Igor led the children through one of the seminary’s gates they had never used before. It weaved a straight path through the forest they had since come to understand surrounded the Seminary. Unlike the other parts of the forest, though, there was no mist here. It was clean air and a healthy forest dirt and trees and grass, and a luscious green so bright it was soothing.

He did not give them the time to appreciate it, however, moving with strides so quick they were forced to hurry. Even Fin, despite his now towering size over Igor had difficulty catching up.

They debouched into something close to civilization after an hour of walking and Forlorn breathed a deep breath.

Barnabas turned to him with an odd expression.

“What?” he questioned.

Barnabas gave no response.

They were clearly out of the territory of the seminary now, and any who had spent a night in their dormitory with Forlorn knew of his delusions of grandeur surrounding how he would escape the seminary and return home. However, in the past few months these delusions had taken a turn for the darker so that his return home was not one of triumph but of vengeance. In them his family would pay the price of not coming for their son, he would then advance to Barony, gather a following of similar strength, then storm the seminary walls. The impossibility of it had made none of them oppose or question him.

But now, standing out at the edge of civilization, surrounded by buildings of brick and cement and paint, with people bustling about, shuffling from one business to another, they began to worry for their brother.

The seduction of escape was not lost to them, any of them.

All the buildings were dilapidated, broken and unfixed, leftovers from the old world. The men and women who used them now simply thatched them with anything they could find to give them some modicum of habitability for the purpose of their trade.

Igor spared Seth and his brothers a single look before moving ahead, and they followed after him, obedient children unwilling to test his wrath.

He led them through the buildings and through a conglomeration of smaller stalls that seemed like a market of some sort with people peddling their wares, announcing their services and displaying the oddest of products. It filled the air with sound and constant chattering. And while the seminary was constantly noisy during the day, the noise here was different. Where the seminary’s noise was one of pain and discomfort, this was one of life.

The children found they liked the contrast. The difference that came with the sounds of humans actually communicating.

Seth couldn’t help but stare as they moved. It was not in the way the child of a Lord would, it was neither genteel nor regal. There was no haughtiness to the action either, only a wonder the likes of which belonged in the eyes of younger children than him.

Suffice to say, he was not the only one.

They had been in the seminary for too long. Two years away from civilization had done this to them. In return, they had learned to kill. Yet none of us have truly killed anything of consequence.

Not none of us, one of his minds reminded him.

“Yes,” he mumbled, his thoughts going to Timi. “Not all of us.”

“Quiet, Jabari,” Igor berated from the head of the procession without looking back. “This is no place to display your mental illness. Save it for when you’re out of sight.”

Seth heard the things unsaid in the man’s words: do not disgrace the seminary.

So he held his tongue, understanding the man.

One of the things that made today different was their choice of wear before leaving the seminary. Before they had gone for their weapons of choice, Reverend Gareth had presented them with cassocks of their own, cut to their size. Unlike the cassocks the Reverends wore of black or white, theirs was of a deep grey with slits in the sides and at the back. It was long enough to fall below their ankles but not so long that it fell to the soles of their feet, so that it did not rub the dirt upon which they walked. It was also surprisingly easy to move in.

In their cassocks they identified, if not as reverends, then as seminarians, and it made the populace around them stare with unveiled fear.

The sensation was new to them and they each handled it in their own way. Seth was certain he wasn’t the only one wondering where exactly this place was that the seminary did not fear showing them off. And by the way the people around them stared, while fear was their response, something in the way they watched them showed that the sight of seminarians and priests was not necessarily rare.

As for their reactions to this, it varied with each brother.

Timi moved uncaring of the way they were watched, and so did Jason. Barnabas was somewhat cowed by it, embarrassed perhaps, and Fin walked with his shoulders squared and his back straight, almost as would be expected of a soldier. Salem walked with the easy grace of a dancer, eyes roaming as if in wonder though there was none of them that didn’t know the boy was scouting everything around them. Bartholomew kept his eyes on the back of Igor, suppressing a reaction so heavily that his shoulders seemed to visibly tremble. Forlorn, however, held his nose in the air like some pompous noble in the midst of his subjects.

As they walked Jason pulled up beside Seth, and Seth prayed the boy would not make conversation. But whatever deity listened when unbelievers prayed, proved itself capable of holding a grudge.

“What are you looking for?” Jason asked.

“What do you mean?” Seth returned.

“Well,” Jason’s gaze panned around them for only a moment before returning to him. “You’ve been looking around for a while now.”

“So has Salem.”

