₦airaland Forum

Part 11
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A week passed in which I did nothing but dwell on the task I had promised to perform for Gerangi. All I had to show for my efforts were wasted thoughts, as I was still yet to come up with a way to remove the fog and release Gerangi from its cell. I had only seen the fog cleared once, and it had been by the imp in the expensive coat. I could not think of a single distinctive feature on the imp. I did not remember what it looked like, what color of skin it had, what length of hair, what body structure and size. All I remembered was that it had been dressed in the same set of clothes as the other fighters underneath its expensive coat, and that its name was Xavier. Beyond that, I was at a complete loss.

I hadn’t seen any of the fighting imps since the day of my last fight.

Now I had complete access to all parts of the pits, save the areas reserved for the pious ones. I had walked the entire place, learning pathways and checking behind every room with curtains to find the imps. All to no avail. I could honestly say that I was starting to despair.

I heard a loud laughter come from the table to my left and I turned sharply, wondering if the uspec was out of its mind. Then I remembered that I was no longer a fighter, and no longer sharing meals with the fighters. The wardens ate much differently than we had.

The wardens’ eating room had six circular tables scattered around a round room. Unlike the long benches the fighters had, the wardens had fine stools around each table. The food was not gruel, it varied by day. I had been there for a week and each meal I’d had was different. After nine years of eating gruel, I found it hard to swallow the much finer platters the wardens enjoyed. The meals were on plates instead of in bowls and they usually consisted of hard meals which could be picked up and eaten with the fingers, instead of scooped up with stale bread.

But the most troubling, or at least the hardest thing to acclimate to was the noise. There was so much noise. The wardens congregated in little groups and sat and chatted while they ate. They laughed riotously and teased each other. After the first day, when a few wardens had walked over to my table and tried, without much success, to strike up a conversation with me, I’d been left alone to enjoy my meals in peace. At least as much of it as one could find amidst the discussions going on around me.

I had expected the deference I’d been shown by the new wardens to wane, or at least to be restricted to the ones who’d already treated me to it, but I’d been wrong. All of these new wardens approached me and spoke to me with much more respect than I had ever been treated to. I could tell from the way they looked at me when I walked by that they were in awe of me. Despite the cloth I wore to hide my scales, they knew I was irira, and it seemed to raise their estimation of me.

The curtains to the room were pulled open and a begetter walked in. A heavy silence fell upon the room as the begetter stood in front of the curtain. The begetter had a small frame. It had all of its eye sockets formed and two of them filled. It stood with its legs apart, and surveyed the room. Then its eyes met mine and its mouth opened. It took a step back. Then it shook its head, clenched its jaw, as if preparing itself, and then it approached me. Its eyes filled with derision as it came closer. And I smiled. This was the reaction I was used to.

Standing close, I could tell that there was something different about the fraise that this one wore. While the other fraise I’d seen extended all the way over the shoulders, to the upper chest, this one was more like the cloth I wore, it only covered the neck. But it had the official markings of the order of Procreation and so I assumed this uspec was another begetter.

“Iri…” The words were cut short. The pious one shook its head, as if catching itself before the slip, and then its eyes grew even harder, as it spat out my name. “Nebud.”

I didn’t reply, I simply took my gaze up to the pious one’s face.

Its jaw clenched even harder, as it extended its arm, and placed a folded piece of paper on the table. “From Fajahromo, your patron. It is unopened.” The pious one spat out the curt words.

I took my gaze from its face to the paper on the table and then back to its face. “I cannot read.” I stated simply.

The pious one gasped. Its head drew back as if I had insulted it and then its eyes narrowed at me. It glared at me and I felt its anger. It would have been an easy thing to exhaust it, but I wasn’t in the mood for easy. I stood up instead.

The pious one’s eyes bulged as it was forced to move backwards to create space for me. It arched its head to stare up at me, and the anger waned. It swallowed nervously and then took another step back. Without breaking the pious one’s gaze, I reached for the paper on the table and handed it back. “Perhaps you can tell me what it says.” I said.

The pious one’s hands were shaking when it took the folded paper from me. It looked down at the paper and then up at me. I took a step towards it and it retreated, walking all the way into the next table. The pious one tripped, falling over an unoccupied stool. The room remained silent as it fumbled around, before pushing itself up to its feet. It cleared its throat, and then ran its hand over the fraise it wore, as if to remind itself that it was there, and take courage from it.

It looked down at the sheet of paper. I watched as its eyes scanned over the sheet, then it folded it and held it off to the side. Then its shoulders squared, and it rose its head up, but its eyes never met mine. “Your patron requests that you take charge of an uspec. That you attend its arrival and teach it how to fight.”

Take charge of an uspec? When Fajahromo had told me it would require things of me, I had thought it meant to use me as an assassin, I never thought it would use me like this. What was Fajahromo planning, and what use had I as a caretaker? “What uspec?”

“Come with me.” The pious one turned around and it began walking, leading me away from the room and the gaping wardens.

I felt the brush of a hard object against my thighs and I almost froze, until I remembered the baton dangling from the belt on my waist. It was the only sign of my status as warden in the pits. I had not been given regular assignments like the other wardens. I did not have times to patrol the fighters’ living areas or to escort fighters to the arena. I had simply spent the last week roaming around at will. I tended to stay away from the fighters’ quarters as they all knew me as irira and it was disconcerting to be amongst them without being one of them. Though I did go back on occasion to sit on my old bed and puzzle at the comfort it brought me.

My new cell was much superior to the old one. In fact, it was more of a room than a cell, having much more luxuries. My head turned to the right, as I looked in the direction of the pathway leading to the rooms, before we walked passed that hallway. My room had a much larger bed. It had a soft layer on top of it, which I suppose was meant to make it more comfortable. After nine years of sleeping on hard wood, the softness felt strange to me. Perhaps that was what I owed my sleepless nights to. The room also had a small side table with two stools around it. There was an empty box off to the side of the room. That box contained more cloths like the one Fajahromo’s slave had put around my neck, and an extra baton. The room also had a bucket in it, which the imps always kept half filled with warm, scented, pink liquid, and several cloths hanging from a long pole. Compared to my old cell which only had a hard, tiny bed, my new space was palatial.

My steps slowed as I noted that the pious one was taking me beyond the edge of the parts of the pits I had access to. There was a wall of dark black fog which served as a barrier to the other parts of the pits. I had been told by the warden who’d given me the tour of the wardens’ quarters and all the connections between the wardens’ space, the fighters’ space, the fog cells, and the arena, that beyond the black fog was the pious ones’ quarters.

So now I watched with awe as the pious one put its hand into the dark fog. The fog went away, revealing the restricted parts of the pits.

Now this felt like walking into another world.

The first thing I noted was that there was no sludge. I walked into the pious ones’ quarters and the ground formed beneath my feet, cradling it the way it had so long ago. This was the first time in nine years that my feet was not on sludge. There were two stools by either end of the open space the fog had once occupied. An imp sat on each stool and an additional imp stood beside it. These imps were clothed. They wore long tunics that flowed seamlessly over their bodies and had empty eyes and streaked skin. I stared at them wondering if one of them could be Xavier, the imp who’d controlled the fogs.

The pious one walked to one end of the wall and placed its hand on it. The fog formed back. Then the pious one walked over to the imps. It rose its legs and the imps cleaned them, wiping off the sludge from the other parts of the pits. I followed the pious ones lead and had the sludge cleaned from my feet.

The pious one snapped its fingers imperiously and a standing imp walked over to it. The imp handed the pious one something and, before I could take note of what it was, the pious one put its hand against the wall. The previously solid wall softened, allowing the pious one to put its hand into it. Then the pious one pulled its hand out and the wall firmed. Then it stood, waiting.

I took my attention to study the rest of the room. We were in an empty space with light sources hanging from the ceiling and three walls of fog in front of us. One of those was a dark shade of red and large, taking up most of the area, the other two were grey and much smaller in size.

The red fog lightened, turning it from an opaque barrier to a translucent one. An uspec walked out of it, and the fog darkened, returning it to its previous opacity. This uspec had on the full fraise with the markings showing it was a begetter. It had five filled outer eyes, and was much taller than any other pious one I had ever seen. It walked towards me and I could see that we were of the same height. In bulk though, I had it beat.

Its eyes studied me. There was an air of somberness surrounding it. It did not look on me with scorn, it simply studied me, and then it turned to the pious one that had led me there. Its previously serene face changed as it frowned. The other pious one looked down, guiltily.

“Apologies Nebud, the letter was supposed to reach you unopened.”

The pious one which had led me there, looked up at the other and said, “it could not read, elder, it asked me to read it.”

Elder. Finally, the different fraise made sense to me. The one who had brought me here was a novice, it was a devout in training, not yet a pious.

