For the next two weeks, Ferene found herself pulled into a new schedule.
Her morning routine stayed the same - after finishing breakfast and various chores, she went to the cave with the training area, this time bringing her own sword and armor. The short trip along the wooden platforms linking the caves together felt strange - she passed Hatharen wearing their simple shirts and leggings, while she herself was fully geared for battle. The first few days, she received stares, but after that they quickly ignored her.
Rather than stepping into the ring to spar, she passed it to arrive at the familiar spot towards the back of the cave, where Relgren stood, waiting, every day. His methods did not change with their new deadline. Just as before, he would demand she assume a stance, adjust it until her form reached his standards, and then have her drop and take up the stance, repeatedly, until she got it right on her own. Then, he would alternate being having her attack him, which always ended in her being disarmed, or swinging at her, where he went easy on her and allowed her to feel the difference between how she used to fight and how he wanted her to fight.
After stances, he started adjusting individual motions. Relgren’s strict demands extended to every step she took and every turn she made while holding her sword. If an enemy stood behind her, he needed her to move in a very specific way to face the threat. If she had to step towards an enemy to negate their range advantage, or step away to utilize her own, Relgren pushed her to perform the movement precisely the way he wanted her to.
Ferene grew more and more annoyed as each and every thing she tried to do was corrected multiple times in ways that she was sure would make no difference, and every time her frustration at being wrong was masked only by the wonder of it. Every single movement became easier and faster. The training sessions went on longer and longer as she found herself tiring less every day, not by increasing her endurance but by decreasing the effort of nearly everything she did without making anything feel worse.
With her training taking nearly the entire day, she returned to her family every night, after cleaning up, just as they were sitting down for dinner. Filraehen always had food ready for her. Ferene smiled at her, making eye contact with Sathar and Ilraghen as well. The three of them got along just as they always did, the stress from before seemingly forgotten.
Telhrian would smile at her as well, and she would smile back. The two of them hadn’t talked about their disagreement, and Ferene figured they might never. Perhaps it was best to leave it behind.
Rilya, though, was another matter. The two of them still slept side by side, whispering words of love to each other, but very little beyond that. Ferene’s attempts at intimacy were repeatedly rejected, though Rilya reassured her each time. They were reaching the limits of what could be communicated with the one sentence they shared back and forth. Ferene did not know what was wrong, and did not know how to go about fixing it, as much as she wanted to. All she could do was wrap her arms around Rilya and tell her how much she loved her.
In the second week of her training, Relgren returned Ferene to the ring, where more and more Hatharen gathered as they fully recovered from injuries received during the battle. Handing her a training sword, but not allowing her to remove her armor, Relgran selected two Hatharen to fight her.
The practice fight started with Ferene facing both of them, standing with her fake greatsword in both hands, squaring off against one holding an axe and the other holding a spear. Her opponents opened by separating, circling her in opposite directions. Ferene immediately moved to attack the one with the axe, charging her target. Relgren never asked her to show him how she ran, never had a chance to correct her larger steps. This first move was entirely hers, as was the swing, carrying all of her momentum. The axe-wielding woman flinched back, not bringing her weapon up to stop Ferene’s attack but rather shifting her entire body away to avoid it. Ferene easily continued with her momentum, flowing forward and knocking the woman away with an elbow to her chest. As she turned to face her other opponent, Ferene’s entire body moved with precision, her feet, knees, hips, elbows, and shoulders all remembering the hours and poking and prodding to perform the spin just as Relgren instructed her, snapping her sword into position to block an attack she hadn’t even seen coming.
Emotions rushed through her mind, excitement and pride. Alien feelings. She blocked two strikes and then countered, not with her sword but with her leg, kicking out to strike at the spearman’s knee. He moved with the blow, avoiding damage but letting that leg slip backwards. In the moment he took to readjust himself - a moment Ferene did not think she would have seen a week ago - she struck again, swinging her sword deliberately to knock his weapon aside, then stepping inwards, just as Relgren instructed, and punching her opponent under his arm, causing him to let go of his weapon with that hand. Relgren immediately called a stop.
In a handful of seconds, Ferene defeated two Hatharen warriors. She felt lucky about the first one, and knew that in a real fight, the woman would have regained her footing and senses just as she defeated the other, if not faster. However, compared to all her sparring with the Hatharen before training with Relgren, there was a world of difference.
In his typical fashion, Relgren immediately had the three of them do it again. The pair approached with the same tactic, but moved slower, more cautiously. Ferene immediately knew her previous assault wouldn’t work out as it had before.
