More than ten millennia ago the Ma-Ti developed a system of written communication, its express purpose was to chronicle a comprehensive history of the people. All significant events and discoveries were recorded in grand detail, where failures were documented as thoroughly as successes. Nothing was censored from this collection, which became known as The Annals.
Every decade, a new volume was added to the archives, each one given a title indicative of the most notable event within it. To protect the integrity of The Annals, no changes were ever allowed to previous volumes since history was not allowed to be rewritten.
A society was created, known as The Scholars of the Annals of Qu-Ai, and charged with protecting and updating The Annals. All citizens of Ma-Ti were given a condensed version of The Annals during their coming-of-age celebrations. These versions contained the knowledge deemed most instructional and important by the Scholars.
Liu spent his entire life studying The Annals for signs of the Conquerors Gate opening. No clear information was available after the beginning of the last gate cycle. Four millennia was a long time for records to survive, even under the best conditions.
Liu walked out of the small library where he had been studying, and wandered down the main road of the town. It was not much of a town, as it was built solely to house the support staff for the gate’s library.
In minutes, he was clear of the village and was standing before the archway; measuring the mana, as he did several times a day.
The readings had never changed, not in all the times he’d measured them.
He frowned slightly, looking hard at his instruments for a moment.
Did I just misread that? he wondered.
The mana reading near the gate showed higher than it ever had. With a deep sigh, Liu promptly cleared the readings on his monitor, and retook the measurements. And took them again. And again. His knees gave out as he took them for the fifth time.
Beads of sweat formed on his forehead.
The readings were the same on each occasion, although it just couldn’t be this high. Perhaps the device was faulty? After all, he did have to carry it around a lot…
It wasn’t faulty. When he was sent crashing into the ground, he was forced to admit that maybe the readings had been accurate.
After all this time, the mana was condensing near the gate.
Liu frantically ran back to the library, yelling for the soldiers to saddle a horse for him, while he quickly packed to travel to the capital.
Two days later Liu, wearing his pristine scholar's robes, rushed through the palace in the heart of the capital, as if to prevent a great tragedy from happening.
His eyes were wide, his attire flapping in the breeze created by his own movement.
“My Queen! My Queen!”
He rushed into the Queen’s private dining room, sending the vast oak door frame rattling and the doors slamming open against the walls. The Queen’s guards met him, swords drawn and pointed at his throat. Liu’s momentum nearly left him impaled on the guard's blades as he slid to a halt.
“My Queen,” he repeated anxiously. “The gate is going to open. I’m sure of it! My… my Queen… I’m sorry to have barged in like this.” The room was nearly empty, but under her gaze, Liu felt like a thousand eyes were burning into him. Gesturing hastily to her guards, the Queen motioned for them to put down their arms. She looked at the young scholar for a moment before delicately setting her cup on the table.
“The gate has opened, you say?”
“No, not yet, Your Majesty. It will open soon, though.”
“What would lead you to believe it will reopen after so long?”
“I have studied the gate library for many years. During that time I found the equipment the ancients used to measure the mana’s density. Since I found the equipment three years ago, I have been checking the levels several times a day. Two days ago, it began to rise. I checked it several times to be sure it was not a mistake. When I realized it wasn’t, I rushed here to tell you. There is no doubt that mana has begun to gather near the gate. According to the records, that means it will open soon.”
“I see. But the gate has not yet opened?”
“No, Your Majesty.”
“This is excellent news,” she said thoughtfully. “Can you predict when the gate will open exactly?”
“No, Your Majesty. The old records were unclear about how long the mana will have to build before there is enough to open the gate. From what I can discern, it will likely take several months.”
The Queen turned to her guards again. “Send for my Minister of War. If this information is correct, we will need to begin the tournament. One of them may be the first to step through.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
She turned back to the scholar. “Does anyone else know what you’ve told me or how to work your instruments?”
“No, my Queen. I have been alone in my studies of the gate.”
“Take him to the cells. Make sure he speaks to no one.”
The scholar fell to his knees, weeping. It was common knowledge that no one returned from the prison. Once someone was taken, they disappeared. The people of the kingdom called the Royal Jail the Forgotten Place.
Two of the guards grabbed Liu’s arms and dragged him, sobbing and flailing, from the room.
The guards closed the dining room door behind them.
“In two weeks precisely, you will take him from the prison and return him to his library; post only the most trusted men with him. He is to be protected at all costs. If he can figure out when the gate is going to open, he is the most important man in the Kingdom for the time being.”
Jarez, head of the Royal Guard, “Yes, Your Majesty. May I ask a question, Your Majesty?”
“Bold. You may.”
“If he is so important, why did you send him to the cells?”
“He interrupted my dinner.”
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“Yes, Your Majesty. Of course, Your Majesty. Please forgive my impertinence.”
***
After a lifetime of training, twenty men were left standing on the field; their numbers had been reduced until only these few remained. The arena was overflowing. Everyone from the nobility to the meanest peasant crammed themselves into the arena to watch the brutality of the final selection.
