In a blink, Emrys disappeared. A moment later, or perhaps simultaneously with his disappearance from Aloram’s side, he reappeared across the courtyard behind the man in white, a long, glimmering sword of milky, ivory light upraised in his hand. The figures in black standing to either side of the pair leapt backward in opposite directions in anticipation of their master’s reaction. It all happened faster than Aloram’s eyes could properly follow, even with his improved senses. I need to get this fucking collar off.
The man in white clapped his palms together as if in prayer, and a barely perceptible sphere of solid rei emanated outward from him in all directions. Emrys flew backward, tumbling through the air. Below where the man stood, a perfectly smooth upside-down half dome had been carved from the cobblestone ground as if an ice cream scoop had taken a perfect chunk out of the earth. Moments before slamming into the wall, Emrys twisted his body to land in a crouch, absorbing the momentum of the impact, then leaped back at the man, rocketing through the air, the strange, ephemeral sword ready at his side.
Aloram watched, dumbfounded at the display. Even at the height of his power in the cave, he couldn’t have matched Emrys’s speed and grace. And what the hell did that guy just do? The man in white smiled, his hair and robes billowing around him as he made a strange shape with the fingers of one hand.
Before Aloram could see what the man did next, a ball of purple lightning jumped into his vision; he leaned back just enough to avoid a direct impact, but fingers of electric energy reached out to touch him as it passed, searing the exposed skin of his arms and leaving boiling lines of burned skin. The shock of it caused him to gasp, and in a moment of rage and suppressed panic, he realized that his right arm was, for the moment, completely numb. It hurt. This wasn’t his first time being electrocuted, but never had he experienced the fiery, shrieking pain at this intensity.
Spinning towards the source of the lightning, Aloram’s eyes fell on one of the black-clad figures, their face hidden in the recesses of a deep, shadowy hood. Something about the dark robes and upraised hood was intimately familiar to Aloram; it tickled at some memory hidden deep inside of him, one he couldn’t access but felt, like an itch in the middle of his back where he couldn’t reach. His memory had always been a mystery to him: most of the time it was perfect, but then there were always inexplicable gaps. For as long as he could remember, Aloram had been able to memorize anything, even complex information, nearly instantly. Phone numbers, credit cards, faces, names, sequences of events, he could even recite several passages and poems word for word after only reading them once or twice. But at the same time, he felt amnesic. Chunks of his life seemed to go missing, and his memories of childhood seemed surreal, covered with a film of unreality, as if a remembered dream or scenes from a movie as opposed to his real, personal memories.
Searching for a weapon amid the barren courtyard, Aloram tried putting the troubling thoughts from his mind. Maybe now that he was here, in this other world, he could find the means to answer such questions. But first, he had to kill this fucker and escape. Aloram scanned the courtyard. The guards had begun beating the inmates. It wasn’t so much a fight as a one-sided punishment; there was little a bunch of emaciated, unarmed prisoners could do against their armored guards carrying billy clubs and iron batons, but a few of the inmates seemed not to care about the odds, and fought. There were fifteen guards, and now that Aloram had slain two of his compatriots, forty prisoners. Perhaps ten of them were well enough to fight. The rest were just meat shields and fodder. One of the black-robed priests, that’s what Aloram thought they must be, was his opponent. He didn’t see the other anywhere, and Emrys was fighting the leader. Clearly, the priests could use rei, but he didn’t think that the regular guards could. Who knows, maybe the prisoners could hold out long enough for him or Emrys to come to their aid. It’d be a much-needed moment of catharsis to beat the ever-living shit out of their guards. If he was lucky, the one who’d punched him in the face might even be among them.
Aloram dove out of the way of another ball of crackling lightning. They came at him fast, flying through the air like purple dodgeballs of electric death. Running in a circle around the priest, his right arm dangling limply at his side, Aloram snatched a branch from one of the many decorative trees scattering the courtyard and tore it off. It was about five feet long and the width of his wrist. The end was leafy, and several smaller branches stuck off at inconvenient angles; it was imperfect, but it would work. Aloram recalled a book he had read, “Musashi” by Eiji Yoshikawa, and remembered his fascination with how Musashi had slain dozens of men using nothing but a wooden sword. Aloram had always had respect for those that asserted their dominance through a strength that ignored expectation and tradition, and in his way, collared, one arm useless, and armed with nothing but a glorified stick, Aloram felt a perverse sense of pride and excitement in this opportunity as he contemplated how he’d slay the opponent in front of him.
