Chapter 4: Aven's Tale

Another two waves, and the voidspawn stopped coming. Then it was on to the next pit, another couple miles away. On the trip between pits, they even spotted some voidspawn out in the open, black carapace easily visible against the white snow. These fell to the guards’ arrows before they even made it to the prisoners. More corpses for butchering, alongside the ravaged bodies of a few deer the voidspawn had been feasting on.

The sun was setting by the time they returned to the fortress. The wind’s bite grew harsher, but the cold wasn’t Aven’s concern anymore, not after the exertions of fighting. His spear hand was blistered and shield arm ached from the force of blows. Even his temples ached, the exertions of tapping into the Battle Mind a strain showing how out of practice he was. Yet Aven was alive. Alive when others had died.

The Warden’s Eye at the fortress gate watched them as they returned, cursed light following them as weapons were returned and chains were exchanged.

“I did not see you in the cells,” Ko’jan noted to Aven. “Which floor are you on?”

“Bottom floor,” Aven said.

Veese whistled, and Old Fox gave Aven a sharp glare.

“Ha!” Ko’jan slapped Aven’s shoulders. “They think you are even more dangerous than me, then! I am surprised they let you out even to fight voidspawn!”

Aven shrugged and made no response to that.

They returned to the prison and the cells. Ko’jan waved as they separated to return to their respective cells, the beastkin on the fifth level, Veese on the fourth, Old Fox on the first, and Aven at the bottom on the sixth level. Back to the dark and silence.

Or rather, not silence, since Janaya was up and about.

“Your evil condemns you to the fires of hell. Your villainy condemns you to the fires of hell. Your sins condemn you to the fires of hell. Your...”

The mantra continued on, wording and emphasis changing slightly with each repetition, occasionally looping back to previous iterations. The woman was quite dedicated to her monotony. Perhaps such a fate awaited him as well. This place seemed to have a way of sapping prisoners of their sanity. To die from the voidspawn or to end up as mad as Janaya, which would be a worse fate?

Which fate did someone like him most deserve?

Aven tore his mind away. With the power of the manacles suppressing his vis, there was little he could do to train. The binding curse did not eliminate vis power, but it slowed it from a river’s flow to a faint trickle. When he tried to access the Battle Mind, he found nothing but his own thoughts. His own fears and doubts, whispering that all effort was doomed from the start.

Aven opened his eyes to escape from the darkness of his own thoughts. Even compared to the other company this place provided, they were poor companions. At least Janaya’s madness was a novel flavor.

“Feel my wrath...feel my rage...feel my hatred...feel my judgement...feel my pain...feel my suffering...feel my wrath...”

A rattling cart intruded upon the mantra. A minari woman, not even four feet tall and nearly as round as she was tall, carefully brought the cart down the ramp to the bottom floor. The stench that accompanied the cart was not as stomach-turning as it had been before, not after experiencing the even worse smell of butchered voidspawn, but it still did little to help his appetite.

“Hello, dears,” the minari woman’s face creased in a deep, sincere smile. She slopped a ladleful of unidentifiable mash into a bowl and passed it through the bars of Janaya’s cell. “Sorry, Janaya, but still no new spoon for you.”

A disgruntled grunt interrupted Janaya’s ravings.

“And here’s yours,” the minari offered a bowl through the bars.

“Thank you, madame,” Aven said.

She laughed, “Oh my, so polite! I’m no madame, sir. I’m just old Tanya.”

He bowed his head in reply, “Aven nym Arvanius, at your service. A pause, “Or rather, just Aven Arvanius now. No formal title anymore. My apologies for not introducing myself before.”

She curtsied in return, “Quite forgiven. You’re rather more talkative today than you were this morning! No need for apologies; I know how boys get into moods at times. Why, my youngest spent nearly a week pining over that apprentice spellwright girl. A few good days of work turned his mood around. I suppose work in the quarries turned around yours.”

“Not in the quarries, I’m afraid,” Aven said. “Hunting voidspawn.”

“Oh dear,” she shook her head. “Terrible stuff.” She slopped an extra bowl of the mash and passed it through, “Best you take another bowl to keep your strength up.”

Aven accepted it with a bow, “Your kindness is an honor I scarcely deserve.”

“Don’t know about deserving,” Tanya said, moving the cart along. “No one deserves what they get in Hellfrost, now do they?”

A statement to ponder as Tanya left and Aven settled into his two bowls of mash. Perhaps it was best that the ingredients were unidentifiable. Still, Tanya was right. Refusing to eat would only weaken him. He needed strength.

For what?

Aven sighed as rather gloomy thoughts returned. Thankfully, Janaya’s chants resumed shortly thereafter, though now muffled a bit by mouthfuls of food.