Ferene lost the second match, taking out the woman with the axe but falling to her spear-wielding companion. The third match she tried to be more aggressive at the start and was immediately dropped to the floor, with Relgren remarking on her stupidity. A fourth match ended with Relgren calling her loss due to her taking too long. In the fifth round, Ferene won again, even faster than the first time, but lost the sixth after trying to change her tactics once more. She did not hear Relgren demand a seventh display.
Each fight lasted less than a minute, but Ferene felt more exhaustion from that than from the hours of training the previous day. Yet she still stood upright, in full armor compared to the light clothing of the Hatharen, and looked to Relgren for her next instruction.
He stood outside the training ring, talking to Rilya. Sometime during that all she had arrived, and Ferene paused to wonder why, her mind relaxing from the stress of combat, only to start worrying.
After the two finished their discussion, the last few words whispered between them, Rilya stepped towards Ferene and smiled at her. “I want to have a lot of sex with you right now.”
Ferene blinked, staring up at Rilya’s innocent smile. She wasn’t sure if she had heard that correctly, but multiple responses rolled around in her head for a moment as she tried to figure out which one to say.
Relgren broke out into laughter. Rilya looked from Ferene to Relgren, then to the gathered Hatharen, several of whom were pointedly looking away from her, and her cheeks took on a red tone. Spinning around, she quickly walked back to Relgren, sharp-sounding words pouring into the air. He laughed harder, and she turned to the gathered crowd and asked something. One of them responded, and her eyes went wide, the red draining from her face. She immediately launched into a long conversation with the Hatharen that responded, and after a moment of discussion the two of them stepped towards Ferene.
“She wants to talk with you tonight, and says to come back earlier than you usually do.”
“I’ll do that.” Ferene nodded to Rilya, who smiled in return. Relgren let out another barking laugh, and Rilya glared at him.
After several more sparring sessions, with Relgren changing the number of opponents she fought and even giving them several different handicaps, Relgren released Ferene early, just as Rilya had asked. She quickly cleaned up and walked back to her family’s home. Rilya and Telhrian sat there, waiting for her. Ferene felt the worry from before came back, but pushed it away, walking forward and sitting down with the two of them.
“You’re translating for us?”
“If you don’t have any objections, yes. Rilya has a lot to say, and to some degree it will affect all of us. Though your time here has been short, you are part of the family, so you leaving affects all of us.”
“She says this?”
Telhrian nodded. “She does, but I agree.”
“Go on then.”
“She trusts you and loves you. She understands why you can’t stay here. She, and all of us, wish you could stay, wish things were different. She knows you have things you need to do, back in the human lands. You had a life before us, and we are only a small part of that. She wants you to remember her, and all of us, and your time here.”
“I will.” Ferene said, not looking at Telhrian, but directly at Rilya. He relayed her words, and she smiled back at Ferene.
“She wants to apologize for being distant this past week. The…the recent events have left us all feeling rather off.” Telhrian took a breath, shifting. “Speaking on my own, none of us have witnessed something like the battle you saw. It has been thousands of years since so many of us have died at the same time. Our fights are usually limited to smaller skirmishes. We do train for that kind of fight, but it’s not what we expect to see. The lives lost…We never expected to be in this situation.”
“You are fighting a war.”
“We are, but…” He trailed off, looking beyond her. “That’s not the point. Rilya wants to spend time with you while she still can.”
Ferene nodded, reaching out to her and smiling. Rilya smiled back. “Is that all?”
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
“Well… She knows you can’t return here, but if you are ever in the area, she will find a way to reach you, if you can let us know you are nearby.”
Ferene nodded at Telhrian’s words, but her eyes were focused entirely on Rilya, as the other woman pulled Ferene into her lap. With a rustle, she heard Telhrian stand up and walk away.
“I want to have a lot of sex with you right now.” Ferene took the time to pronounce each word clearly as she smiled up at Rilya, who blushed in response before surging to her feet, holding Ferene with one arm under her legs and the other under her shoulders. The smaller woman let out a laugh as Rilya carried her into their small house and dropped her onto the bed.
Over the next few days, Relgren made her training more intensive, though not more successful. She went from fighting two Hatharen with success about half the time, to fighting three with a rare victory, to fighting four at once where she could occasionally take out two before he called a stop to the practice and made them start over. The lack of success was only mildly annoying, as Ferene found herself reacting faster, and lasting longer after numerous repetitions.
Despite his claims of being able to make her able to beat Sathar in a fight, Relgren was not improving her competence, but rather her endurance, and her chances at coming out of this kind of situation alive. Somehow, he understood what kind of fights she found in the human lands.