Killing his momentum with a sudden lateral burst, Aloram pushed off his left foot and changed direction, sprinting directly toward the man in black. Right arm hanging uselessly, Aloram ran low to the ground, his makeshift bokken trailing behind him, the leaves hissing against the cobbles. There were only twenty feet between Aloram and the priest: he’d be upon him in moments. The man lifted a hand in Aloram’s direction, and he prepared to dodge sideways. Instead, a plain wooden staff materialized in the man’s hand, a polished, spherical nub of bone set into each end.
He twisted the staff, and as the bottom end rose toward the sky, a protrusion of man-sized bone spines erupted from the earth, splitting the cobblestones with an audible crack as they lanced towards Aloram, blocking his approach and threatening to impale him. Aloram jumped and spun sideways, his limp arm taking a cut from elbow to midway down his forearm. He couldn’t feel anything through the numbness, but blood began pouring from the wound and dripping down his arm, off his fingers. Aloram kept running towards the man, now only a handful of feet away.
The priest swept again with the staff, and a wall of bone rose between them. Aloram dropped his weight, then exploded upwards, leaping over the wall and into the sky. He was directly over the man, no less than eight feet in the air. Aloram smiled wildly. A single spear of bone thrust itself upwards from beneath him, aimed directly at his heart, but Aloram had expected something like it. As he fell, Aloram lowered his branch to intercept the side of the spear, placing his stick between himself and the spire of bone. Scraping and sliding against the spike, Aloram fell upon the priest legs first, planting both of his feet into the man’s chest, his weight carrying them both to the ground.
Aloram landed, rolled, and turned, swinging his makeshift sword one-handed. To Aloram’s surprise, the priest had recovered instantly and met his swipe with his staff, also one-handed. The collision of wood on hardened wood sent vibrating reverberations through Aloram’s hand and arm, and he recoiled from the blow, staggering back, amazed at the priest’s power. In the priest’s other hand, a pregnant purple-black crackle of lightning gave birth to a forking bolt that struck out at Aloram in a flash. It collided with his torso before he could turn away, eating a smoking hole into his shirt and burning a deep, acrid gouge into his flesh where his pec joined his left shoulder. Instead of penetrating through the flesh, the force of the bolt carried Aloram into the air, launching him several feet high and backward. Aloram grunted, only able to keep ahold of his stick with a supreme effort of will as he landed roughly on his back, lost his breath, and slid, rolling across the cobblestone. The pain wrought by the bolt was incredible; he was sure that if he’d had access to his rei, the pain would be dampened, but he did not, and it was not.
The black robes, the electricity, they wakened something in Aloram. Flashes of pain touched a dormant part of his brain, and it was as if a curtain were temporarily being pulled away, flapping in some unseen wind to allow shafts of light to penetrate periodically. But the light was the flashing return of obscured memory, and as Aloram lay on his back, his eyes upturned to the grey sky above, he remembered. Or rather, he saw incoherent images imposed inexplicably on his consciousness. Because surely, these memories, this person—it couldn’t be him, could it?
A boy no older than six sat in a plain, stiff-backed wooden chair, arms lying on wooden armrests, wires attached to thin metal plates resting on the skin of his forearms, his neck, his exposed chest, his legs, and his face. Placid and emotionless, his face didn’t so much as twitch. But his eyes burned with a resolve beyond his years and an inhuman knowledge of suffering that aged him in a way that seemed, even to Aloram’s callous mind, inexcusably cruel. The plates vibrated, and from his ethereal vantage hovering some feet away from the boy, Aloram heard the humming of electricity passing through them and into the boy’s flesh. His small fingers clenched the planks that were the chair’s armrests, and his head pressed backward into the chair’s high back, but his face showed none of the unimaginable pain which he must’ve been experiencing. Only indelible defiance and a sort of predatory, triumphant glee at conquering this challenge affected his visage. In his dream state, Aloram gawked in awe at the boy’s resilience. Something burned in his chest, and he realized, rather begrudgingly, that he admired him.
The ring on his index finger pulsed coldly, hungrily, some alien intelligence recognizing the internal machinations of Aloram’s mind and savoring the evolution they signified.