“Vengeance does not sleep...your corpse will feed its pyre...the pit waits with open mouth to consume your evil...”

In the past, Aven had heard tales of a legendary figure from Octarnis’ past who had spoken in similar manner. Dalara the Mad Priestess, an apostate from the Temple of the Sun, dedicated to the Ideals of Truth and Piety, who had proclaimed herself the avatar of the Sun and sworn revenge against the gods for supposedly abandoning humanity. In the end, the woman fled into the desert, growing mad from the heat of the sun until all she could do was scream empty threats at the sky. That priestess exhausted her vengeful energy and starved to death in the desert, flesh consigned to feed the jackals. Janaya, in contrast, seemed perfectly able to continue her rantings indefinitely.

“Your endurance surpasses a saint,” Aven mused.

Janaya’s voice stopped.

“Oh, I suppose Dalara lasted thirty days without food,” Aven said. “So you have at least a couple more weeks to go. Unless, of course, you’ve been going strong for at least a fortnight prior to my arrival.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“I’ve been here three months,” Janaya said. “...you’re talking about Dalara the Fallen. Her story is a tragedy. I wouldn’t expect someone from Octarnis to know a saint of Amaklos.”

“Really?” Aven said. “Amaklos claims her to be your saint? Odd. We count her a fallen of Piety, one who could have been a paragon but fell from grace. Of all the things for our nations to fight over, I wouldn’t expect the legacy of a mad apostate to be among them.”

“Apostate,” Janaya spat. “She saw the truth more clearly than anyone. She saw the treachery, the apathy, the cruelty of the gods, but despaired so much from the revelation that she lost herself. In her madness, she could do nothing to save those who followed the gods in vain. I see the truth, and I will not lose myself. Mere threats and condemnations will not help those under the tyranny of the false faith in uncaring deities.”

“Truly a pity,” Aven said. “If threats and condemnation were all that is necessary, I believe your mastery would be enough to tear down the heavens.”

“They will suffer,” Janaya swore, her voice quiet yet full of an intensity that made Aven shiver despite himself. “Even if centuries pass, one day they will see. They will know the pain they caused others.”

Despite himself, Aven found himself drawn with more than simply idle amusement to the conviction in Janaya’s tone. A madwoman she may be, but never had Aven seen a madwoman with such conviction and focus.

“My first day here, you asked me if I was an enemy of the gods,” Aven recalled. “Are you?”

A pause. Then an exhalation of breath like a death rattle that turned into a low growl of rage. Such sounds should never have come from a human throat.

“The gods play with us, treat us as toys,” Janaya said, the words coming out more like a snarl than speech. “They claim to love us, yet they cause our suffering. They proclaim themselves righteous, yet they are willing to sacrifice us for their own ends. They take their most devout followers, the purest souls who dedicate everything in worship and faith, and they let them die in agony.”

A slam sounded in her cell, rattling the bars, “They take the holiest saint, and they watch her burn with a smile. And they call it justice. They call it a blessing to suffer and die for their sake!” Janaya’s voice rose to a shriek. “When I escape it is they who will burn! The false gods will pay in blood and hellfire for their crimes!”

There was little Aven could answer to that. If such passions were the fruit of insanity, then there was no reason that could dissuade them. If, on the other hand, such hatred came from a sane mind...well, there were few things that could change such a resolve.

“It seems we are both enemies of the gods, then,” Aven said.

“And if a goddess were before us, I would gladly kill her with you,” Janaya answered, voice raw and quiet from her prior shrieks, “but a nobleman like you who deals so carelessly with the lives of those beneath you is just as worthy of death. The gods watch and laugh as the world burns, but it is men of power who carry the torches. Men like you.”

Was that truly the kind of man Aven was? In truth, Aven had never considered whether his actions helped or harmed the world. The world was far too broad a thing to be concerned with. Even the Empire of Octarnis was far too vast a scale to measure by. The only scales Aven had ever measured his actions by were the scales of duty, completion of the missions granted to him without thought of the justice of those commands. He’d been a weapon for his order, a blade that struck down foes and protected allies. A tool for the glory of Octarnis, or perhaps the Shadow Order itself - the pretense was that they were one and the same. No...not even that. He was a blade unfinished. He had aspired to be such a weapon and fallen short.

“May I tell you a story?” Aven asked.

“Does it involve licking?” She asked, tone making it clear that stories of childhood mischief were not to her taste.

Aven chuckled, “Not this time.”

“I will listen,” Janaya replied.