The pious one turned to face me. Its features, while still severe, relaxed a little as it stared at me. “Is this true?” it asked. I heard the novice inhale sharply as if in outrage and I had to struggle to keep from mirroring its sentiments. I was nonplussed by the fact that a pious one would ask me for confirmation against one training in its order.

I shrugged and then nodded.

The pious one nodded in acceptance. “Return to your studies novice.” It commanded. The novice glared at me and then it walked into the dark red fog. The fog turned translucent as the novice walked through it.

“Come with me Nebud.” The pious one said, taking my attention away from the fog. It led me to one of the smaller black fogs and then it put its hand into it. The fog went away, and we walked through. I couldn’t help wondering what the difference was between when the fog remained translucent and allowed the pious ones pass, and when it was completely removed allowing anyone through.

The new room had even more fogs. To the left there was a small slot in the wall which was covered with a red fog, and to the right, most of the wall was a grey fog.

“Your patron desires that you have access to that room, and so you will.” The pious one stated, briskly. It jerked its head towards the large wall of grey fog as it spoke. Then it turned to the left and put its hand into the red fog, saying, “You will not have access to this room.” The fog went away, and we walked in.

The room we walked into was a strange one. We stood on a raised platform, looking down at what looked like a mine of some sort. It was a large room with nothing but potholes of varying sizes and filled with thick liquids of varying colors. Imps milled around, putting objects of some form or another into the potholes and pulling them out, then carrying them into places hidden underneath the platform.

“Give me your baton.” The pious one ordered.

I turned to face it and just stood, staring, as if I did not understand the command. The pious one simply stared back, and even as the seconds grew into minutes, it did not get angry. It only pointed at my baton and opened its palm. I took the baton off and handed it to the pious one. It wasn’t as if I actually needed the baton to kill it, I thought as the pious one grabbed onto the baton. There was a moment when both of ours hands where on the baton, and I felt a sort of connection with the pious one. It scoffed as if it had heard my thoughts on how I could kill it, and then I released the baton and whatever bond we may have shared was gone.

The pious one eyed me with speculation and then it turned around and handed the baton to an imp who’d been standing behind it. I was shocked to see the sudden appearance of the imp and even more shocked to see its sudden disappearance. The ground underneath it gave way, turning from foam to quicksand, and the imp was pulled into it.

“I will not bother introducing myself to you as I hope, by the founder’s grace, to never lay eyes on you again.” The pious one’s words shocked me. I turned to find it staring at me with hard eyes. While it did not look derisively at me, I could tell then that it was not pleased with me, not even in the slightest. It put its hand behind its back and continued speaking. “Allowing you into this sacred place,” it paused, “everything your patron wants is repugnant. You are a sacrilege Nebud, but I suppose that is not your fault.”

There was something about the factual way in which the pious one spoke that I found amusing. I knew it was not a humorous discussion, but I could not help the mocking smile that formed on my lips. How I hated the pious ones. “I suppose not.” I replied.

The pious one sighed. “Forgive me Nebud, I am not usually so…curt. But you must imagine that it is unnatural, unholy, for any one uspec to own the birthplace of Hakute. This place belongs to the founder, but the magistrate is a…” the pious one cut itself off. “That does not concern you. All that concerns you is this.” The imp reappeared, rising from the ground. It had my baton with it, and although the baton looked the same, I suspected that there was something different about it. The imp handed the baton back to the pious one and the pious one studied it, shook its head, and then handed it back to me.

“This is your key.” It said after I took the baton. “Stick it into the fog before you enter, and the fog will turn translucent if you are allowed in. Be warned, once you stick the baton into the fog, the fog turns from an innocuous solid wall into a weapon. If the fog does not turn translucent, do not walk in, or it will kill you. Never walk in with another person. To the rooms you do have access, the fog will only grant passage to one. If more walk in, it will kill all. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Good. Your patron has assigned a charge to you. It will be born today, and your patron desires that you…attend its birth. It is a sacrilege for any but the pious ones to enter into that sacred place.” The pious one’s jaw clenched, and I could sense its anger. But then the anger went away, so unnaturally quickly that I was shocked. The anger had only existed for a second and then it had gone, as if it had been exhausted. I looked at the pious one and it looked at me with knowing eyes. It looked as if it new I had searched its emotions and it knew what I was capable of. Then it smiled smugly at me. “Don’t bother playing your games on me, I am too well trained.”

Too well trained for what? I thought to ask. Was there a way to be trained against emotions? How would that be possible? Did that mean that this pious one also had emotions? Could I train myself to not be susceptible to any external control on my emotions? I had too many questions and enough sense to know that I couldn’t voice them if I didn’t want it getting back to Fajahromo. So, I frowned with confusion and asked, “what games?”

It smirked at me as if it knew I was lying, and then shook its head. “Come.” It ordered and I followed, wondering about how much I did not know about the emotions I could control.

We walked out through the entryways, back to the center room with the three fogs. Then it steered me towards the other black fog.

“One more thing.” It said, and then it turned and looked me squarely in the eye. “The key only works for the fogs here. It would be futile to try using it on a fog cell in the other quarters.” Then it said, “Use it now.” And gestured towards the dark fog.

As I put my baton into the fog, I thought on the pious one’s words. It had made a point of telling me that the key would not work on fog cells. Why would it tell me that unless it knew that I’d been to visit Gerangi that one time? Was there a message in the warning I’d been given? Maybe it wasn’t a warning at all.

The fog turned translucent and I walked in. The pious one walked in after me. It gestured towards the right were smaller grey fogs lined the right wall of the room. “You have access to those. Your ward will be living in one of them.”

I tried to pay attention to what the pious one was saying, but I could not take my eyes away from the orange hue emanating from the dark alley I saw ahead of me. The orange reminded me of the dots which had been part of my life in the slums. Everyday in the slums had been spent mostly outdoors. The orange dots which illuminated our days had become as common place as the red clouds that filled the nights. They had seemed so mundane that I had ignored them, taking them for granted. But after spending nine years without the natural lighting of the dots or the clouds, I felt drawn to the orange hue.

“To the hatch.” The pious one said, as it led the way towards the space ahead, and the orange hue which emanated from it.

It wasn’t until we got much closer that it dawned on me what I was about to witness. I was about to learn how an uspec was born. The mystery of our birth was to be revealed to me. My eyes widened as I stepped into the orange light.

Part 10
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Guards with long swords hanging from their belts lined the room. Four of them stood directly behind Fajahromo and the others stood close to the walls. There were two identical imps standing in front of the wall behind Fajahromo. They wore long flowing skirts which covered their legs, but nothing to cover their chests. A long table was in the center of the room and there were several chairs placed around it. White light sources were situated in the top corners of the room, and a smaller table stood to the side, with a tray on it. There were two cups on the tray and a large decanter.

Fajahromo stood in the center of the room.

It had its hands on its hips, standing with its legs spread. The robe it wore covered the top half of its chest and flowed freely from its neck, held securely by the jeweled fastenings in the front. There were holes at the back of the robe, for its ailerons. It still wore the garment which covered its top half, or rather, covered the iron spikes on its top half, hiding the fact that it was an irira.

“My friend!” Fajahromo greeted, walking towards me.

Suddenly, I was pulled back in time. It was nine years ago, and I was lying on a bed in its house and telling it all about my life in the slums.

Fajahromo’s hands clapped onto my upper arm. It arched its head up, and its eyes caught mine. It held my gaze, its smile never wavering. Although I was now taller than it was, I couldn’t help feeling smaller in some way. Maybe it was because of the guards that stood around the room, or maybe it was the fully-filled eye-sockets, or maybe it was just the air of wealth and power which seemed to radiate off it. I did not know the cause, just that I didn’t like it.

Still, I could not help being awed at the sight of an uspec with all of its outer eye-sockets filled. I had never seen such before, never amongst the crowds of spectators who came to watch the matches. Fajahromo having all its eyes meant that it now had all the understandings of the different spectrums. It had the full range of magic I had dreamed of as de trop in the slums.

Fajahromo’s hands dropped. “Leave us.” It commanded, never breaking eye contact with me.

Out of the corner of my eye I watched the guards leave the room. Fajahromo turned then and nodded at a shadow lurking in a corner of the room. The shadow walked forward, and I remembered it. It was the imp, Kyrie, the slave that had served me in Fajahromo’s house. The imp walked towards the curtain. It lay its hand on the curtain and a fog appeared, filling the space between the walls and behind the curtain.

Once the fog had fully formed, Fajahromo said, “we may talk freely now.” Then its eyes turned back to study me and it smiled. There was praise in the look it gave me, and for a second, I found myself soaking up the approval in its eyes like a starving pet being fed its favorite meal.

I shook my head and reminded myself of how much I hated Fajahromo.

Fajahromo pointed to a chair by the table and said, “sit my friend, we must catch up.” Then it turned around and walked to the smaller table with the tray.