A steady stream of foul-smelling smoke rose from the sizzling wound in Aloram’s shoulder. Rising to his feet, one arm lame and the other pulsing agony, Aloram bared his teeth. His shirt had mostly burned away, and only a few scandalous scraps remained to cover his bare torso. At some point in the confrontation, he’d lost his shoes and now stood barefoot, clad only in his robe skirt and the tattered remnants of his grey shirt, willowy branch in hand. That boy was him, he was sure of it. Those memories were an island; he had no idea when or how they had taken place, could not fit them into the tapestry of his past, but he knew they were his. He was that boy. He had endured… something. Torture? Either way, a pain greater than this. Whatever was happening to him, Aloram welcomed it. This cunt in black had given him a gift; his appearance and their fight had knocked something loose in his mind and opened a door to something forgotten. So many questions about this world and about his life, his past, his history. This priest was an insect, an obstacle in his path. One Aloram would crush.
The inability to use rei was a blessing Aloram was only now realizing; this wouldn’t be the only situation in his future where he’d be deprived of his most potent weapon, and he had to learn how to fight at a disadvantage if he wanted to be truly powerful. So how would he overcome the priest? A spear of bone exploded from the ground, splitting into two, then four, then eight as they ate through the distance between Aloram and the priest, accelerating towards him as they multiplied. Well, distance is an issue, Aloram thought as he lurched to his left, his limp right arm acting as a counterweight and balancing him as he dove. I have to get in close.
The bone spikes lost momentum once they’d missed him, falling to the ground, no longer animated by the priest’s power. A crackling roar from below warned Aloram of an approaching wave of low lightning coating the ground and rippling out in a wave from the priest towards him. Aloram sprinted toward the encroaching electricity, trying to gain as much ground as possible before it reached him. Jumping, Aloram used his long branch as a pole vault, launching himself towards the priest. He’s better with the staff than I am with my “sword.” I’ll have to train with it before I’m anything close to competent. For now, I’ll do what I’m good at. The tip of the branch caught fire as the lightning below touched it. Flames engulfed the branch, disintegrating it with unnatural heat. At the peak height of the vault, Aloram released the burning branch and flew once more through the air, landing a few feet away from the priest, who slammed his staff into the ground.
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Shards of bone sprouted from the earth, but before they could grow into anything longer than hands of bone a few feet long, Aloram shattered them at their base with a low kick that he’d honed through countless thousands of hours training muay thai. Instead of returning his rear leg to his side, as would be the case if he were resetting his stance, Aloram let the leg follow through the kick and land in front of him, his back turning towards the priest. Spinning on the heel of his lead leg, Aloram lifted his left foot, chambered, and fired off a spinning heel kick toward the priest’s stomach.
Shocked at the change in tactics, the priest blocked it last second with his staff clutched in both hands. To his utter surprise, his staff broke in half, leaving him with two jagged shards of wood. No longer able to summon bone and both hands occupied, the priest was helpless to defend against the limp arm that was swinging towards his head like a whip. He tried raising a hand in defense but was too slow. Using the sharp side of the wrist in lieu of his fist, Aloram’s numb right arm collided with the side of the priest’s hooded head where he thought the neck must be. There was an audible crunch that, unfortunately, Aloram couldn’t feel, and the priest collapsed, or rather plummeted to the ground, his upper body careening downwards with the force of a swung ax. His head shattered against the cobblestone, the right side of his skull caving in against the stone, blood suffusing the black cloth of his hood and pooling on the ground in a rapidly growing lake.
Aloram’s ring suddenly began to burn hot against his finger, practically bellowing at him to attend to it. His hand felt pulled to the corpse as if by a force of gravity or magnetic attraction, and without knowing why he did it, he sunk his hand into the shallow pool of blood. His ring drank, the heat intensifying until Aloram was sure that it’d burn a brand into his finger or burn it off. Under his obscuring robes, the priest’s corpse seemed to shrink and drain of substance until there appeared to be little under the clothes than a skeletal outline of what was once, only moments before, a healthy man. Aloram shuddered as the burning sensation from the ring expanded across his entire body, heating his skin and sending shivers of warmth rippling across him from his hand, up his arm to his face, and down his chest to his torso and toes. Feeling returned to his injured arm, and he flexed the fingers of his recently immobilized hand. He was healed, and he was strong. The shudder-inducing heat receded, and the burning from his ring lessened to a subtle, satisfied warmth.