“True. But while Salem has been keeping track of everyone around us, you’ve been looking for someone.”

Sometimes Jason was too observant. Seth didn’t care much for it at the best of times, but it irked him this time.

“What are we looking for?” he asked his minds.

“I take it you’re not talking to me,” Jason said, casually.

You think Jabari’s watching? One of his minds thought.

Seth frowned at this, his mood dampening at the confirmation. He’d asked for the sake of asking, knowing exactly why they were searching. It was appalling to think he actually wanted to see his kidnapper once more.

“I doubt,” he answered them. “He likely has better things to do.”

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Like kidnapping another Lord’s unsuspecting child, right?

“Who does?” Jason asked.

Seth offered his brother a smile that did not reach his eyes in response and said, “The ghost of winter’s cold.”

That said, he out-paced his brother, hoping he would take a hint.

Jason did, and let him go.

……………………………………..

They followed after Igor like dogs on a leash, and he led them through the market in nothing but silence. The only sound present was of the busy market; of the man selling an elixir brewed from the testicle of a soul beast that boosts vigor; of a woman selling cloaks of nightshade, whatever that was. There was a stall with vats a full arm span, holding organs of varying kinds. Each one had multiple engravings of runes and sigils that seemed to interconnect and weave themselves around each organ, beating like molten veins in a soon to erupt volcanic mountain.

There was none of them who didn’t know what those were. In this, Clint had done a splendid job, teaching them the origin of runes.

Contrary to popular belief amongst those unsouled, runes were not writings of power invented by soul mages or gifts that simply come to them from being souled like the abilities they displayed. What they were, was patterns found hidden in nature after the first crack, bindings that held everything with reia, somehow allowing them to work. Whether they were a product of reia, or reia a product of them, was a question the souled had yet to find an answer to. And the fewest of soul mages that dedicated their time to studying the new conundrum of their world that was reia for the sake of knowledge and not simply to strengthen themselves and their evolution had yet to figure it out.

As for the glowing cracks in the organs, none of them knew for what reason they existed. Seth figured it had something to do with the translucent green liquid within which the organs rested. But in truth, he couldn’t be certain by any stretch of the word. The organs of souled beasts fetched a heavy price and were only capable of being refined by a mage of Baron authority. Thus, the true knowledge of such subjects rested in the hands of the Barons.

In this way they moved through the market, escaped out of a side of it and into an almost quiet city of haphazard paths and broken land. The buildings surrounding them were tall and of shattered glass. Seth recognized them easily as being of the old world. But that this was a town, and they hadn’t been fixed like all the other buildings they’d come across, was odd.

All established towns since humanity had returned to some form of ordered civilization had fixed their buildings regardless of how tall or how complicated. Those they had not fixed, they had refurbished somehow, maneuvered into something else. Here, all the buildings remained dilapidated yet occupied.

Seth tried not to ponder on it and failed.

Just where exactly where they? What kind of town had the seminary built itself in?

Igor took them on a long walk through the broken city—as Seth’s mind had now named it—until they ended up on what could only be the outskirts of it. There he met with a man of brown complexion so deep it was almost black. It reminded Seth of the color of oak wood if it were burnt.

“Reverend,” the man greeted enthusiastically as they approached him. His brogue was one Seth could not place.

Amongst them Forlorn spat. “Peasant.”

His voice was quiet but his disdain loud.

Seth cocked a brow at it. He knew there were places where slavery was practiced, holding those of darker skin and African descent as slaves, but there were not few enough for him to begin deciphering from which one Forlorn came. For him, it was the only explanation for the boy’s disgust.

Igor spared Forlorn a quiet look as they drew closer to the brown skinned and overenthusiastic man, a quiet scorn on his face before returning his attention to the man.

“Somto,” he greeted respectfully, hand outstretched for a handshake.

The man, Somto, took it in a firm grip. “Is it that time of the year again?” he asked.

“It is.”

Somto stood as tall as Igor. His square jaw was littered in greying beards that did not look a result of age and the hair on his head was cut short at about an inch in length.

Somto looked behind Igor, focused his eyes on them and Forlorn gasped in fear. The man did not look at him but his eyes were of deep indigo so that all knew him souled.

You think he heard the idiot? One of Seth’s minds chuckled.

Seth did not take his eyes off the man’s deep indigo, though the man was not looking at him either. “You think?” sarcasm touched his words at the seams.

Somto panned his gaze over them slowly but casually and seemed to survey them a moment longer before returning his attention to Igor.

