Helion woke up from the first screams that rattled the night. That was just the first sign of alarm. The second one was the terrible tremor that followed soon after, shaking everything and throwing him onto the floor when he was trying to get up. Confusion gave way to fear as fast as he could get on his feet again. Another tremor came, this time stronger, but he had already secured himself against the corner of the room where he had been sleeping. He knew what was happening right away. They were under attack. The heretics had arrived.
They had been expecting something like that for days now. His father had been on edge since the news of the heretic attack on the neighbouring town of Kaladori arrived the last week. The townsfolk and the soldiers had been working overtime to raise the defenses as fast as possible. There wasn’t much to be done with most strong Wielders drafted, so they had to make do with their hands and some small doses of power here and there.
There were a couple of Irons in town as part of the town guard, hired by the Bronze mayor a few years ago, but they weren’t enough at all. Besides the mayor himself, who was a hard-boiled veteran from the war with the Rebel Province decades ago, Helion’s father was by far the strongest person in town. If the rumors about the destruction of Kaladori were true, he may very well be the strongest Wielder left in the entire valley. The only one not part of the heretic’s forces, that is.
He recalled his father’s instructions, drilled into his skull by endless repetition over the past days.
“Sleep with your clothes on.” His father had said while he was getting ready to depart from the house. “Wear the padded armor under them. Keep a bag with supplies nearby. Sleep on the basement with the knife I gave you under the pillow. And then if an attack starts, grab everything and go through the passage I showed you. It will take you into the tunnels under the town. Follow the marks I left for you there until you reach the underground cistern and wait for me there. I’ll try my best to save as many as I can, but I’ll go meet with you the moment I see things turning south, I promise. I’m not trying to be a hero, believe me.”
Helion knew he was lying, of course. He would do much more than just “try his best”, he wouldn’t be able to help himself. With innocent people, especially non-wielders, in danger, there was no way he would just abandon them unless there was no way to help them at all. Helion figured his father would try to lead them into the tunnels too, but he hadn’t thought to ask about it. He had barely seen him the past days while he was helping with organizing the barricades and defenses for the common folk.
He had very little hope that it would be of any good at all.
The heretics would be at the very least Iron Cores, probably Bronze Cores too, if they could take down the much larger settlement of Kaladori beyond the hills. They had a Wielder Guild there for adventurers and quest seekers and even their own fortress church, unlike the tiny town of Jakon, where Helion had lived his entire life with his father. Helion feared that they could have a Silver on their ranks leading their efforts. He had transmitted this fear to his father before they had parted ways, but he only gave him one of his “it will be fine” smiles.
Truth be told, his father was strong. He was not worried about him. Not at all. Not even a tiny bit.
The basement under Helion’s house was cold and damp, not a good place for a thirteen year old to sleep in. He was on the edge between child and teenager, his brown skin face still showing the roundness of childhood. But there was steel in his eyes. Gray and sharp like a blade’s edge, Helion’s eyes were always the first thing people noticed about him. “He doesn’t look at you like a child should”, they would often say.
He didn’t care about what the other children said about him. His father didn’t let him study or play with them anyway, so it’s not like he had made any friends there that he would care to lose in the attack.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
No. That was not right. He was already assuming that everyone was gonna die. That his father would not be able to win. And that was dumb of him. His father always won.
Shaking his head, he grabbed the bag next to him and prepped it on his back. He started going, but realized he was forgetting something, stopped after a few steps and went back in a hurry. Under the pillow he had grabbed from his bed upstairs along with the sheets, he took out the knife on the black leather sheath his father had gifted him for his thirteenth birthday, barely over a week ago. Just about the time things had started to go wrong in the valley, so he hadn’t had much to celebrate with the growing tension around them.
He pulled out the blade to inspect it briefly and marveled at the brightly reflective and polished surface of the metal. It must have cost his father a fortune in blank coins. At least a few silver coins, for sure. Maybe even a Skill coin at that. Metal like that was not easy to come by at all in their little portion of the Empire of Blades. Or just metal in general, for that matter. Usually, most weapons were made of wood, ceramics or big animal bones, like the ones the town guard used for their spears. At least the weapons of non-wielders like Helion himself was.
His father’s Moonwatcher bow was not made of such common materials at all. Perhaps it had been once in the past, but after growing its own spirit as an Almat, an object with a soul, it must have changed in appearance quite a few times as his father evolved it during his years as a soldier. Now it looked like it was made of threads of silver and ivory, braided around to form the solid but deceptive flexible body of the bow. It had beautiful decorations of a moon with an eye on it and it felt pleasantly cold to the touch. It was also quite a polite bow, very nice to have a conversation with. Most of their conversations revolved around hunting or the valley's hot weather, but it was still nice to have someone other than his father to talk to at home.
With his inventory checked, he went to the left side wall from where he was while checking the stairs to the first floor. The door out of the basement was still closed, but it didn’t hurt to be careful. He pressed the point of the solid rock wall his father had made him memorize days before, noticed the slight give under the pressure and waited exactly 5 seconds before letting the hidden button go. The rock parted ways to open a barely illuminated tunnel that descended into the earth. The air that came out of it was stale but moist, the smell of water not far in the distance.
He entered the passage and pressed another hidden button inside of it to close the wall. He waited until there was no trace of the entrance at all and then took out the small portable torch his father had given him. It was barely a stick of some unknown green colored material. Helion didn’t know where his father had found such a strange thing, but he knew better that to ask too many questions when it came to his father’s secrets. With a decided crunch, he folded the stick on itself with both hands, like if he was trying to break it in half, just like his father had told him to do.
The stick glowed with a green light, making the tunnel look alien and strange, the surrounding rock almost like a dull version of that green gem, what was it called... oh yeah, an emerald. One of those strange materials from the weird books his father gave him when he was little. It was incredible to behold such a thing to exist without the aid of the Word System! Was it a relic of the Metal World? Had his father bought it from a merchant or had he recovered it himself on the Slaughter Lands in his past as a free roaming Wielder?
If he hadn’t heard about these glowing sticks before, they may be unsanctioned relics by the Church of the Word. Looking inside his bag, he had about a dozen more of them. It was tempting to try to avoid using them to sell them to a merchant, but he didn’t know if it could get him into trouble with the Inquisition or if they would even be worth enough to risk wandering in the dark hoping he found the right tunnels.
He followed the marks left behind by his father, carvings of a moon with an open eye in the center. Good thing he had left a trail instead of expecting Helion to remember the path. He was not confident at all that he could guide himself otherwise in the labyrinth. The passageways turned and twisted, the excavated rock left behind who knows how long ago. He wondered how had his father found those tunnels in the first place.
Then he heard something. His whole body tensed up and his hand went to his knife. He waited a few seconds, his senses on high alert, listening to every shadow, every whisper of danger. He heard it again, this time a little closer.
There was something else with him in those tunnels.