Ten years earlier.
The boy was not quite eight, and his bare feet did not reach the floor. He had never owned a pair of shoes in his life. The tank top and cloth shorts his mom had stitched for him from leftover fabric were beginning to fray. They had been white once, but wasting water just to clean clothes was foolish.
He was getting tired and rubbed his light blue eyes to stay awake. He sat at the table in the front room of their cottage and swung his legs back and forth to fight the boredom as he sat on the hard wooden bench. His parents had called him back from playing in the fields with his friends hours ago, and he wasn’t allowed to do anything else but sit there at the table.
His parents sounded like they were arguing again. His mom was crying. He hoped it didn’t get violent. His dad was scary when he got mad. There was a knock on the door. His dad stormed out of their bedroom, looked at him, and yelled,
“Do not move an inch from that spot.”
Dad meant it. They used to have fun as a family together. But things had gotten worse in the village, food had become scarce, and neighbors fought over what there was. He seemed to be more of a drain on his father now. His stomach growled. It was almost the hour when the lane outside went quiet, after the carts had gone by and before the lamps were lit, and the one gray window showed the night settling over the roofs of the village.
Inside their tiny cottage, everything was brown. The walls were brown where years of smoke had got into the plaster. The table was brown and scarred along the edge with knife cuts where his mother did her mending and prepared their meals. The small loaf of bread that was supposed to be their dinner tonight had already begun to mold. Nobody had cut it, though supper time was long past, and he knew better than to touch food without permission.
The hearth was cold. It had been four days since they ran out of firewood, and someone had stolen their axe. The smell of smoke from the neighbors’ chimney came in through the open window in the kitchen. Stale and sweet and ashy. At least it smelled warm. It was a poor house, but it was still theirs and the only home he had ever known.
His mother and father stood at the door with a third person whose face he could not see past his father’s shoulder. A traveler’s cloak, road-gray, damp at the hem from the lane outside, which was not a real road, just a stretch of dirt worn bare by use that turned to mud for days after it rained. His own feet were still caked in it.
His parents kept talking with the man. Under his hood, the edge of a thin face and a pointed chin poked out. His voice was too low to make out. His father’s back was to him. His mother stood a little apart with her arms folded, looking at the floor between her own feet.
A purse changed hands.
It was not a large purse, and something was wrong. He could tell from the way his father’s fingers closed on it and stuffed it into his coat pocket without even weighing it in his hand. His father normally checked every coin that came into the house to make sure it was real. Then they all turned and looked at him.
Nobody raised a voice or said his name. With just the clothes on his back he was being told he would be staying with this man now and that he had to do whatever he said. That was the whole of it. From the door opening to the door closing, it took less time than cutting the bread would have.
He looked at his mother for the explanation.
She knelt down to his level. Crying, she told him she loved him and that he had to be brave, just like the mighty Khaelan he was named after. She gave him a kiss on the forehead before running out of their cottage, her sobs trailing after her. His dad raised his hand as if to stop her but let it fall. He looked at the boy. His eyes were dead. No love or even hate was left in them. He simply walked back into his room and shut the door. That was the last time he ever saw his parents.
The man grabbed his arm and dragged him along without saying a word. He was too tired and hungry to fight. He was thrown in the back of a mule cart with two other kids from his village, a boy and a girl. They both looked a bit younger than him. The girl was terrified and cried often. Even the other boy cried sometimes when he thought everyone else had gone to sleep. He would not cry. He had promised his mother. He would be brave and strong just like the hero Khaelan.
In his mom’s version of the story, Khaelan was a dark elf who saved the day many times and was one of the leaders of the Hero Party that saved the world from darkness. The Church’s version of history was quite different. Its records said the warlock was dangerous and a threat to the Church. Hundreds of years later things had gotten worse again, especially for the dark elves and orcs. Despite being part of the Nexus Treaty, they were still treated like trash. Only the Beastfolk had it worse.
He chose to believe his mom’s version. He lost himself in his imagination and tuned out the long and monotonous journey through Qylith, battling dragons and goblin kings in his head to save the day. The days blurred into weeks as he shivered in the rain without a blanket. Scraps of food were thrown into the back of the cart for them to fight over. There were four other boys with them now, and barely enough food for three.
The other boy from his village did not wake up one morning. He looked frozen solid. The man just picked him up and threw him into a ditch on the side of the road. The girl stopped talking after that. She spent her days staring at the spot where he used to sit. Maybe they were siblings. Mom said some families had more than one child so they could work hard for the family and play with each other. That would have been nice. What was his name again? It was hard to remember much lately. He wasn’t quite sure anymore where reality started and his imagination ended.