“Quite an odd bunch you have here,” he said. “Are you lot teaching the children to dual wield now?”

Igor looked back at them, eyes focused on Seth balefully before he returned his attention back to Somto. “No. That one’s an odd ball we’ll be glad to get rid of. And he’s wearing three not two.”

Somto made a gesture of nonchalance. “I noticed. I just thought the third sword was a spare, seeing as he had only two arms.” Then he paused speculatively as if in surprised discovery. “Or does he have a third arm I can’t see?”

Seth wasn’t sure if the man was being serious or not.

When he’d found his way to Gareth’s armory earlier, after a whipping from Igor he could still feel in the lines on his back, he’d been glad to find the Reverend had almost everything in the place of weapons. Thus, he had been quick to select. He’d found a katana, a sword of old Japanese design, very much similar to the Tachi, and had taken to it very quickly. He’d asked Gareth how many he could take and Gareth’s response had been uncaring.

“As many as you can carry,” the man had said without sparing a glance from whatever he had been working on.

So Seth had taken three. Two rested on each side of his hip now, and the third he rested horizontal behind him at the waist where he usually kept his hunting knife. As for the knife, he kept it strapped vertically against his hip so that it rested from point to hilt along its length, enclosed safely in its sheathe.

The choice of swords was in semblance to how he always found himself in the consequences of failure of his daily quest, in the format [Lucid Dreaming]made him. Since he would be hunting reia beasts, he could only begin to speculate at their size and their capabilities. So he opted for a choice of weaponry he was comfortable with.

As for the third sword rested at his waist, Somto was correct; it was a spare.

“Do you think they are ready this time?” Somto asked Igor in conversation.

Igor shrugged. “Clint has done his best.”

“Cint,” the man scoffed, “has no best. That he made Barony is already surprising enough.”

“Somto,” Igor scowled. “You will not bad mouth one of your brothers in the presence of their lesser.”

This brought surprise to all of them. That Igor would refer to Clint as one of Somto’s brothers when they bore no racial or physical semblance could only mean one thing.

What’s a priest doing so far outside the seminary? A piece of his mind asked.

Seth held his tongue and gave no response. After all, he had none to give.

Somto didn’t seem fazed by Igor’s words, but he said nothing more against Clint’s person. Instead, he said, “Let’s hope there’s no repeat of last winter.”

“What happened last winter?” Jason asked.

Igor turned to him with a frown while Somto simply winked. Jason held his tongue then, knowing he had spoken out of turn.

Still, Somto answered, “The seminary lost too many of its own.”

“Greater boys than you,” Igor explained, still frowning, “died for lesser reasons than they should’ve.”

They were still pondering on his words when Somto led them off to a carriage that rested a good distance from the civilized world they’d been given a glimpse of.

The carriage was pulled by two bipedal lizards, green scaled and long as eight feet from crown to tail. They had slit for eyes and nostrils that dragged back horizontally from their snouts to end near their eyes. Seth surmised they were better sniffers than they were seers.

The carriage itself was made of metal, painted brown to look like wood. Seth and his brothers would’ve thought it wood, had one of his swords not clanged against its side as he mounted. Igor scowled at the sound but did nothing else. To draw no more of the man’s ire, Seth unstrapped all three swords and rested them on his lap as he took his seat.

Somto sat with them within the carriage, leaving them wondering who would guide the lizards, and as if knowing the thoughts crossing their minds, he smirked.

Whatever entertainment he was having was lost to them. To Igor it was unnecessary and uncalled for.

“This is no time to bask in a new skill,” he told the new priest with a touch of annoyance. “Let’s be on our way so I can go back to doing more productive things.”

“You’re just no fun,” Somto replied.

With that, he snapped his finger and the carriage swayed into motion, the sound of two bipedal beasts stomping ahead of them low and muffled.

Did you feel that? One of Seth’s mind asked as they moved, swords held in an easy grasp of one hand.

Seth said nothing, thought nothing. He would not display in front of Somto. The man might be a priest, but he wasn’t one that was aware of his state. Thus, there was no need to inform him of it.

But he had felt it. A gentle ripple in the air like the cold air of the night if it was actually itchy and warm. It was a brief sensation, like the momentary sensation felt when opening the door of a cold room and stepping into the heat of the afternoon sun.

We wonder what that was.

Can’t be reia, a mind replied.

Why not?

Simple, came an answer. Because we’re not souled yet. Only the souled can feel reia.

Then what was it?

Seth shrugged in reaction to the answer that came. Maybe he farted.