Chapter 1
brYN
Dust. Sweat. Filth.
The thud of meaty fists.
Grunts. Snarls.
Pained screams.
The splatters of blood on the ground. Old. New. So commonplace that they’re barely noticed unless there’s enough to slip in.
The coppery tang of it is in the air with underlying notes of piss and shit.
The sights, sounds, and smells are all around me. But they’re muted.
I know what’s happening, and what I must do, but I’m disconnected. It’s as if it’s not really happening to me. Like a vivid dream. One I can’t wake from.
There’s nothing else.
Moments. Hours. Days.
I exist in the present moment. Sometimes, I recall notions of the past, snippets of more. Another time. But I try not to let them in. There’s no place for them.
Males. Females. We’re all the same here. In the training rings, we fight who we’re told to fight. We’re kept apart at night though. There are no ‘bulls’, and no blocks. The females aren’t rutted or released. Only fighting happens in this place, only fighters exist here.
Like me.
The woman in front of me strikes out, catching me in the mouth. Her jagged nails, sharpened in the paddock on rough stones last night no doubt, cut me and my own teeth split my lip as well. Her feral eyes flare and I grin wide at her with my bloody teeth, spitting in her direction.
Uncertainty appears in her eyes. And malice.
She steps back, her foot landing on a sharp stone that I’m sure cuts into her flesh, but the pain doesn’t register on her face. The humans here are a different breed. Fate’s stings in retaliation for my hurts are mostly ignored…if they’re even noticed at all.
I don’t know how long it’s been. I recall the years I spent in The Barrack, but I don’t really remember how or when I came here. When my thoughts sometimes turn to long roads and tall horses late at night while the others slumber, my recollections are hazy at best.
The memories are jumbled and subdued, but I get an odd sense of comfort, of safety.
Three faces. Sometimes there’s a wisp of a name, but it’s gone almost as soon as it comes.
A smile here, or a head bent toward mine in camaraderie there.
I hear laughs and low, calming conversation in my dreams. But when I wake, that’s all they are.
Just fancies of something so intangible that I think I must have made it up.
But sometimes it all feels so real. It confuses me and— My opponent slashes at me again, catching me off-guard.
Survive.
My thoughts had strayed to those three faces again, I realize. Unfocused my mind. It’s toying with death, doing that here, even when I’m not in the training pits.
In the present once more, my eyes follow the woman circling me. She’s around my age, I suspect. Hair long and scraggly. Eyes bright and clear, and yet devoid of kindness or mercy. She’ll kill me in this practice fight if she can. And no one will care.
When it happens, the overseers shrug and say the human wasn’t strong enough for the pits.
The body is thrown down one of the deep shafts from when this place was a mine.
Sometimes their gnawed bones reappear in the passages that lead back to where we’re stowed at night in the paddock, torn off the corpse by the creatures that live in the darker caverns and later discarded.
We see them sometimes. Large and savage things. Like rodents with square snouts and rows of flat, crushing teeth.
A constant reminder that the humans here live in the midden of rats. That’s all we are.
All I am.
Refuse. Garbage.
Even more so here than at The Barrack, perhaps.
I never thought there were places worse than that dying, barren outpost of misery where I spent so many years, but I was wrong.
There are no healers here. Food is merely thrown amongst us like we’re farmyard beasts. We fight each other for whatever we can grab, and the weaker are henpecked by the stronger.
Some are killed just trying to keep hold of a bone with a few strips of meat upon it. No one stops us. I learned to scrap for my dinner quickly, or I didn’t eat.
At least our water is abundant, coming directly from a river that runs through the center of the nighttime paddock. There’s more than enough to fill an empty stomach, and it’s clean.
We’re locked in at night, males on one side of the wide, deep stream, and females on the other.
A few scraggly goblins and trolls open the gates in the morning and lead whoever survived the night to train in the pits for the day.
Overseers, mostly orcs, appear from up, the higher levels of the pits, soon after.
We listen to the orders they yell. We do as we’re told.
Anyone who doesn’t is hurled down the shafts.
The best have promise. They’re taken up. They do not return.
Up means the masters have decided they can turn a profit from them.
The best fighters live up. They win or they die. They fight in the arenas of the First Circle. They’re given food. Pleasurable company. Entertainment, I hear.