I walked to the large table in the center of the room and pulled out one of the chairs. The chair had sturdy arm rests and a base for sitting. I sat on it and waited.

Fajahromo picked up both of the glasses on the tray, holding them in one hand, while it carried the decanter in the other. It brought them to me, and I couldn’t help wondering why it would do any work at all, when it had three slaves standing around in the room.

Fajahromo placed one of the glasses in front of me and another in front of the chair to my right. Then it poured a bit of a dark purple liquid into both cups. It put the decanter down, sat and picked up its cup. It held the cup up in a silent toast to me.

Seconds rolled by as I simply stared at the uspec, wondering if it really expected me to sit and drink with it as if nothing had happened. As if it hadn’t abandoned me in the pits. And as the seconds went by, I became aware of a subtle change in the atmosphere of the room. The imps seemed to have frozen. Kyrie stood behind its master and it appeared to be standing so still it could not have been breathing. I turned my gaze down to Fajahromo and was surprised by the change in its face. It was so slight, I may have been imagining it, but Fajahromo appeared hostile. It still had its smile on its face, but its previously friendly gaze was gone. I reached out with my anger towards it and I wasn’t surprised to find a small flame of anger starting to burn in it.

I flirted with the idea of simply killing it right then and there. But it had the understandings of the five spectrums, one of which allowed an uspec to take a life without moving. I remembered the events of the morning and the way Maxad had been forced to appear against me in the arena, and knew that my choices were limited. So, I picked up the cup and held it up, accepting the toast.

Kyrie exhaled and the two identical imps in the back moved a little, but Fajahromo’s concealed hostility did not wane. Now, when it smiled at me, I felt chilled by the anger I could feel lurking beneath the surface. It sipped its drink slowly, its eyes never leaving mine. I held its gaze and something in the way its eyes never wavered even as it drank shook me. I suddenly felt as if I had been trapped in a dangerous game, one in which Fajahromo knew all the rules.

I looked away, and Fajahromo’s anger left, as if it had been exhausted. I realized then that it had been pushing for the upper hand and by looking away, I had given it to it. Angrily, I shoved the edge of the cup between my lips and took a heavy gulp of the wine.

I had to fight back the urge to wretch. It was strong wine, much stronger than anything I had ever had before. It burnt my throat as it made its way down, but I did not let my reactions to the drink show. I gave myself time to calm and then I turned my attention back to Fajahromo.

It still had that smile on its face, but its eyes held a note of curiosity. I hated the instant relief I felt from knowing that its hostility towards me had gone.

“My friend, I am happy to see you.” Its central eye twinkled as if it truly meant what it said. “But you are much grown, my friend, much grown indeed. Alas, the entire port screams for you! You have done well my friend.”

“Gratitude sirga.” The response was automatic. And I regretted it as soon as I said it. Kyrie gasped behind its master, and the smile left Fajahromo’s face. Its jaw clenched tightly, and it glared at me as if I had insulted it.

“Domina, you cannot refer to my master as sirga.” The imp Kyrie said. I turned my gaze to the imp and frowned, wondering why it had mentioned the honorific ‘sirga’ as if it were an insult.

“My master is now the grand, Fajahromo, sovereign of the first burg in the second metropolis of Hakute, and first majestic in the line of the Dukes of the second metropolis of Hakute. You must refer to it as grand one.”

My gaze turned to Fajahromo and I watched it stare at me. Its anger began to rise as I remained silent, and it grew with each second that I did not speak. Cold eyes met mine and we were trapped in another game. For a few moments I allowed myself to believe in the fantasy of defying Fajahromo. I had faced a variety of foes in the arena and I had learnt all about hand to hand combat from them, but this, the duel of looks I exchanged with Fajahromo, was a type of combat I was untrained for. I had killed the best fighters in the pits, but I somehow found myself incapable of facing the danger I could sense from this uspec.

“Apologies grand one.” I said, finally, “I did not know.”

Fajahromo’s jaw ticked. It remained silent and in its silence the imps froze. It simply stared at me, its eyes observing me until it relaxed its jaw and took another slow sip of the wine in its cup. It put the cup down, but it did not smile.

“I own the pits now.” It said. “We must maintain the charade of the pits belonging to the order of Procreation, and so the magistrate remains the figure head. But the magistrate belongs to me.” It stopped speaking, and in the silence I wondered how an uspec could own a magistrate, the head pious one of an order.

It sighed. “Don’t oppose me Nebud.” It warned. “It will not end well for you.”

I froze in my seat and my eye searched Fajahromo’s. It simply stared back at me, its unsmiling face regarding me with the complete confidence of a superior addressing an inferior. It did not balk, it just waited as if it new that I would come to see things the way it did.

Then it stood. It turned its back to me, and my mouth hung open as I stared at the first fully filled ailerons I had ever seen. It was dazzling. The ailerons looked like wings, like beautiful wings covered in cyan feathers. There was none of the green skin on its ailerons showing, not even a tiny patch. For its feathers to have grown like this, it must have used a great deal of spectral magic. I swallowed nervously.

“Much has changed in my life Nebud. Domax and Raban are gone. Domax was killed on my progenitor’s orders when it appeared several days after you came to the pits, driven insane with a madness no one could diagnose. It was a mercy killing.” I gulped when I heard of the noble one’s fate. I had driven it insane, I had polluted its anger. “I killed Raban myself. Unfortunately, there was no place for the fool in the world I plan to build. All my siblings are dead. I killed them all and now I am the only offspring my progenitor has. I am its heir, I will be the next Duke of this metropolis. And then, after I kill the Kaiser, I will become Custodian of the spectral port of Hakute. I am not of the line of Kaisers and so I cannot be Kaiser. Not yet at least, but all that will change soon.”

Then it turned and its eyes met mine.

I could not look away.

“I will build a port for iriras like us. A place that our kind can call home. You have exceeded my expectations Nebud; you have made me proud. So, when I am Kaiser, I will make you a Duke. All I ask of you, old friend, is loyalty. Serve me well and you will be amply rewarded. I swear it by the founder.”

I gulped. There was no doubt in my mind that Fajahromo was capable of all the things it said. Finally, I understood the menace I had sensed in Fajahromo the first time we met. I had known that it was capable of murder, but I had underestimated its thirst for power.

“What do you require of me grand one?” I asked.

Fajahromo smiled. “Obedience.” It sunk back into its seat and picked up the cup. It took another sip of the wine before continuing. “From now on, I am your patron. There are tasks I will need you to perform, things that I need done here.” It rose its hand in the air, and motioned with its fingers for one of the imps standing in the back of the room. The imp walked forward. It stopped behind me and, on Fajahromo’s nod, attached a cloth to my neck.

My hand sprung up to the material, ready to rip it off, but Fajahromo’s words stopped me.

“Irira is dead.” Fajahromo warned. “From now on you are Nebud, a plain kute serving as a warden in the pits. You must keep that cloth on to hide your scales.”

I brought my hand down and Fajahromo’s smile widened. “My progenitor requires that I become a progenitor, but before that can happen, there are certain things I need you to do.”

“What things grand one?”

It took a sip of wine. “You will know in due time my friend.” It promised. “You may go.” It said, dismissing me.

I stood up from my seat and walked towards the curtains all the while wondering where my hatred and pride had gone. What was it about Fajahromo that I found so frightening?

“Wait.”

I stopped. Kyrie walked away from its master towards the fog covering the curtains.

“You have learnt well Nebud, and I am truly impressed by your fights and your kills. But remember that there are much easier ways to kill an uspec.” It paused as if in deliberation. “Or perhaps you already know this. Are you kun, Nebud?”

The question caught me off guard. “I don’t know what you mean grand one.” I lied. Although I did not know what kun meant, I had heard the word enough times now to have my suspicions.

Fajahromo sighed. “Do you have emotions?” It asked.

For a second it was as if my heart stopped beating. I froze and Maxad’s words came to the front of my mind. “You are kun. I should have known. Keep your emotions from it.” I had not trusted Maxad in life, so I did not know why I would trust it in death, but I found myself unable to ignore its warnings.

“Don’t all uspecs have emotions grand one?” I tried to ask as innocently as I could.

There was silence, I kept my back to it as I waited. And then it laughed. “You are as you always were my friend.” It said, and I could not tell what it meant by the words. “Farewell, till we next meet.”

Kyrie puts its hand on the fog wall and the fog disappeared, I rushed through the curtains walking as quickly as I could to get away from Fajahromo. “It is not your friend. It will turn on you just as it turned on its own line. When you are no longer useful you will find yourself where I am, begging an enemy for death.” Maxad’s words haunted me.

I walked to clear my mind.