Aloram rose, standing from his crouch. He lifted his hand and examined it. The silver ring glowed faintly, the dull metal temporarily brighter, its intensely complex rei signature pulsing strongly even in his severely inhibited senses. Dark blood coated his palm and fingers, and giving in to a strange, foreign, yet somehow primal urge, he touched his tongue to the base of his hand just above his wrist and licked it, lapping up the human liquid. Aloram licked his palm clean, then each of his fingers, until finally, he was satisfied.
His eyes gleamed ravenously, and his heart beat strong and fast. Glee and the anticipation of slaughter rose in his breast, and he was overcome with a powerful gratitude for his rebirth. What had he been as a child? When had his memories slipped from his mind? What was he not remembering? He was sure that it was connected to whatever this world was and the reasons that he was brought here. Everything was such a god damned mystery, but right now, he didn’t care. He’d defeated the priest, a human being that could wield lightning and command bone to rise from the earth with his bare hands. He’d slaughtered a bear larger than any on Earth. He’d wielded black fire and destroyed a necromancer. Emrys, a creature clearly older than he could imagine, had, for some reason unknown, taken a liking to him. This world, and all its mysteries, would be his. Without any training, any information, he’d made it this far. What lay beyond these monastery walls? What peaks of strength lay in wait for him to discover? What paragons of might and power dominated this world, confident in their fame and glory, for him to rob of esteem and conquer? This temple was erected in the image of some pathetic god of the dead; in time, Aloram swore, temples would be built in his image.
His ambition flared brighter than the triplicate suns, and grinning wider than oceans, Aloram left the body of his defeated adversary behind, shattered staff and pulverized corpse splattered on the cobbles, and dashed into the mass of inmates and guards. Emrys could be trusted to deal with the man in white and red, and when the other priest in black revealed himself, Aloram would crush him too. For now, however, Aloram would have his vengeance on the guards.
The first guard was the luckiest. There was little time to react and less to feel the pain of his death as Aloram’s large hand grasped the side of his head and slammed it into the hard stone ground. The side of his face sloughed off on the cobblestone, splotches of wet skin and bloody chunks of bone and flesh streaking against grey rock as Aloram’s momentum carried him several yards, the bone of the guard’s now bare skull, stripped of skin and muscle, grating against the ground. His cheekbone and jaw shattered, the immediacy of his death leaving little time for suffering.
The next guard was not as lucky. Aloram grasped the guard’s wrist as his billy club fell toward the helpless neck of a cowering, emaciated inmate, one Aloram recognized for his shock of red hair from the food line outside his cell the day prior. Aloram squeezed, twisting the guard’s wrist, shattering it as the man yelped in pain. The guard clawed at Aloram’s hand, but it was pointless. Aloram yanked the guard’s hand towards himself, pulling the guard into him, and headbutted the man in the mouth, shattering his teeth. Still holding his mangled wrist, Aloram kneed the guard in the groin, then punched him in the gut with his free hand. Falling to his knees, the guard coughed blood, crying strangled pleas of mercy through the blood and loose teeth in his throat, his free hand grasping helplessly at his eviscerated family jewels.
Aloram laughed triumphantly as he released his grip on the guard’s wrist, inverted his arm, and grabbed the underside of the kneeling man’s chin with four fingers, digging his fingernails into the soft flesh between jaw and neck. Crouching, then standing and twisting, Aloram threw the guard by his neck over his head, then slammed him into the cobblestone with an audible crack as the man’s head collided with the ground. Bones shattered, and Aloram’s ring lapped up the man’s ebbing lifeforce even as he dashed towards his next victim.
Aloram moved through the crowd of guards and inmates like an animated storm of wrath and fury, ripping, tearing, bashing, and killing. Aloram’s assault recognized no boundaries, gave no quarter, and cared nothing for the salvation of his fellow inmates. His touch promised only death and an equal number of allies as enemies met their end at his arrival. Within a handful of minutes, all of the guards and a not insignificant portion of the prisoners were slain or gravely injured. The courtyard had turned into a field of lifeless corpses and moaning bodies. Those that lived did so cautiously and only by avoiding the madman’s dance of death. Many lay on the ground, pretending to be dead, if only to avoid his attention. Eventually, there was no one left to slay, and the endless font of rage and energy that’d animated Aloram through his torrent of murder and revenge began to drain, leaving him standing amidst a courtyard of dead, panting and dripping blood and sweat.