On the other side of things, the Hatharen got better working together. Ferene learned, over the course of several days, that he was deliberately picking groups outside of their family units, forcing them to learn how to fight alongside allies they didn’t spend all their time living with. Despite her size, Relgren forced them to approach Ferene the same way they would a Direag.
Before the final day, she cut the training short, turning away from the other Hatharen and leaving the training arena, instead seeking out Tahrean. The elder was, as usual, in their own cavern at the edge of the stronghold, sitting with their feet dangling over the edge of the chasm.
“This is your last day here, is it not?” Tahrean asked, not even turning around, as Ferene stood behind them.
“Yes.”
“It has been a long time since a half-human lived in the stronghold. As much as I wish you could have stayed here longer, I also wish you never came here at all.”
Stepping forward, Ferene carefully lowered herself to sit down beside Tahrean. “You said you would tell me what it used to be like.”
“I did, didn’t I?” They laughed. “I told you that I would gather my thoughts, and I did. Despite all the things that happened in such a short time, I was able to come up with a proper explanation.
“You see Ferene, in a time before time, before any of the six who lead the stronghold now were alive, before even Relgren, my people and I did not live here, high above the world. We lived down below, in the lands on both sides of the mountains. We spread out, having plenty of space for each of us, and we lived peaceful lives. We moved and socialized as we wanted, not being confined to small groups of potential breeding partners. We didn’t think about that at all. We just lived, a timeless people that didn’t care about time, that didn’t worry about death or the future, because death did not exist and the future was something we would see when we got there.”
“Are you the only one to see it?”
“That is a good question, Ferene. Others would assume that I am, and not even think to ask. Surely the monsters to the north advanced on our peaceful society, and we retreated up into these very caves, and slowly were transformed into the sad, pathetic people you see living here today, weren’t we? I am simply a relic of a different era, living in resentment of what the world has become, aren’t I? That is the easiest truth to believe, and so I let them believe it, and tell it to each other, and none of them think to ask me. To think so few thoughts would be unthinkable in the time before, when we thought as many thoughts as we wanted.” Tahrean laughed.
“No, Ferene, I am not the only one to see it. For none of the ones living in the system they live in remember what it was like before, meaning that someone from the life before created this new, twisted way of life. It was not me, so do not think to ask that.” They smiled at Ferene, looking at her without turning their head. “I would be offended if you did, so I have taken that chance away from you.
“Yes, the beasts fell upon our lands, and we fought back. We fought and died and learned about death. We learned that the future we took for granted was something we would need to fight for, to sacrifice for. So our age of sacrifice began. An obsession started. We sacrificed our lands, making our strongholds. We sacrificed our community, moving into the strongholds and separating us from each other, dividing into tribes. We sacrificed eternity, and devoted our lives to learning how to fight, learning how to do the one thing that would mean we would die. We were foolish, but we were prideful. We were young and old, sure of ourselves but lost in the changing world.
“As we started to see the future for what it was, disagreements arose. We sacrificed our unity. We fought and killed each other. Some had the idea of how to proceed, and saw other ideas as threats, and so the threats were eliminated.
“Do not look at me like that, Ferene. You know you must not tell anyone what I am telling you now. Yes, I have broken the one rule, however it was not a rule when I broke it. Those times are what lead to that singular rule being put into place. The victors, their hands covered in blood, declared that no more blood will be shed. How convenient for them, that the violence needed to be stopped only once they had eliminated all opposition.”
Ferene eventually found her voice. “You lived.”
Tahrean turned to look at her, smiling. Ferene looked into their eyes, and did not see a smile there. She saw a darkness, a danger. Something that scared her. “There is a contradiction, isn’t there? I claim to be a peaceful individual, and I live outside of the system, in protest of it, yet if my story is to be believed, all that opposed the system were removed. So how am I still here, talking to you, you ask?”
Ferene nodded, finding herself unable to speak, staring into those eyes.
“The answer is exactly what you should be thinking it is. Because I was not in opposition. I fought and killed to create the very society that I now despise. I killed the ones I loved more than anything else, claiming it was for the good of us all, and in the end I was left alone. My allies congratulated me on a job well done, as murdering my family - my parents and siblings, not the families they have today - was something to be proud of.
“It broke me. I could not accept it. I exiled myself to this place, just barely outside yet so far away. I refused to go along with them any more. They could take what I helped them build and they could run it without me. And they did. It makes sense when you understand the scale of it. The humans call them generations. How many years of fighting does it take to kill off everyone that would remember those times? Can you imagine it? If there were six hundred immortal lives, at one time, living here, and a few die every year, how many years would it take for them all to die?