I was reeling. Reeling from the power that I had felt Fajahromo wield like a sharp knife. Reeling from the words it had said and the heinous crimes it had carelessly confessed to me. Reeling from my own reactions to the uspec. Thoughts plagued my mind as I replayed the events of this day. I did not know how so much could change in the span of a single day. I almost craved the simplicity of my fights in the pits. It seemed preferable to the tangled web Fajahromo spun.

I kept walking until I found myself standing in a familiar pathway, in front of a fog covered cell. I could not remember how I had gotten here. I did not know what pathways I had walked down or how those pathways diverged.

I sunk to the ground in front of Gerangi’s cell and whispered, “Pious one.” There was no response. “Pious one.” I called out louder.

There was a grunt and then a hoarse voice called out, “Who is it?”

“A friend.” I replied.

Gerangi did not respond. “Irira?” it asked.

“Yes.” I said. And then, because I could think of nothing else to add, I said, “I have been made a warden, I no longer fight in the pits.” It wasn’t until the words came out of my mouth that I realized why I had come here, and what I had come searching for. I wondered if the pious one would remember the promise it made to me, and when it didn’t answer, I prompted, “Pious one.”

“I am Gerangi.” Its voice was hard. “I am no longer pious, I am just Gerangi.” There was so much bitterness in that voice that I sought to console it.

“That cannot…”

“Your progenitors were both imperial ones. One was a first and only imperial, the single offspring of the Kaiser of Lahooni, while the other was a second imperial, the second offspring of the Kaiser of Hakute. You have a lineage irira, you are of the line of Kaisers. Both of your progenitors died in bringing you into the world and so you were given to your hooni sire, the progenitor of your progenitor, the Kaiser of Lahooni. We were led to believe that you died along with your sire, but we were obviously misinformed. You have what you came for irira. Now leave me.”

I did not know what to say. I had a lineage, I belonged to a line, a family. And not just any, but two of the greatest ones. But I was still de trop. Having a line didn’t change that. It simply showed what I could have been if my sire hadn’t abandoned me. But it had. De trops were not created from orphans, they were created from unwanted ones. If I was sent to the slum, it was because my sire hadn’t wanted me. What good was the knowledge of family if it only exposed all I had missed out on?

“I don’t care about my lineage.” I said. “That is not why I came here. I came for you pious one. What happened? How did you come to be here?”

Gerangi sighed. “I was imprisoned by the one who released you. Now leave me!” It snapped.

“Nebud?” A voice called out from behind me.

I jumped to my feet and looked down to the source of the voice. I found the warden who’d taken me to Fajahromo.

“Come Nebud.” It instructed.

I was just about to start moving when I heard Gerangi’s voice. It was so low. “Do not trust it, my friend. Fajahromo put a dagger in Takabat’s back even though Takabat loved Fajahromo above all others. There is no one Fajahromo won’t kill to get to the top. But be wise. Fajahromo is now one of the most powerful uspecs in Hakute. You cannot afford to cross it. You may have emotions, but Fajahromo has spectra, it can kill you with the fogs.”

I didn’t move, I simply waited to see if Gerangi would say any more. I did not fully understand the words, but I could guess at what spectra was. I had seen the eyes on Fajahromo’s face, had seen them all filled, which meant that it had the understandings of the different spectrums. I had never had a name given to this form of magic, but I guessed that was what spectra was. What else could it be? My waiting paid off when Gerangi spoke again.

“Fajahromo owns the pits now. It is no longer safe for you or for me. If you find a way to get me out of this cell, I will lead us both out of this place.”

Then it was silent.

“Gratitude pious one.” I said, and I actually meant it. In a choice between Gerangi and Fajahromo, I knew which I would pick.

I had to get Gerangi out of the cell.

@Peaceyw haha, I'm glad to see that I can surprise you!

@Fazemood lol, more has arrived, enjoy!

@MhisTahrah yes please do. hope you enjoy them

Part 9
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Maybe it had only been hours, but I could not imagine how. I was wound tight, like a coiled spring ready to be released. My mind had grown weary from the constant prodding and the repetitious way in which I had replayed the events which I had seen. At the moment, I believed I could rival even the passing traders with my attention to detail if I was ever called upon to tell the story of the things I had witnessed. I had pondered the events over and over while I tossed in my bed, hoping, to no avail, for the release of slumber. Now, as the curtains of my cell were drawn back, I sat up on my bed and wondered just how much time had passed. Rational thought told me that it could not have been more than hours, but my fatigued mind insisted that it had to have been days.

“Come irira.” A soft, uncertain, voice called out.

I rose slowly from my bed, my eye alert as I took in the form of the new warden. It had nothing on save the belt and baton that the old set of wardens had worn, but there was an excited air about it, as if it was truly happy to serve in the position it now had. It was only too clear that this warden was a novice to fighting. It was tall, tall enough that when I stood and walked over to it, its head reached my shoulders. But it had a lean-muscularity, the kind that spoke of a body built from exercise and not the exertions of fighting. This warden, unlike the ones who’d been here before, the ones I had watched getting slaughtered, had never fought in the pits.

I stopped in front of the curtain which it held open for me and smirked at it. This warden would not survive long in the pits. It took hard uspecs to control the fighters and this one looked ready to faint just from being so close to me.

“Am I to fight?” I asked it casually.

The uspec only had its single central eye. In that it was as the old wardens, because it had its outer eye-sockets formed, but none of them filled. Its tail was also fully grown so it could not be as young as it appeared, I thought, counting down the seconds in my head as the uspec simply gawked at me. I was tempted to give it its first real introduction to the barbaric nature of the pits when it shook its head, as if recalling what it was meant to be.

“Yes irira.” It replied. “Shall I take you to the portal room?” It asked, its eye widened and there was something about the way it looked up at me, that left me feeling uneasy. This was the second new warden which was treating me in a manner I did not expect. The old wardens despised me, but these ones seemed to respect me. This warden stared up at me with adulation.

“I know the way.” I snapped, irritated by the warden.

I marched towards the portal room, shaking my head as I heard the hurried steps of the warden running behind me. It panted a little, as if the mere act of keeping up with me was more of an exertion than it was used to. I almost turned around and killed it, just to put it out of its misery. A warden like this wouldn’t last long in the pits. It would cross the wrong fighter and that fighter would kill it.

“The founder’s grace be with you irira!” The warden yelled as I walked into the portal room.

I scoffed at the words no doubt intended to wish me luck. I didn’t need them, I made my own grace.

I stopped in the middle of the room and stood over the hard, light-brown quicksand. It softened underneath me, and I was transported to the arena. As I rose to the surface, I held my breath to keep from swallowing any of the liquid in the okun. My head emerged and as soon as the scales on my neck became visible the mob began to cheer. Half of them belted out their fight song as I continued my slow ascent.

“Hair of horns and a chest of iron. Irira!
Skirt of tails and a neck of scales. Irira!
Not one but all. Not weak but strong.
Say you, ‘Tiyoseriwosin?’
Say I, ‘Uspecipyte’.
I am iron strong, unbreakable, I see you shake.
Standing my ground, while I hear you quake.
Against me you set your best?
Apologies, but to death they are next.
Say you, ‘Tiyoseriwosin?’
Say I, ‘Uspecipyte’.”

By the time my feet rested on the sturdy ground beneath the okun they were still singing the song. I turned, looking first on the frantic mob. It was as it usually was. Half of the uspecs stood and cheered and screamed and sang as if I was the very reason for their existence, as if in my presence they found justification for their meaningless lives. While the other half of the uspecs sat still, their looks of condemnation having absolutely no impact on me. I did not bother with looking at the imps.

Instead, I took my time, slowly letting my gaze travel along the okun all the way to the other side of the arena where my challenger stood. It seemed to be standing as far away from me as it possibly could. It stood with its legs parted slightly so that I could see its tail. I frowned at the sight of the Kute feature. It was forbidding for a kute to fight in the pits so I knew that if one was there, it had to be an irira like me. And so I let my eyes continue their perusal. They rose all the way up the uspec’s body to rest on its head. It had seven horns that I could count coming out of its head. There was something off about the horns, but I couldn’t quite say with certainty what it was.

“Irira!” the mob cried. “Irira!” they screamed, and even though there were two iriras in the arena, we both knew which of us was being cheered.

I began walking towards the other irira and as I got closer, I searched for its emotions. There was pain, so much pain. It was the type of pain that you would expect in one which had been beaten. Most of it came from its head and there was some residual pain from its face and other parts of its body. The unexpected pain was the one which I felt in its ailerons. I had never felt pain emerging from an uspec’s ailerons. There was also anger. The anger was subdued, as if it had burned brightly for a long time but had finally been overwhelmed by the immensity of the pain.

I was surprised when I walked closer to it and the irira did not move. Instead, its anger seemed to be growing, as if my presence was sending it into a rage which rivaled the pain. The pain won out in the end, but the anger was there, lurking beneath the surface.

I stopped in front of the irira and froze.