More than one human down here at the bottom of the pits will do whatever it takes to get taken up.
I should, too. I know that. Elevation means survival. Survival is the most important. And wasn’t that all I did in The Barrack for years anyway?
And yet…
The woman darts forward and I evade her, giving her another dark grin that doesn’t reach my eyes.
I think she arrived here around the same time as I did. We’re evenly matched in terms of skill.
She loses her balance when she doesn’t connect with me, and I whip around, my fist catching her in the side of the head.
Hard.
She goes down, skidding to the gravel, skinning her knees.
But she’s up in an instant, whirling around and lunging for me, eyes very angry now. Murderous. She catches me in my middle and flings me backward. I hit the unforgiving ground, the stones digging into my back making me gasp.
Her bony, long-fingered hands wrap around my throat. She grunts low but says nothing. Humans rarely speak words to each other down here. They aren’t needed.
An orc overseer stands not far away, watching us with some slight anticipation, but also looking a bit bored.
I gag as my windpipe is squeezed closed, trying to pry her off me. I tap her. Sometimes that works with the ones who aren’t too far gone, the ones who remember a time before the pits.
But she doesn’t budge.
Survive.
I grasp around in the dirt and rocks next to me, keeping her attention on my other hand, the one that’s digging into hers at my throat.
Survive.
I find a stone with enough heft. I grip it at the back, keeping my fingers curled away from its face, and I slam it into her temple.
She doesn’t make a loud noise, just a little breath out as she falls to the side, her eyes rolling back.
She slumps over, her hands going slack and I suck in a gulp of air, another one, and another.
There’s no time to recover though.
I’m on my feet before weakness is noticed. My opponent is on her back. Her eyes are open, but unblinking. Her fingers are twitching at her sides.
I don’t approach.
Something deep inside me is telling me this is wrong. I felt it before, too, not long after I came here. Another female took my food on the first day. When she attempted to do it the next time, I made sure she couldn’t ever again. No one tried after that.
I silence the feelings brutally. She would kill me without thought. They all would.
A rusted piece of iron falls from somewhere high, catching her in the shoulder. She doesn’t seem to feel it.
Fate was too late. Oft times it is here.
I learned quickly that I could no longer rely on being Fate Touched to keep me alive.
I have only myself. Kismet was another life.
I always thought I was a coward in The Barrack. But I’m not here. I’ll do what it takes to survive.
I’m pushed hard out of the way by the overseer who enters the training pit, and I slide in the gravel, only just keeping my balance.
The huge orc with dark green hair, who reminds me of Sio from The Barrack, leans over my still opponent and slaps her face hard enough to wake the dead, but she doesn’t move.
Her hands have stopped twitching now. Her gaze is frozen on the steep, high walls surrounding us, on the round openings hewn into the rockface that I see figures in sometimes, watching for those who are good enough to go up.
I stare at her. I think she’s gone. She escaped from this place the only other way we can.
I’m about to turn away, feeling nothing but a vague notion that I should feel something, that there was a time when I would have felt something, when she blinks, sits up, and shakes herself.
The orc grunts.
‘Again!’ he roars, moving away.
She gets to her feet, swaying a little and assumes the fighting stance they taught us on our first day.
But then the horn sounds.
The practice for today is over.
We straighten, saying nothing, looking through each other now that the sparring is finished, and we file along with the other humans through the tall, open archway to the nighttime paddock.
I wait in the middle as the gates are closed, locking us in for the night. The river is there. The gargle of it sounds so inviting and my thirst is great.
But water isn’t what I need. Not yet.
The overseers wait until we’re all inside before the food rains down. Scraps from the kitchens. They give it to the male side first.
The females wait in perfect silence, all faces turned upward toward the open shaft above us with almost reverent expressions.
Food is coming.
Meat falls first. Mostly bones. Some is raw.
We don’t care.
I grab half a chicken in mid-air, snarling at the woman next to me who tries to snatch it and hitting another who lurches toward me, sending her to the stone floor.
I kick her as she grabs for me even as I tear at the bones with my teeth, and I retreat to the side, putting my back to the wall so no one can sneak up on me.
I eat fast, stripping the bones methodically, excited that they aren’t so bare as usual and that it’s cooked through.
It’s not enough, nowhere near. But it’ll keep me alive for another day.
Survive.