to the speed and strength of the muscular Leon.

Without sparing his knocked out opponent another second of attention, the Guard continued to walk towards Tristan. Marcus stepped in between them. For a moment, they locked eyes.

“Marcus,” Talia whispered from behind him. The Guard glanced over Marcus’ shoulder at the mother and boy before looking back at him.

“The man behind me no longer has a functioning nervous system,” the Guard told Marcus, gesturing at Leon. “An attack like what I just did is enough to scramble the entire biology of the human body. You have a wife and a son whose safety I’m certain you want to ensure as long as you can. Do you still wish to challenge me to a fight, Marcus, father of Tristan?”

Behind Marcus, Tristan stared, wide-eyed, at Leon’s limp body. His fingers shuddered as he imagined, not Leon, but the figure of his father lying there. A vision that seemed to flicker in and out of reality.

He looked down at his hands. And then looked up at the man in red confronting his father. Without a second thought, he raised a block of earth out from underneath the Guard. Taken by surprise, the man stumbled backwards. Tristan didn’t stop, raising four walls around him to trap him inside. But the Guard punched out of it with ease.

He was suddenly grinning, the stoic face from before now replaced with something much more fanatical. “Incredible,” he said. “To think that I couldn’t override your command of the earth. Affinity-bearers really are something!”

“Tristan, Talia, get inside!” Marcus yelled and his wife and son obeyed.

“You’re not safe inside, boy,” the Guard sneered.

A brick exploded against the Guard’s face. “Get out of our town!” shouted the townsman that had thrown it. The Guard’s face bled from three places.

“Hmm. Contempt of the Royal Guard and assaulting an officer of the Monarchy,” he muttered. “This town must really hate itself.”

“You’re not getting the boy, scum,” another onlooker said, gripping a pitchfork. His hands trembled, but his face hid any fear.

“Well then,” the Guard grinned. “You’re not getting another hour in this life.”

***

Talia sat curled up in the shadows of their bedroom, hugging Tristan as close to her body as she could. The curtains were drawn and the door was locked. The sounds of fighting outside were muffled but quick, followed by a dead silence.

For a slow moment, nothing happened. Nothing broke the silence but the slow breathing of the mother and son cowering between the bed and the wall.

Wood exploded with a resounding crack as a glowing fist punched the knob out of the door. Talia stifled a scream as the knob flew across the room and struck a photo of Talia and Marcus, cracking the glass on Marcus’ side.

“I know you’re in here,” the Guard’s voice floated in as the door eased open. He stepped inside. Talia peered over the edge of the bed and stared, horrified, as the man dragged Marcus’ limp body into the room by his hair.

“Don’t worry, darling, he’s alive,” the Guard said. “As much as I’d like to drag the boy out of here, I can’t force him to use his Encastry for us.”

He tossed Marcus to the floor. “So, Tristan!” the man in red looked sideways at the mother and son curled up in a corner. “If you don’t want me killing your father and your mother here and now, you will comply and come with me. Killing you at your age would be such wasted potential.”

“Leave us alone!” Talia screamed, pressing her son even tighter against her body. “We’re not criminals! My son is not a criminal and he never will be! We’re just trying to live our lives in peace!”

“Ah but you never know, do you?” the Guard turned to face the woman clutching her boy, tears streaming down her face. “Maybe one day he gets mad that I killed everyone in his village and decides to enact revenge?”

The words hit her like a stab in the gut, and all of her resolve died in an instant. “Killed . . . everyone?” she almost whimpered.

“Well, I don’t know,” the Guard shrugged with an air of nonchalance. “I imagine not all of the women and children were on the street today and would let alone challenge someone far superior to them in a fight. Men need to learn that starting fights is pointless if they can never win.”

The floor between them exploded in a cloud of dust and the Guard slammed against the wall behind him, dropping to his knees, coughing.

Tristan was on his feet in front of his petrified mother, his entire body glowing in the blue aura, face a mix of anger and terror.

The Guard chuckled as the dust settled around the room. “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you boy?” he grinned at Tristan. “And here I thought you didn’t know gaseous Encastry.” He got on his feet and took his fighting stance. “Let’s see how dangerous you can be.”

For a moment, Tristan seemed uncertain. But that moment passed in a second as he mimed a pulling motion and the entire wall behind the Guard exploded into him.

The Guard rushed out of the explosion, caught Tristan’s throat in his hand and burst through the window. The crash of shattered glass snapped Talia out of her stupefaction and she scrambled onto the bed and threw herself onto the big hole that replaced the window frame.

But her breath caught in her throat as she beheld the slaughter below. Blood sprayed across the street, the limp bodies of many men and one or two women strewn along its length, broken pitchforks and hoes used as weapons scattered about in the morning sun.

And in the middle of it all knelt the Guard, pinning Tristan to the floor by the throat. A single column of earth shot out of the ground, ploughing the Guard in the gut, causing him to stagger to the side and wheeze.

Tristan, free of the chokehold, sat up, heaving to catch his breath, dizzy from having the circulation to his brain cut off under the weight of an adult man.

The Guard, having recovered from the attack, stood up thoughtfully. He couldn’t play around with Tristan. It was only by Tristan’s lack of combat experience that the column of earth had not been driven into his skull instead. The boy’s control of the ground beneath them was too strong.

“That’s quite enough games, I think,” he said and backhanded Tristan across the head. The boy dropped to the ground, unconscious.

All Tristan saw as he passed out was the muffled scream of his mother calling his name as she burst out of their front door.