Emrys and the man in white and red were nowhere to be seen, and the other priest in black had vanished. Aloram scoured the courtyard for them, but his ravenous eyes found nothing but empty silence. Turning in a slow circle, he discovered the many bodies of enemies and weak inmates he’d slain and was pleased. When his gaze landed on the remaining prisoners, fourteen of them, a quick count revealed, they averted their eyes from his, instead staring pointedly at the floor. He took a step towards them, and as if in telepathic communication, they dropped to the floor in unison, prostrating themselves. Their knees struck the cobblestone, and their foreheads kissed the ground. Their arms were outstretched before them, their palms upturned to the sky.
The image of their upturned palms caused Aloram’s vision to blur and his memory to flash. A vision of men and women in robes of deep satin black, palms raised in supplication to some divine power roared in his mind, and he blinked it back, struggling to reclaim control of his mind. Aloram’s vision cleared, and he looked upon the prisoners arrayed before him. They surrounded him in a semicircle, their bodies and heads bowed, some holding themselves still even as rivulets of pooled blood from the ones he’d slain ran across the cobblestone and onto their skin, under their foreheads, noses, and lips. They were submitting themselves. Offering themselves to him.
His had been a long and arduous life. Every day had been torment, every moment a challenge. His mind, soul, and body had been imprisoned in a way that defied explanation, shackled by the very circumstances and rules of his world. But now, here, he was free. He would rule. He would reign, his father be damned. Where had that thought come from? He didn’t know. Aloram tilted his head back and laughed. It was a hearty, deep, roaring laugh that roiled the depths of his being. The prisoners remained in their posture of supplication, silent and unmoving.
“RISE, MY SUBJECTS,” Aloram screamed, the animal thrill in his heart causing him to bellow the command.
“Follow me, do my bidding, and I promise you, this world will never forget your names.”
His first followers, terrified of the violence he’d displayed just moments before, remained silent, too petrified to speak, too terrified and uncertain to take any action whatsoever, as they had no idea how their divine monarch might react.
“I am Aloram, and you are my lot. Know this: for those who serve me, nothing shall be out of reach. For those who oppose me, death will be a most welcome release from the eternal torment which I will inflict. I will rule, and you will prosper with me. This world, this place, will know my name. And they shall remember, until my dying day and after, they shall remember.”
His father’s words echoed in his mind. My Messiah. Is this what he’d intended? Aloram’s memory flashed again, his vision replaced by an inner vision, and he saw his father standing over a stone altar, a strange knife clasped in his hands over the chest of a young boy, his body covered by a white cloth. Aloram’s father was smiling as the world around him turned black, consumed by abyssal flames. On his lips, Aloram read the words: “From generations: you,” and then all turned to darkness.
Aloram’s vision returned to the present. A brave two of his servants had risen to support him, each with an arm under one of his own, lifting him, keeping him from falling. He’d gone unconscious on his feet during the vision, it seemed. Silence dominated the courtyard, interrupted only by the stifled moans and coughs of his fourteen. All of Aloram’s strength had left him, and without the support of the two to either side of him, he would have collapsed to the ground. Behind where they stood, a before-hidden gate stood open, revealing a steep staircase that led to the open plaza of the monastery above.
“Take us from this place,” Aloram croaked, his voice a hoarse whisper from his ravaged throat. “Find a place for us,” Aloram coughed, his whole body heaving, shuddering in the arms of those that held him. His eyes expanded, pain wracking his chest as he heaved heavy breaths. “A safe place to,” he almost said hide, then corrected himself, “to rest.”
The inmate on his right, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a beard and a scar extending from behind his right ear down to his collarbone, nodded. “Aye, as you say,” he said and met eyes with the prisoner on his other side. They wouldn’t be able to kill him. Even if they might’ve succeeded, they wouldn’t risk it. If they helped him now, stayed by his side, this “Aloram” would recognize them as his most faithful. They would be rewarded, and if they escaped, they would be his most trusted.
Aloram’s head lolled forwards, and he slipped into unconsciousness. He was surprisingly heavy for his size, and Guro grunted under his weight. “Let’s go,” Guro said, and Ru, the lanky boy with a shock of red hair, no older than sixteen, whom Aloram had saved, nodded, hefting Aloram’s arm until his shoulder was set under Aloram’s armpit. As they started forwards, the other twelve rose to join them. They foraged weapons and some scraps of armor from the dead guards, pilfered keys, and formed two columns of five behind the pair. Two went in front as a forward guard, and in that formation, they ascended the stairs.