A cold central eye met mine.

For seconds we both stood there, two enemies assessing each other. Its pain remained constant, but it was the anger which spoke loudly. It rolled, moving like a wave, inflating and then subsiding only to rise up again. But all through this, it simply stared at me, until finally, it said,

“Irira.” There was so much derision in that single word.

But I smiled. My lips formed into an evil smile which I hoped foretold of all that I would do to it as I replied, “Maxad.” Then I turned my focus to its horns, ignoring the gasp it let out at the casual way I mentioned its name, “or perhaps I should call you Irira too.” I mocked.

“You know that I am not Irira.” It snapped.

I looked at the sockets on its face. Some of the sockets were as one of mine was, with white streaks instead of the pure green of an eye-socket which had never been filled. I couldn’t help remembering the first time I had seen it, with its many eyes and the fraise around its neck. Now it was without any of its outer eyes and its neck was bare. I looked up at the horns and I understood why so much of its pain came from its head. There was dried blood surrounding each of the horns. Those horns had been dug into the uspec’s scalp, they were not natural, it was not truly an irira. But if someone had gone through the trouble of doing this to Maxad, then the person wanted Maxad to die in the pits, and had made it appear as an irira to ensure that.

“You cannot touch me!” Maxad snarled. “It would be a sacrilege to harm a pious one.”

There was so much arrogance in its voice that I couldn’t help smiling. Luckily the crowds still screamed my name and so they couldn’t hear the conversation going on between us.

“I see no fraise, so how can you be pious?” I taunted. “All I see are horns and a tail. I see an irira, not a pious one.” Then I dropped my head so that I could be on a more even level with the uspec before continuing. “And like a begetter once told me, iriras must gift their lives to the pits of Hakute.” I had rephrased its words, but I could tell from the widening of its eye that it remembered what it had said to Fajahromo the day it brought me into the pits.

Without giving Maxad a chance to respond, I grabbed onto a fake horn and pulled it with ease from its head. Then I stabbed it into its side and punched the uspec so hard it fell onto the floor.

It began to crawl away from me on its side, and I stalked it, taking my time to exult in its pains. All of the anger was gone now. I imagined it would be feeling fear too, but I did not have fear and so I could not sense it. But I could sense its pain.

I stepped savagely on its ankles and I heard the sounds of bones breaking as the uspec screamed out in pain.

“Please!” Maxad begged. “I will pay you. If you let me live, I will show you the way out of here. Not all fights must end with death. You are so famous that the mob will grant you anything you desire. I will set you free! Please! Please Nebud!”

There was something about hearing my name again that stopped me. I hadn’t thought it knew that name.

Sensing an advantage, Maxad pressed. “I know the way out. I know things that you cannot even imagine. I will give the world to you on a platter. Nebud, I will…”

I hadn’t been sure of how I felt when Maxad had called my name the first time. Now I was sure. I screamed, a hollow pain filled my chest as my name was called in the arena of the pits. I was irira. Irira was responsible for the bloodshed, irira killed and entertained a mob. Irira not Nebud. But having Maxad try to force Nebud and irira to converge as one was an unforgivable offense. It was the last time Maxad would hurt me, I swore as I bent to pick the uspec up.

I wrapped my hand around its neck and lifted it off the floor. My hold on its neck was strong as I punched it, slamming my fist into its face with a mindless frenzy which I had not felt since my first time in the arena.

I don’t know how much time passed, or how many blows I dealt to Maxad’s face, but by the time I finally returned to awareness, there was more red than green on the uspec. I could barely see its central eye. Its nose was broken, its jaw was shifted and if not for the pain I felt emanating from it and the gentle throbbing of its veins against my hand, I would have thought it was dead.

“You are just a tool.” It said. Its voice was so faint I wasn’t sure if I had heard the words or simply made them up. Surely it couldn’t speak with its face so badly beaten. I turned my gaze down and found that it was clinging to me, both of its hands gripped my arm with a strength that fascinated me.

Suddenly, my mind was blank. It was as it had been in the infirmary all those years ago, when Gerangi had put its thoughts into my head. This time, when my thoughts returned, I heard Maxad in my head. Its voice was stronger in my mind than it had been when I heard it before. “It is not your friend.” The voice warned. “It will turn on you just as it turned on its own line. When you are no longer useful you will find yourself where I am, begging an enemy for death.” The voice sighed. “You are kun.” It seemed to laugh weakly. “I should have known. Keep your emotions from it.” Then it sighed. “I have given you a gift, return the favor. Put me out of my misery.”

I could not decipher the words. It was as if Maxad had spoken in riddles. But there was something so desolate in the way it spoked that I found myself doing something I would never have thought possible. I felt sad for Maxad. I felt pity. I wanted to fight the emotion, to beat the uspec more and make it suffer for the life of hell it had sentenced me to. But I could not.

I had sworn to myself that I would kill it, and at the time it had simply being the vengeful ramblings of a child. Now, as I increased the pressure on Maxad’s neck, I felt hollow. For a second, I thought to call out to it and tell it that I was sorry for the beating I’d given it, and in that second when the thought occurred, perhaps I was sorry. But Maxad did not need my apologies, it needed death, and I provided it quickly. Just as the pits had taught me.

Then I let the lifeless uspec drop to the ground.

It died with its eye open.

The screams of “irira” were deafening, and for the first time since I stepped into the pits, I wanted to be away from it. I could not stand the death. Maxad had made me Nebud again. In its final act of cruelty, it had removed the mask I wore to keep myself separate and exposed me to myself.

My eye darted around the pits, as if searching for understanding in the eyes that peered back at me. I don’t know what I was looking for, but I found Fajahromo instead.

Our eyes met.

In a part of my subconscious I noted that the Fajahromo who stared back at me was not the same one I had left nine years ago. Nine years ago I had thought Fajahromo was a great uspec and I had believed this with the naivety of a de trop who didn’t know any better. Now I knew better. I saw the face, completely filled with eye-sockets, the robe that extended from its shoulders and the guards that surrounded it, and I knew that this Fajahromo was truly a great uspec.

It smiled at me the same way it had the first time it had come to watch me fight. And then its eyes moved to Maxad’s dead body lying in the okun beside me. Its face filled with a different type of smile when it looked on Maxad, and I feared that that smile was the first genuine smile I had ever seen on Fajahromo. It was a smile filled with relish.

“You should be more careful of who you make an enemy of.” Fajahromo’s words echoed in my head as the memory of that fateful day nine years ago resurfaced. I remembered Fajahromo’s promise to Maxad. “You may have won this round, but this is not the end.”

Suddenly, I felt sick.

“You are just a tool.” Maxad had said, and I finally understood what it meant. Fajahromo was behind this. Fajahromo had designed this so that Maxad would fight me in the arena, knowing that I would kill it.

I saw the smile on Fajahromo’s face as it stared with triumph at Maxad and I remembered the warden’s words. “You will fight today. But it will be your last.” A chill ran up my spine as I thought of the slaughter I had witnessed, and the beaten Gerangi who’d been dragged into a fog cell. Fajahromo’s gaze rose to meet mine and I had an awful feeling that it was behind all of this. The warden’s words came back to my mind as Fajahromo nodded to me and I feared that killing Maxad was only the beginning of what Fajahromo wanted from me.

It smiled at me one last time and then it turned around to leave, surrounded by guards who reminded me of the warriors who’d flown into my slum all those years ago.

“It is not your friend. It will turn on you just as it turned on its own line. When you are no longer useful you will find yourself where I am, begging an enemy for death.”

As Maxad’s last words echoed in my head, I felt the ground underneath me soften. It sucked me in and teleported me back to the portal room. The warden from earlier on in the day, the one who had told me that this would be my last fight, was standing alone in the portal room, waiting for me.

It smiled.

I don’t think I smiled back, though I may have unconsciously. I was still in too much of a shock to do anything but let my mind reel.

“Come with me irira.” It spoke cheerfully. “Your fighting days are over.”

And then it began walking and I followed in a mindless daze. As I walked, I thought about what all of this might mean for me. Fajahromo had re-appeared in my life and all I felt was sick. It had used me. Granted, I’d wanted to kill Maxad, but it was the way Fajahromo had orchestrated it, that shook me. How did an uspec gain so much power? How had Fajahromo become the kind of uspec who could have one pious one thrown into the pits and another into a cell.

But as the questions rolled around in my head, I remembered the hate. I remembered the first few days I had spent in the pits hungry and praying for death. I remembered the day Fajahromo had come to watch me fight and simply left me there. I remembered that I swore to make it pay. I was no longer the de trop who’d been afraid, I refused to tremble at the sight of any uspec, regardless of how far it had come.

Fajahromo was not the only one who had changed.

The warden stopped in front of me. I stopped too as the warden held open curtains the like of which I had never seen before, leading into a room I had never previously encountered. The warden gestured with its hands for me to go in.