He was strong for his size and could fight. The other boys quickly learned to leave him alone and not try to steal his share of the food. The girl from his village was not so lucky. They started to target her, maybe out of boredom, or maybe it made them feel less powerless. First by making fun of her. Then by throwing things. He knew it was only going to get worse from there.
She had such a sweet and innocent smile on the rare occasions he saw it. He decided that if he was going to be like the Khaelan in the stories, he would protect her. Night after night he made sure none of the other boys bothered her, and he shared his food with her. She slowly started talking again and stayed glued to his hip from then on. The other boys soon looked to him as their leader too. They began to look out for each other, share what little they had, and talk about what they would do when they escaped.
Was this what it was like to have a sister, he thought one night as she giggled at one of his made up stories of how Khaelan saved the princess from the evil monsters while wearing nothing but his underwear.
He did not know how long they were on the galley, stuffed into the storage hold with the animals, where it reeked of dung and disease. Weeks? Months? They were fed the same feed as the animals. Was that how the man saw them? He retreated into his fantasy world again.
It was a rough journey over the open sea, and even the man got sick, vomiting over the rail most nights. Not him, though. The hero Khaelan would never throw up because of some choppy water that you couldn’t even drink.
Then one night he, the girl and two of the other boys were pushed into a rowboat and rowed toward the corner of an island, behind a white and red lighthouse, while the galley continued toward the harbor. The other two boys had disappeared. He didn’t remember the last time he saw them.
Another cart ride. This time there was hay to keep them warm, and the man insisted they stay hidden inside it. It was bumpy, as if they were not on a road at all, going over rocks and roots, and it only lasted a day.
When they finally arrived at their destination, the four of them, a little more than half of those who had started the journey, were still alive. Starved and dehydrated, abandoned by their parents for a little coin. They stumbled through the forest, the man pushing them to move faster. They neared a mountain range at the edge of the forest. The man had bound them with rope so they were forced to walk together in a line while he yanked it to make them follow. He walked straight into the side of the cliff. It shimmered, and they passed through it.
Magic!
He gasped. The Khaelan in the stories could do magic. Maybe he could learn it and free all of them for real. They came out the other side of the cliff. Tucked away, hidden from the rest of the world, was a tower of black stone, old and broken, with many parts of it crumbling. The man led them in through the main doors and locked them behind him.
The chamber near the top of the tower had no windows. It was cramped but had a high ceiling, and it was cold in a way the cottage had never been. It was a stone cold, and that strange smell he had told his parents about just days before he was carted off hung thick in the air. He had been in the village market with his dad when he smelled something strange on the man, and said so. The man had heard him. He came by the house a couple of days later.
He crinkled his nose. That smell was everywhere.
“Can you really smell it, boy? The chaos?” the man cackled. “We’ll see. Yes, we will see. What a find that would be.”
There were tables full of bottles, alchemy supplies, herbs, books, scrolls and even a wand. A staff with a crystal floating at its center rested on a hook on the wall. In the corner there were three cages. The man directed them to get into their new homes, where they were chained to the wall and left alone in the dark for hours and sometimes days.
The man was older than he had thought. Mostly bald and disheveled, he always had the weird smell on him. On the side of his neck was a raised red brand. He would never forget that mark. He was forced to stare at it day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year as the man did his experiments on them, often flooding them with a purple energy that burned them inside out. He called it Menos, and said it came from the Destroyer, a being of immense power that Aethelos had trapped at the cost of his own immortal life.
“Wasn’t Aethelos the god of creation, who sacrificed himself to save the world and stop the Destroyer?” the girl had asked once. He had slapped her so hard she didn't move for two hours, and he could not reach her, chained inside his own cage. His anger and hatred kept growing.
He started to look forward to the experiments. He wanted to take it. Take all the power. He felt it as it passed through him. If only he could figure out how to grab it for himself. He would make them pay. He wanted to be so powerful and strong that he could be like Khaelan and rescue her. The last few weeks had been brutal. He hadn’t seen the other two boys for days, and the man had just taken her. He had tried to stop him. He felt something was different this time, but he was too weak to do anything.
The man had brought four hooded friends with him. Each had the same brand on his neck. It had been hours since he heard her last scream. Hopefully she had just passed out and would be back soon. He had saved her some of his food, a handful of crumbs each.
He must have fallen asleep. He woke lying on the table in the man’s lab in the highest room of the tower, strapped at the wrists and ankles. He was much thinner than he had been in the cottage. He could not have said by how much, or how long it had taken.