“Hatharen die every year, but eventually the ones dying are not the same ones that started it. We raise our children and send them off to die as well. Parents outlive children. Children die seeking revenge for dead parents. Which generation is dying blends together, but eventually there are none left that started this cycle of death. They saw the future they made, Ferene. They lived in it, they fought for it, and they died. Did they die for this-“ Tahrean waved an arm, taking in the entirety of the stronghold, “or did they die for their past crimes?” They laughed. “I hated them. I isolated myself because I hated them. Now the isolation is my future, and though I do not hate the children they left behind, I cannot assist them with their way of life.
“I live in regret, and my self-imposed punishment is that I will see the future I have created until the end. I will not escape from it by dying, I will not escape from what I did, the way they did. I will not forget. So, I commit one more crime, and make you part of my self-punishment. You will remember what I did, you will judge me. Tell me, Ferene. Make your judgment as a Knight Of Resh. Raise your sword and tell me if I deserve to live or die.”
Somehow they were both standing in the center of Tahrean’s cave. Ferene did not remember the two moving there from the edge, but here she stood, staring Tahrean down. Her hands held the hilt of her sword, and she shivered.
“No.” She whispered, only loud enough for herself to hear.
“No!” She shouted, and Tahrean smiled. “No, you have to figure that out.”
Tahrean laughed. Throwing their head back, they laughed loudly, the sound no longer light and joyful, but filled heavy and filled with sorrow. They did not stop laughing as they turned from Ferene and walked to their hut.
The next morning started just as any other, with a silent breakfast. When she finished her last piece of bread, Ferene stood up, and the rest followed suit, even though they still had food on their plates. One by one, they turned and walked to their homes, quickly returning with various objects held under their arms. Ferene watched them all, standing clad in her armor, her greatsword on her back and her shortsword on her hip.
Filraehen approached her first, handing her a package wrapped in waxed paper. Ferene opened one end, taking a look inside. Flattened bread and dried slices of potatoes. Ferene smiled at her, and Filraehen suddenly hugged her, patting her on the back before scurrying away.
Sathar stepped forward, simply nodding to her and placing a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t die.” He said, and Ferene nodded back.
Ilraghen was next, looking at her as he stood in front of her, then looking away. Finally, he met her eyes again, and bowed deeply, saying something in the Hatharen language.
“He wants to thank you for everything you’ve done for Rilya.” Telhrain said. He held out a small cloth pouch. Taking it, Ferene started to look inside, but he stopped her. “That is not for you to see. Instead, give it to a human merchant. A smart one. You’ll get a good price for what’s inside.” Nodding, Ferene secured the pouch underneath her armor.
Alri stepped up, wrapped her arms around Ferene, squeezing her tightly, then stepped back, running a hand through her hair and laughing. Ferene smiled back, not sure what to make of her.
Finally, Rilya stepped forward, one hand behind her back. She looked at Ferene, shifted awkwardly, and brought the item out. She held a long-knife, the kind that every Hatharen wore when geared for battle. The kind that Linara had used to free her, all those months ago. Ferene remembered how Linara had been able to accurately throw it, proving it a deadly weapon even at a distance.
Reaching out, she took the knife and pulled it from the sheath, looking at the blade. The metal was that strange black material of Relgren’s sword. The base of the blade, where it met the hilt, featured a design, a circle split in two halves that twisted around each other. It was beautiful.
Looking up at Rilya, Ferene opened her mouth, but couldn’t form any words, even if Rilya could understand them. Rather than wait for her, Rilya took the initiative by kissing her, pulling away with a smile and a nod. The six of them stood together, watching, waiting. Ferene slid the knife back into the sheath and attached it to her belt. They all smiled at her.
“Good luck.” Telhrian said, and pointed at something behind her. Turning around, Ferene saw a rope attached to the edge of the cave, leading down into the darkness below.
She felt like she should say something, but she didn’t know what. Ferene never said goodbye before. Not like this. She only remembered how she said farewell to Tullund.
“Good luck.” She replied, bending down and wrapping her hands around the rope. Placing her feet on the wall of the chasm, she slowly lowered down into the darkness. Six pairs of eyes watched her descent.
At the bottom, Ferene turned south, and followed the path until she stepped out into the light of the day. Behind her, the walls of the world stretched upwards, hiding the terrors that lay beyond, and housing the silent protectors. Before her, the human lands stretched outwards to the south. Somewhere out there was her father. Somewhere out there was Linara. Between her and them was an untold amount of filth, humans that fed on other humans, stole and raped and murdered, but among that filth, that unending mass of evil, were good people. Peaceful people. People that needed her protection.
Ferene took her first step back towards the world she was born into.