“The grand one awaits you.” It said.

With a frown of confusion, I walked in and stopped dead in my tracks.

Fajahromo stood on the other side of the room with a smile on its face.

Hey @popeshemoo glad to see you're still following this story I miss Osezele too, but, I think the time away is going to be good for the story

@Fazemood Done! Check your inbox

@Tuhndhay lol, no apologies necessary. I like knowing that my gender isn't obvious in my writing Hope you enjoy the ride!

@Fazemood hahaha I can see why you would like that lol.

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Part 8
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In the pits. The third burg in the second metropolis of Hakute
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I do not know what woke me. There was a stillness in the air, an unnatural occurrence during a time of night that is normally accompanied by the sounds of wardens. On some nights I would hear them stomping as they marched from corridor to corridor. On other nights I would hear their snores as they slept, derelict in the duties they were supposed to be carrying out. But this night there was nothing.

I only pondered on the silence for a moment. Then I turned around in my bed and shut my eyes, prepared to return to my sleep. But I found myself twisting and turning so much that I decided to get off the bed and satisfy my curiosity. Perhaps if I saw the wardens congregated in the eating room drinking wine, they would never share with us, and partaking of the good meals we could never eat, I would be irritated enough to come back to my bed and salvage the rest of my sleep.

I stood up and walked out of my cell.

The hallway was empty. That was bizarre enough to make me frown. Usually, there were at least two wardens by the fighters’ cells. Not now though. I kept walking, down the long hallway filled on both sides with cells. The curtains leading into each of these cells were closed. I kept walking, grateful for the white light sources fixed on the upper arches of the walls. I walked all the way down the sludge hallway, until I got to the end of the living space. I walked into the circular junction which broke off into the other parts of the pits. To the left was the portal room. It was the room with the quicksand, where we went to be taken into the arena. To the right was the eating room, and the path opposite where I stood led to the cleaning room.

I stood still in the junction just waiting, even though I could not say what I waited for. I simply had a feeling that something was off with the pits this day, and I was determined to find out what it was. I blamed my sudden burst of curiosity on insomnia. If I hadn’t had such a hard time falling back to sleep, I wouldn’t be standing here.

The sound was very light. It was so light I would have missed it if there was any other sound flowing into the junction. But the area was so silent that I heard it. I turned sharply to my right, just in time to see two green feet dragging against the floor and moving into the wall. I frowned, blinking as I tried to clear my eye. My sight must have been failing me, because I knew that I could not see feet moving into a wall. That was preposterous. I kept staring at the wall off to the right, and when nothing else happened, I sighed, chuckling a little at my own stupidity.

I prepared to turn and then I saw an imp emerge from that same wall, as if thrown out. This imp was not like the rest I had seen. The imp was in full possession of both of its eyes and had a streak-less skin. It wore two layers of clothing, one which covered its chest, but not its arms or neck, and another which covered the lower half of its body, stopping at its ankles. The imp had long flowing hair and a light brown skin. In its hands, it held two identical weapons I had never seen before. The middle of the weapon, which it held, seemed to be some sort of grip. One end of the weapon was a cyan horn, and the other end seemed to be a blade forged from large cyan scales.

The imp summersaulted in the air, and I was suddenly reminded of the imps who’d been dancing in Fajahromo’s house. Although that memory made me frown. It had been nine years since I’d seen Fajahromo, it pained me that I still remembered the day we met in such detail.

The imp landed on the ground in a silent squat and then stuck its leg out, sweeping it in a semi-circular pattern on the floor. As it did this, part of the imp’s leg disappeared into the wall. A warden fell back, emerging from the wall as if the imp’s leg had tripped it. Before it could land, the imp lashed out with its hand swiping the blade along the back of the warden’s neck. The imp jumped to its feet and caught the warden before it could land on the ground. The warden’s body was lifted from the ground as if there was someone inside the wall, carrying the half of the warden which hadn’t emerged from the wall. Then the imp moved forward, and it disappeared into the wall with the dead warden.

I looked around me, wondering if anyone else had happened to see the remarkable things which I had just seen. I wasn’t sure which surprised me more, the sight of things moving through walls, or watching an imp kill an uspec warden.

I moved forward, my curiosity aroused beyond reason. I walked down the path which led to the eating room and stopped around where I believed I had seen the imp and warden come out from the wall. Without pausing to contemplate what I could be walking into, I moved towards the wall, going in headfirst. I prepared for an explosion of pain when my head hit the solid surface, because regardless of what I’d seen, I couldn’t believe that my eye wasn’t playing tricks on me.

It wasn’t.

I walked into another world.

Well, that is a bit of an exaggeration. It was not so different from what I was used to in the living areas of the pits, but it was startling to imagine that so much existed here, hidden by walls I had stared at for years. There was an open area in front of me with five short pathways leading away from it. Each of those pathways were so short that standing where I was, I could see to the end of them.

And they were all full of fighting imps and wardens.

It was as though I was watching a revolt, as if the imps had risen up against the uspec wardens. My lips twitched as I watched an imp do an entertaining high jump in the air, kicking a warden in the face as it made its way down to land precisely on its feet, without faltering. That set the warden falling backwards, into the waiting blade of another imp. In a perfect arch, the imp brought its longsword all the way around to cut clean through the warden’s neck. The warden’s head rolled away from the body which collapsed onto the floor.

I turned to another corner where a warden was trying, unsuccessfully, to connect its baton with an imp’s head. With arms behind its back, the imp dodged the warden’s blows seemingly effortlessly. Then it bent to a squat and stuck its leg out, sweeping so that it tripped the warden over. Then it jumped onto the warden, straddling its waist, and stabbed a short dagger into the warden’s chest.

I noted that all of the imp’s were dressed in exactly the same way. They wore two set of clothing made of the same black material, and all had both eyes and a streak-less skin. But they varied in size and color. Some had long hair left flowing, some had hair tied back, some had it in short curls, and some had shaved their head bald. Some had skin as light as cream and some so dark their clothing was almost inseparable from them. Some were short, others tall. And there was so many of them. I counted twenty at least.

I noted that while some of them fought, others carried the bodies of the killed wardens away. I saw them pull the wardens with them into passages which seemed to branch out from the ones that I could see.

One by one the imps killed the wardens until the ten dwindled to five and then the five down to the last one. And as the killings occurred, I found a real wall to lean on and watched the fighting with the avid concentration of a fighter witnessing a new form of combat. I was suddenly filled with the desire to meet the master of these imps, the one who had trained the imps to fight as such and had then sent them off to kill the wardens. I wanted to know how one resisted the urge to simply take the imps’ eyes and instead use the imps as fighters who could battle with such a different technique.

I felt absolutely no pity for the wardens being slaughtered. Perhaps if I thought the imps were acting on their own behest I would have interceded, but I knew that imps could not enter into this place as they had, without the backing of a powerful uspec. I felt no desire to interfere with their uspec master’s wishes. So, I simply watched.

I swerved to the right, pushed by an imp. I grabbed onto the back of the imp’s neck and lifted it off the floor, bringing it up so that’s its face was at an even level with mine. I turned the imp around then and stared at it waiting for it to apologize.

“Put me down!” It snapped instead.

I dropped the imp, ignoring how deftly it landed on its two feet, and slapped it across the face. The imp grew enraged. I could feel its anger and it would have been such a simple thing to exhaust it, but I was curious, I wanted the challenge of a fight with imps that had taken down the wardens. And so I simmered the anger instead, forcing it to wane slower than it naturally would. The imp reached for the weapon at its back and I looked amused at the small dagger. It was a double edged one with a scale blade on one end and a horn on the other.

It reached to stab me with the blade in the stomach, a retribution for slapping it I suppose, but I stopped it easily, with a blow to the side of the head. The imp frowned and then it arched its head to look up at me, and then it fell to the ground and did the sweeping thing with its leg. I laughed. I felt the imps tiny leg making contact with mine and I laughed, at how ineffective it was.

I’d heard that the wardens were former fighters, glorious survivors of the pits who had been promoted. How had the wardens grown so lax that imps like this could kill them? I reached down and grabbed the imp by its neck, then I slammed my head into its, and grinned when I heard the sound of bone breaking. Blood ran down from the imp’s nose and mouth and I stared at the eyes, thinking about how easy it would be to take them and put them into my sockets.

I could feel the imp’s pain. It was enough to send uspecs to their knees, but this imp just stared back defiantly at me, as if it was indifferent to the pain.

“Please domina.” A shrill voice called out from below. I had to look all the way down to take note of this imp. It was so much smaller than the rest. I imagined it was a young one then, a child. It was in pain, but its pain was like nothing I had ever felt before. It was vibrant, filled with an energy I could not begin to imagine.

I released the imp in my hand.