The four robed figures stood one at each side of the table. The man stood outside the circle, with his sleeves rolled back off thin forearms and a slim iron-shod staff in one hand. On the side of his neck, above the collar of the robe, the brand had been burned into the skin, raised and old and paler than the skin around it, a shape like an eye. Or a moon and its rings. Khaelan had had a long time to look at it from the table, and he had never been able to decide which.
The man watched him with patience and a small professional interest. He was livestock to be experimented on and thrown away when he was no longer needed.
The man was excited about something they had brought. A device on a brass pedestal, with a gauge and a needle and numbers from 0 to 50, brass fittings that met at the top, and a flawless crystal floating at its center.
The mage began chanting, holding his staff, a conduit he had heard him call it, and started pouring magic into the device. The other four lowered their hoods. Their faces were disfigured. It was dark, he was starving, and his mind was playing tricks on him again. He must be inside his own head.
Maybe I’m still asleep in my cottage at home.
Mom will wake me soon, and Dad and I can go fishing.
They started doing magic too. It was the same purple magic the man did, but they didn’t use a staff. He tried to watch how they did it. It was like they pulled the energy from the air itself, a violet glow rising off each of them, the same color as the light coming from the mage’s staff. He had to concentrate. He almost had it. If he could just reach it, he might be able to pull it into himself.
Their auras seemed to pulse and then gather near their hands. He watched as the raw destructive chaos shot from their hands in torrents and streams of purple fire into his tiny frail body.
He had never felt so much pain. His back arched as the waves of chaos entered him, somehow amplified, and were pulled out of him by the mage into the crystal. The mage was cackling as he read off the numbers from the device. It glowed the same color, and the numbers climbed the more they poured into him.
Be brave. Be brave like Khaelan. Be brave.
The man laughed and looked down at him.
“Khaelan? You want to be like Khaelan?”
I must have said it aloud.
“Want to know a secret? He was one of us. The most famous and powerful warlock in history. He almost single-handedly destroyed the Church and half of Nexus in the early days. He wore the same mark as us.”
That can’t be true.
Yet he sensed it was the truth. The man had never lied to him. He had told him that dark elves had an affinity with Menos, and that by using young, unwanted children who had not fully developed their potential he was working to expand what could be done with it. The mages in the Mage’s Tower had thrown him out, saying his ideas and experiments were too dangerous. He was determined to show them he was right. The man read the gauge again.
“It is working! Increase the intensity. He is holding up well.”
“You know, your pet screamed out something similar… what was it… Khaelan will save me?”
The man glanced over his left shoulder and frowned. He strained against the restraints enough to turn his head toward the corner of the room where the mage had looked. The light there was very faint. He could just make out a single cage, like the ones in their room. His eyes drifted to the floor of the cage.
He screamed in agony then, thrashing against the leather restraints, no longer sure if it was the pain of the purple light searing through his body or the pain he was feeling in his heart. His promise to her broken.
He caught a glimpse of a shadow near the doorway as he closed his eyes. His mind in turmoil, his body melting from the inside with every second his agony growing.
Lies. All lies.
She never loved me.
Be brave.
Listen to the man. Never again.
Be brave.
Be like Khaelan. Never again.
Be stronger. Be the strongest.
Never be weak again. Never again.
He heard the man say, “Who is there?” and smelled magic being cast around him.
"Never again!!!", he shouted and fully opened himself to the chaos. He let it fill every cell of his body. Full of his rage, he did not let it consume him. He devoured it. He bent it to his will.
He pulled even more Menos into his body. It was not enough. He wanted more and he needed more. He sensed the cloaked figures around him being distracted, found their source, and drained them. He felt their shock as their life force flowed into him. He took more than they were giving. He drained them dry.
Their screaming stopped. He opened his eyes and saw the world in a new tint of purple. His once blue eyes were now a bright violet. He was no longer lying on the table. He was standing on top of it. The leather restraints that had held him down were piles of black ash where they joined the table. The four warlocks lay dead on the floor around the table. Purple lightning crashed all around him, and the walls of the tower were crumbling.
Never again.
He searched for the man and saw him only a few feet away, looking down at his own stomach in surprise. A sword point stood out of his back. Then it was pulled back out through him, and he fell. The man was dead, and not by his hand. Someone else was standing over him.
He growled and raised his hand, purple lightning building toward the figure.
“Kael! Stop! I am here to rescue you!”
Rescue me? Kael? I haven't heard that name in a long time. I must be in my head again.
Confused and overspent, the aura around his body vanished. He felt himself lose consciousness and fall as the floor gave out below him and the tower collapsed on top of him.