Only one would remain at the end.
One would be chosen to take the first steps into (name of planet on the other side of the portal).
“You are here to compete for the last time. You know how to win. For the audience, the winner will be the last man standing in the arena. In previous competitions, I have been the adjudicator. Today, this competition has no adjudication; only one of you will stand before me at the end,” the judge said, turning his back on the arena.
In this competition, no allowances would be made. Only the strongest or the luckiest would stand.
His back to the arena, the adjudicator shouted with no warning, “Begin!”
Hazk, perhaps the strongest of the competitors, launched himself into the center of the group without hesitation; drawing his blunted sword as he moved. The pommel of his blade slammed into the forehead of the closest contender, knocking him unconscious before anyone else began to move. Hazk had four of them stretched out on the ground before most of the men in the arena even realized that the fight had begun. Even with the blunted sword, it was questionable whether any of them would survive.
Only one would be allowed to continue.
Hazk had selected his first opponent as soon as he heard that the final selection would be battle-royal, no one remaining was weak or unskilled. They were all powerful fighters who trained against one another since they were children.
Hazk knew all of their strengths and weaknesses, almost as well as he knew his own. He knew he was the strongest, but that did not allow him to relax. He knew if the others worked together, they would defeat him.
Hazk ran toward his next target. He grabbed the man and spun him around; pulling him across his back, deftly using the other man’s body as a shield from the fireball streaking toward the back of his head. The man in Hazk’s grip took the full force of the blast in the chest, ending his fight almost before it began.
Hazk’s heart rate slowed and he let out the breath he had been holding onto. Hazk dropped his shield and replied to the fireball with his own. Not waiting for his counterattack to land, he kicked the falling body of his shield to the right, hoping to tangle the fighters there in it. He took advantage of the opening the body created to dash to the left and bring his right elbow down on the back of the neck of a fighter in red armor.
The distraction from Hazk’s elbow was enough to allow another fighter to take him out of the match.
Magical attacks covered the arena. Fire scorched the loose earth, stained from prior bouts and the vast quantities of mens’ blood that was spilled upon it, and blackened the thick stone walls. Lightning blasted craters from the field of battle.
The protected walls of the arena were barely enough to stand up to the devastation being wrought within. The ground shook as Hazk launched himself at another warrior. A seismic wave erupted underneath the arena and dropped a combatant to the ground, the ripples of the loose earth pulled him under and buried him.
Hazk slid under a spear, thrust at him from the other side, as two challengers attacked him at once. He blocked another spear thrust by the second opponent. Both fell to his sword in seconds.
Surveying the arena, Hazk found only eight of the group remaining on their feet. The fighters came together in a rush. Three heartbeats later, only four remained. They weighed one another at a glance, they were the strongest. It was always going to come down to them.
A slight twitch of an eye informed Hazk who his opponent would be, but the twitch was one of hesitation, not selection. Hazk didn’t give him the chance to react. Throwing himself through the air, he felt the fine hairs on his neck rising as the bolt of lightning knocked him off course.
Hazk rolled to his feet, shaking off the hard landing.
Turning to the mage who launched the attack, Hazk saw that he was already downed by the other two remaining fighters. They spread apart slightly without breaking eye contact, forcing Hazk to engage with them both. They were honoring him. They intended to bring him down together.
Hazk slowly took a deep breath while he considered the situation.
A two-front battle, then.
They gave him the moment he needed to breathe. That was their last mistake.
Hazk reached for his power. He had only used it lightly since the fight had begun. He felt it swell and build as he called upon it. He exhaled, and commanded its release; everything he had, in one instant. The blast of plasma that erupted from his hands washed over his opponents and destroyed a section of the arena’s protective wall behind them.
Hazk considered the destruction for a moment. Turning to the nobility on the side of the arena not far from the destroyed wall, he dropped to his knees, bowing his head to the blood soaked ground. “Forgive me. I may have gone too far. I assumed they were powerful enough to survive the attack.”
***
Hazk meditated in the Padmasana position, seated before the chaos of the newly reawakened portal. He had been training for this mission for ten full years now, though no amount of training could completely quell his unease.
In fact, preparations for this day had begun decades before Hazk was even born. Like all children born of Ma-Ti Blood Citizens, he was removed from his parents’ care at the age of five and delivered to a regional training academy. The starting curriculum was the same for everyone; and here, they learned the basics of mana, weapons skills, and scholastics.
As the students progressed, their training was molded to fit their strengths. By the age of fifteen, he was selected as a candidate for portal missions. For twenty years, he was tutored by scholars, warriors, tacticians, and dozens of other subject matter experts, preparing for the portal’s return. The time for training was now over; Hazk opened his eyes, stood, and walked through the portal.
Stepping through a fledgling portal was described in The Annals as imparting a feeling of being reborn. Through rigorous scholarly study and interpretation, it was concluded that the transition would feel like a sudden rejuvenation, a lightening of the weight of life.
The scholars were wrong.