“Thank you.” The young said. “Come mother.” It pulled the imp I had released away, and even though I did not know what the word ‘mother’ meant, I could tell it was spoken with great affection.

“Get Xavier!” A voice snapped.

I looked up. The imps were gone. There was no dead warden in sight. New uspecs came into the area, these uspecs had batons tied to their waists, but they were unfamiliar, I had never seen these new wardens before. They dragged some uspecs behind them as they moved closer towards me.

“Xavier!” The voice boomed.

“I’m coming.” A voice called out close to me. I turned in time to see an imp walk by me. The imp wore the same black clothes the others had worn, but unlike them, it also wore a thick expensive looking coat. It walked right by me, and it passed so silently I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t felt its emotions. They were polluted, polluted to the point that I could not imagine how it walked around without being driven insane. It had more polluted anger and pain in it than I had ever encountered in any other, uspec or imp. But the polluted emotions didn’t seem to stop it.

The imp stopped in the open area in front of me and said, “well, here I am. What do you want?”

I saw a new warden walk out from a corner in a pathway to my left. It dragged an uspec behind it, pulling the uspec’s body against the sludge, as it walked by me. I frowned when I saw the uspec’s face.

It was Gerangi.

It did not have any of its outer eyes, those had been removed, but I could still identify it. That was when I truly began to worry. Gerangi had blood all over its face, and from the pain coming out of it, I could tell that it had been beaten badly. I could not fathom what could have happened.

“The gate.” The warden pulling Gerangi said to the imp in the coat.

The imp stepped aside, making way for the warden pulling Gerangi, and then it followed behind them. I followed too.

The pathway to the right of where I had been standing had cells built into the sides. Unlike the cells were fighters were kept, these cells had a thick fog, instead of curtains, barring the entrance. The imp put its hand onto the fog and the fog receded. The new warden pulled Gerangi into the cell and then it walked out nodding towards the imp. The imp took its hand away and the fog returned. Then the imp left.

The warden turned its head and our eyes met.

It was taken aback by the sight of me and then its eyes moved down to my neck and I froze, preparing for the silent condemnation I expected to see in its gaze. I was too big and too strong to be openly insulted, but that didn’t stop them from condemning. Yes, they tried to mask it, but I could always tell.

“Irira.” The warden said. Its voice was filled with admiration and I was shocked when I saw the smile on its face. “It is an honor to meet you.” The warden said, bowing a little as it spoke. The top of its head reached my chest, and so I had to look down at it when it moved closer towards me.

“You will fight today.” It said. My scowl deepened, we were never told when the fight would be. “But it will be your last.” I frowned at those words. Did that mean that this warden thought I would be killed? “It has all been planned irira. Go back to your cell and rest. Prepare for the fight.” Then it turned and walked away.

There was something troubling about the warden. It had smiled at me, spoken to me as if I were more than an equal. What had I witnessed? Why had the old wardens been killed? Why was a pious one locked behind a fog cell?

“Pious one?” I whispered, moving closer to the cell. “Pious one.” I increased my voice but there was no response.

“Go to your cell my friend.” The warden’s tone was firm but also placating, as if it did not want to have to force me.

Nine years of living by the rule of wardens had me obeying this one on instinct. And so I turned around and walked back through the fake wall, into the parts of the pits that were home to me. I kept walking to my cell in a daze, all the while wondering what I had seen.

I lay on my bed, but I did not go back to sleep.

@Tuhndhay thank you! I'm glad you're enjoying it First off, I'm not a bro, that is I am not a guy, but I guess I'm used to people thinking I am here on NL lol . I'm not sure what story you're talking about, that is I don't know if you mean what inspired this, or what inspired the human part of the marked? I'll answer both though The human part of the marked actually has A LOT of inspirations. The very first inspirations were from tv shows (the Gates and Bitten specifically), and then as the story progressed I pulled inspirations from more shows I'd watched (and crazy things that just appeared in my head haha). This one, in the spectral existence, is inspired by fantasy fiction books that I've read and my desire to make something as different from the norm as those books are. Honestly, I started this book to give my mind some room to play around. There's room for creativity in the human world, but it's paranormal and so, there's only so much crazy I can get away with (at least for now). But here, in the spectral existence, there are no rules and the world is entirely what I say it is. Which is a challenge that I find really exciting. I will definitely mention you when I start the next one. Let me end by saying welcome to the world of the marked, and thanks for the interest, it really means a lot to me

@GeoSilYe great! I'm already working on ways to get Akhere into the Reckoning just for you

Fazemood:
Who is this last warrior that we are familiar with? HMMM, Obehid guess it's time you start updating twice a week, that is if you can, cus this story is more complex than the other.

Thanks for the update, it was a long read.

Hmm...instead of posting two chapters on the weekend, I could post one on Wednesday and one on Saturday...that's what I'll do. But I don't know how long I'll be able to keep it up. I'm heading into a pretty busy period, so I might have to go back to one chapter/week next week, but this week I should be able to swing two

@lukfame thanks

@GeoSilYe and @ewawumi I'm sorry that this is so hard to understand, maybe I bit off a little too much when I started this. I wanted to go for a world that was very different from what I had before and that has its advantages, but also its downsides, because I have to set up the stage and explain the way of life before I can actually really get into the story. But, to answer your question NO. I don't want you to feel like you have to keep reading if you're not enjoying it, or if it's just too confusing. This story is part of the series, but also not really part of the series. So, you definitely (I will make sure of this) don't need to read this to understand the human ones that come after. Again, I'm sorry that this is so hard to understand, and I'm really grateful that you've stuck with the story so far, even though you found it so confusing, really, thank you. You don't have to worry about getting notified when I return to the human world, I will mention everyone I mentioned in this topic, when I start the Reckoning. Thanks again, I appreciate it

Part 7
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In the First Metropolis of Lahooni
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The years I spent in the pits were transformative. The land outside of the pits was rife with what I later learnt was termed the chasm. And the question, ‘Tiyoseriwosin?’ which I had pondered on, but shrugged off as casual, proved to be much more than just a collection of sounds and letters. Outside of the pits, an uspec’s answer to that question could mean the difference between life and death. But I was as naïve as you would expect one who’d spent the entirety of their lives in an isolated slum to be, and so I did not know what to others was common knowledge. And I had so little regard for the other fighters that I never asked them what it meant. Even with all the time that has passed I am still unsure of the wisdom of my self-imposed isolation from the other fighters. I know enough now to know that they could not all have despised me.

Regret. How the feeling vexes me. Now I find myself thinking of all feelings in terms of the emotions they evoke. Even though much has changed, and the circumstances of my life are not what they once were, I still feel cautious whenever I trigger an emotion outside of my control. I know it is a result of the time I spent after the pits, a result of my exposure to other kun, but I find myself rebelling against any emotion which another uspec could control without my awareness. I am old and experienced enough now to say with all confidence that pain and anger cannot be stolen from me. But I am as vulnerable as any other uspec when it comes to the other three.

Perhaps not quite as vulnerable as the others. Not with my pansophy. But alas I go ahead of myself again.

I will not bore you with the details of the nine years I spent fighting in the pits. I could very easily, and at least in part, truthfully, say that I have forgotten most of the fights except the first few and the last. There was no uspec I faced in the pits who stood even the slightest chance of beating me. I had spectral magic. It was not a well-known, or at least not a well-disseminated understanding, but it was a form of magic and it was one that no other uspec in the pits possessed. By the faith, fights in the pits were to be kept even, the only advantage one uspec was allowed to have over the other was that born of superior strength and skill.

And that was the reason the fighters jumped on the imps with eyes whenever the wardens brought them in, because those eyes were supposedly their ticket out of the pits. It was always a gamble to take an imp’s eyes, one that killed a lot more uspecs than it released. But there were a few uspecs who won the gamble and managed to find two imp eyes from imps who in birth or death shared the same plane as them.

At least that was what the rumors said.

In my nine years in the pits, I never once saw an uspec survive putting an imp’s eye into their outer eye-sockets. Perhaps it was different in the years you spent there. I doubt it though. Now that I have had the time to reflect on my life, I can honestly say that I believe the pious ones used us as some sort of experiment. I believe those eyes were somehow tampered with and the pious ones tested the efficiency of their poison on uspecs foolish enough to risk it.

After the first time when the eye had landed on my table and I had reached for it, I never again attempted to gain an imp eye in the pits. I stayed away from tables close to the center of the room, and after I found the pattern, I stayed away from the eating room altogether on days that imps with eyes were brought in. I do not have to explain this to you my offspring, because you, like every other uspec, have felt the rush that comes with the desire to claim an imp eye. It’s spellbinding, addictive in a way that not many other things are. Once an uspec claps eyes on an imp’s eye free from the imp, the desire to put it into its empty outer eye-socket is drugging. The compulsion goes away once an uspec fills the sockets and while the imp eyes gained are still potent.