“Once, there was a boy born to a noble house, a child of the greatest Trueblade in the Shadow Order. Barely after the boy learned to walk, a sword was thrust into his hands for the first time. A child of the order was scarcely permitted rest or play, instead only training. Nearly waking moment was spent in the pursuit of martial perfection. His father pressed him to learn the arts of the sword until his hands bled and his muscles gave way. And every moment not spent on mastery of the blade was spent learning to be an ideal noble in the courts of Octarnis. Honorable. Ruthless. Cunning. Chivalrous. Cruel. The endless contradictions of noble behavior for the public eye and the hidden blades in the night. The boy learned it all. He mastered the arts of the blade and the arts of the court. A weapon of the shadows and an actor in the most decadent pageant of the highest society.

“At the command of the Shadow Order, the man killed. Monsters. Men. Women. Children. All who posed a threat to the realm, or what the Shadow Order deemed a threat. At the command of his Order, the man was a tool. And he obeyed without hesitation, for his Order was the instrument of justice in a world where the gods did not move. The Order purified the realm of monsters and evil. The Order brought peace. So the man learned. And he did not question. From birth, he had been forged into a blade, and a blade he was. Can a sword defy the hand of its wielder?

“The man killed and killed. Friends, family, lovers died around him. In his arms. At his hands. But he was a blade, a weapon, and his only duty was to obey. He killed and killed. But no matter how many he slew, no matter how much blood soaked his blade, no matter how many tears he spilled, no matter how much pain tore his soul, the world remained tainted.

“Then, for the first time, the man failed a mission. A target deemed a threat to Octarnis, a merchant smuggling goods into the lands of Sodron, bringing food into refugee camps. When finding the target, the man saw the suffering in those camps. The suffering he had seen before, but not the suffering he had caused. The refugees were not enemies of Octarnis. They were not monsters. They were people. People dying. Starving. Suffering. Ridden by disease, victims only being born in the wrong country. A mile away, the border towns of Octarnis thrived. In the conquered lands, the people starved. And the merchant, for the hideous crime of trying to relieve such suffering, the man was ordered to kill.

“The kill should have been easy, an operation conducted a dozen times before. Yet the man was sloppy in execution, and rather than a clean, silent kill in the dead of night, the man found himself confronting a pleading wife and children as well as the merchant. And the merchant only begged the man to spare his family, thinking nothing of his own life. Rather absurd, isn’t it? Only the merchant himself was target. The merchant’s wish that only he should die was exactly in line with the mission to begin with. The family was not a part of the mission. Yet the man could not bring himself to cut down the weeping family. That was the day the man failed the first mission in his life. The Shadow Order marked him for death. And so he fled.

“Tell me, what should such a man have done? A murderer he remained. Failing to kill one man certainly did not erase the dozens of other lives ended at his hands. A new conscience did not bring back anything he had destroyed. So, what should he have done? Begged for forgiveness? Sought atonement? Would your hellfire condemn him to damnation? Does such a man deserve praise for having rejected evil, or does he deserve condemnation for the wicked life he led up to that point?”

The questions hung in the air. Aven did not truly expect an answer, especially since he was only half-certain that Janaya was lucid enough to comprehend everything he’d said. Perhaps no answers existed. Yet still the questions demanded to be voiced.

“The gods would give different answers,” Janaya finally replied. “Many would claim he committed no sin to begin with. Gallinas the Tyrant would condemn him for disobeying orders, no matter how cruel. Domea the Just would condemn him for ever wielding the blade against innocents. Artemesia the Huntress would celebrate his achievements, regardless of the path he chose to use them, and she likely would find the repudiation of past glories to be an act of a coward. Others would be indifferent. Helena...the Lady of Light,” the title was spoken with the greatest bitterness yet, “would reject any pursuit of redemption that did not come from her. She would execute him for past sins no matter how long a man strove for redemption. Unless, of course, that wickedness was done in her name.”

“And what would you answer?” Aven asked.

Janaya fell silent. Aven waited, giving the woman time to contemplate.

“The man deserves death for his sins,” Janaya finally answered. “Yet...if he strove to redeem himself, if he abandoned the path of destruction and turned instead to right the wrongs committed and live for the good of others...perhaps such judgment should be left for the afterlife. Someone who recognizes that they have lived a path of evil...they deserve a chance to live a path of good.”

“A reasonable judgment,” Aven said. “And a pity that man was denied the chance to live that path.”

“What?”

“I killed that man,” Aven said, the memory of his first murder filling him with the same sense of nausea and horror as when his blade first dealt the killing blow. “Ralius Talone. The finest swordsman in Tenebras and the best man I knew. Like an older brother to me. And a traitor to the Shadow Order. Stabbing my best friend through the heart was the very act that earned me the title of initiate into that order.”

Silence.

“When I escape,” Janaya whispered, voice trembling. “I’ll give you the death you deserve.”

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