The ancients’ description was literal and to the point. At the dawn of its reopening, travel through the portal was not unlike being squeezed through a narrow and cramped birth canal; the body simultaneously stretched and compressed as it moved and was pushed toward the light at the other end. The distance traveled was unknowable, and the stars on the other side did not match any observed cluster or constellation.
Travel time through the portal was well documented, taking precisely 1/32 of one planetary rotation to finish the journey. The time dilation between planets, relative to those traveling in the portal, was measured in weeks. A question couriered to the other side, if granted an immediate response, would take a month to be answered. These phenomena would purportedly lessen as the portal aged, and differences in mana essences reached an equilibrium. Travel would then become near instantaneous and feel like walking through a cold cave. This transition took years, precluding an immediate large-scale return to the sister planet.
There had been much debate as to whether the rulers of this world would keep the portal zone guarded, but their contact in Hasdingium had been adamant that the portal had been abandoned. Communication had been sparse over the centuries, the drought of mana limited the use of the communication stones to once a year, and the only remaining stones were in possession of the Southern Kingdom.
Making matters worse, Hasdingium had lost contact with its spies sent to the North.
Hazk’s trip through the portal ended suddenly and violently, depositing him on the ground with no trace of either grace or dignity.
“Rejuvenating, my ass,” he mumbled, as he regained his feet and dusted himself off.
As he took in his surroundings, Hazk was shocked to see that the portal arches perfectly matched the illustrations he had studied in The Annals of Qu-ai.
The blood of the dying guards began to soak into the parched ground as Hazk looked around for the first time.
His armor was lightly decorated and heavily scarred from a lifetime of combat. A long sword hung at his side undrawn, and the spear in his hand slowly dripped.
He was a tall and muscular man, with the sides of his head shaved in the manner popularized by the Royal Family, and a long braid hung over his shoulder and down his chest. It was completely black except for a thin silver strand running through it. His clothing and armor were unremarkable but the man himself would be hard to miss, his eyes also holding a look of destruction that had been carefully contained.
Content that there were no others around, Hazk pulled on the rope behind him, pulling a small cart through the mirror. He reached into his pack and removed a prewritten message that he tossed behind him through the portal.
In two weeks’ time, Ma-Ti would know that the fledgegate was functioning correctly.
Hazk took one last look around the portal, then turned toward Hasdingium.
Godegiselern, the Hasdingium Empire’s capital, was built on a narrow peninsula at the southernmost tip of the realm. Its location limited attack routes and allowed for the build-up of an impressive defensive infrastructure. The primary defense, a 30-foot high wall, bisected the land at its narrowest point. Since the wall was manned by the Hasdingium army, any attempts to sneak into the capital would be met with death. The deep water ports surrounding the capital, coupled with the Hasdingium naval forces, made taking the city by siege all but impossible.
Traffic moved through the large central gate at a brisk pace; searches of both incoming and outgoing wagons were thorough yet quick and well organized. Those on foot entered through a smaller gate a few dozen yards east of the main thoroughfare.
Hazk, being on a schedule, debated heading straight to the front of the line but he reconsidered. The line was moving quickly, and he had little need to call attention to himself.
The guard approached Hazk warily, seeing that he was armed. The guard, with his hand on his sword, asked “What is your business in the capital?”
Hazk simply whispered, “Ma-Ti has arrived.”
The guard scanned around him now, looking this way and that, furtive. He looked confused for a moment before turning pale. “Excuse me, sir, I didn’t know it was you.” He hurried out of the way as Hazk entered the city.
The 100 soldiers who displayed an aptitude for mana were assembled in a standard military formation before Hazk. He mentally reviewed the training regimen prescribed by The Annals of Qu-ai for developing mana abilities in children; he knew it was an imperfect solution. Instrumental in building a strong foundation in the arts of mana at a young age, it was ill-suited for training these older recruits, all of whom had reached at least sixteen years of age. Some, as preposterous as it sounded, were over thirty years old!
Hazk knew from his studies that their ability to wield mana would likely be stunted, but that didn’t matter. He had been sent to prepare this army, and he would do his best.
In Ma-Ti, beings with so little mana affinity would be assigned to support roles at best, while others would simply have been culled. Only a handful would have been selected as the most basic of warriors. Unfortunately, this was the hand that he was dealt, and these were the soldiers that he would prepare for war.
Two promising students were deployed to the forward vanguard, where they would continue to build their power through daily exercises. Their abilities had been tested on an inconsequential town just north of the border. The subsequent reports of their success, while likely embellished, validated Hazk’s assumption that non-mana beings stood little fighting chance against those blessed with his teachings. The Commandant of the Ma-Ti armies did not send him here to arrange a fair fight.
There was little time to teach the basics of mana. The army was preparing to march toward Laterius in just three weeks and Hazk would be forced to teach each soldier whatever basic attack mana they could manage. Those with the most potential would be taught first, then they could help train the rest. Hopefully, they would be ready by the time the army reached Laioruum.