I did not know much of this then, I only knew that there was too much risk in the taking of an imp eye. I was not yet that desperate for spectra, not when I had emotions. Of course, at the time I did not know the difference between spectra and emotions, I did not know that there were different forms of spectral magic, different types of understandings which could be gained. I had only heard of pansophy from Maxad, and never again while I fought in the pits. Can you imagine a life without knowledge of pansophy? Even now I shudder to think of just how vulnerable I really was as an uneducated de trop in the life I was forced to live.

But all of that knowledge did not exist while I fought in the pits. The only knowledge I had as a fighter, was the knowledge of emotions. After my time in the infirmary, I did not lay my eye on another begetter – as the pious ones in the order of Procreation are called – until the day my fighting for sport ended. I did not see or hear of Maxad or Gerangi, until the day of my last fight. But Gerangi’s sage words followed me throughout my time in the pits. I would like to say that the words clung to me because I thought it prudent to recall them for my own safety, but I know better. They stayed with me because Gerangi had used pansophy to put them there. And like the polluted emotions which could not leave my victims in those early days in the pits, Gerangi’s pansophy polluted my thoughts and they could not naturally wane with time.

Sometimes I wonder why I survived the pits. Being what I was, not just an irira, but the symbol I became to the Uspecipytes, especially in a port like Hakute, it should have been a death sentence. I should have been killed. I think back on the conversation I overhead and I think, even though I am loath to admit it, that I owe my survival, at least in part, to Takabat. I never laid eyes on the uspec, I only heard it speak that one time in the infirmary, but it had forbidding the use of pansophy to make me more susceptible to losses in the arena. I think Gerangi had set the foundation for my survival by convincing Maxad that I could not die where the Uspecipytes would not see me go down, and Takabat completed it by forbidding the use of pansophy to addle me. And I suppose, if I were to be completely transparent, I would credit Takabat’s interference to its sibling Fajahromo, but even now I find it hard to be so charitable. So, no, I will not give any credit to Fajahromo. I will say that Takabat’s status protected me from pansophy and Gerangi’s words steered me in the right direction to mastering emotions.

But my victories in the pits were all mine.

And what victories they were.

Once I learnt the different ways emotions could be controlled, taking the emotions in bits was easy. In a day I learnt that emotions could be transferred or spent. I also learnt that transferred emotions could be yanked or seeped. It was in the same day that I learnt that spent emotions could be exhausted, but it took me a while longer to learn that they could also be simmered.

Yank, seep, exhaust and simmer, are the four ways that emotions can be controlled. Yanking and seeping are for transferring the emotions. When I yanked an emotion, I took everything that my target had to offer and could either put it all in a single host or share it evenly between a number of hosts. Seeping was much more difficult. To seep, which is to take an emotion away in bits, I had to make a duplicate of my lifeforce in the intensity of which I wanted to take. If I halved the intensity of the anger in my lifeforce, I could take half the anger from my target. But then it got complicated if I was dealing with more than one uspec at a time. What if I wanted to take half of one uspec’s emotion, a quarter of another and three-quarters of a third? That meant that I had to go into myself and create lifeforces of the varying intensities in me. And going into myself in the arena was never an option. It left me distracted and one second of distraction in the arena was all that was needed to get killed.

The fights were random, an uspec never knew when it was going to fight or how many challengers it would have, and so I learnt to create the lifeforces I needed and just keep them separate in preparation for fights. But that was a hassle of its own, because each new lifeforce drained some of my energy, making me much weaker than I could afford to be. And since I never knew when the fight would come, I only allowed myself to maintain four lifeforces two for the pain and two for the anger, one at full intensity and the other at half. With those four I could survive with enough strength to go into the arena whenever the battle called. I came to rely a lot more heavily on spending the emotions that I couldn’t transfer.

Exhausting was the easiest way to spend an emotion. When I exhausted an uspec’s emotions I made it spend it all in a single act. An uspec would have a single fit of anger, which would have the potency of all of its anger combined in one, but after that, the anger would be gone. With pain it was less straightforward. I could spend an uspec’s pain, but if it was pain created from a wound, more pain would be created. Although, I never had reason to exhaust an uspec’s pain. I exhausted anger as it seemed to reduce the drive that the uspecs had to fight, but with pain I found it was easier to simmer.

Simmering is to spending what seeping is to transferring. Where with exhausting I could make an uspec spend all of its emotions at once, with simmering, I could make the emotion fade at whatever rate I wanted. I could make it go faster or slower than it normally would. But simmering was difficult because it required a longer communication with my target’s lifeforce. In transferring or exhausting I simply told the emotion where to go or to burn itself out, but with simmering I had to constantly keep a check on it, telling it just how much to release and at what moment. At first it was grueling because it took too much attention from my fighting and the lessons I was trying to learn from my opponents. But then I stopped using it in the arena and trained myself properly on it outside of the arena. I used it most on the imps in the cleaning room. Simmering was the most difficult to master, but it was worth the effort.

Once I learned the effects of polluting emotions, I made the choice in the arena, to transfer or spend, depending on what I wanted to achieve. Sometimes I combined simmering an opponent’s pain with seeping some foreign pain into it, that way I was sure the pains would mix and the uspec I fought would be driven insane with polluted pain. Once I did that, killing the uspec was easy. It wouldn’t even be able to put up a fight.

Polluting anger has the opposite effect on an uspec’s drive to fight.

During my seventh year in the pits, I was set against ten uspecs. They were all to fight together against me. I think that fight was Maxad’s doing. By that time, I had come to rely a lot more heavily on my actual skill as a fighter rather than my skill with emotions, but that fight had me pulling on everything I’d taught myself. I mildly polluted two uspecs’ angers so that they were not fully insane, but the slightest offense set them off. It was less suspicious than a full-blown hysterical insanity, and it helped to split the fight. The uspecs I had polluted fought two other uspecs and so I only had to fight five at once. Those were much better odds for my skill.

By the end of my first month in the pits all of my outer eye-sockets had formed. By the end of my second, my tail had grown fully, becoming another weapon I could use in the arena. I never used the venom in my tail against my opponents, never stung them with poison which would immobilize them.

Now, the tales I’ve heard of my triumphs in the pits tell of an uspec who was too strong to need to immobilize its opponents. But that is as far from the truth as possible. The truth is that I was not fully aware of the paralyzing powers of my venom. I had only seen a tail used as a weapon once in my slum and by the time I was fighting in the arena, my slum had faded to a distant memory. At that point, the emotions were easier to use than a tail of which’s significance I was unsure. In that same timeframe, my neck had become fully covered with large cyan scales. The scales were the weapons I used to kill during my early years.

It wasn’t till about the fourth or fifth year when I was strong enough to simply snap an uspec’s neck.

With my victories I grew in size, both in height and bulk. I never became as tall as Juwara, the first giant I faced in the pits, but I grew to be much taller and bigger than the warrior uspecs who had flown into my slum. By my seventh year, even the wardens were afraid to look derisively at me. If it bothered anyone that I was an irira, they never let it show. They did not look on me with kindness, and they did not always look at me with fear, but there was always a slight deference. No warden hit the side of my head with a baton, no uspec spat on the floor in disgust at the sight of me. On more than one occasion an opponent fainted when it saw it was to fight me.

And with each battle won, the Uspecipytes sang their fight song and the Kuworytes screamed of my sacrilege. Not that any of that meant anything to me then. As far as I was concerned, the divisions in the pits were done to separate quarreling factions. I did not know that I was witnessing the chasm, I did not know how rare it was to see both factions under the same roof without bloodshed.

I spent nine years in the pits. I had gone in as a child about seventeen years of age, and I emerged an adult, full grown of twenty-six years. And in the nine years that I fought, I was the only irira to call the arena home. Sometimes I wonder what I would have done if another irira had been pitted against me. I am much changed now, so much different from who I was then. I believe that period in my life saw the most of my personality swings. I had been a naïve, un-blooded child when I walked in, and I was a cold-hearted, killer when I left. No, I would not have hesitated to kill an irira. I don’t know if I relished it. I can say with certainty that I never came to like or even indulge in the fanatic applause of the mob. I still hold very little regard for the uspecs who choose to spend their time watching their kind fight. But did I enjoy the kill? My hands were stained with blood more often than I wish to remember, but I never shied away from it.

I took life without pause or concern.

And I must admit that on some level it appealed to me. I went from being the weak de trop who was defenseless and at the mercy of others, to being the irira who set its own fate. People trembled at the sight of me. I was no one’s slave, no one’s puppet. I was strong, I had no master. At least that was what I thought in my last years in the pits. I truly believed that I was the most powerful uspec to exist and that there was no one who could defeat me. Perhaps in some ways I was still a child. Only a child is foolish enough to possess that much hubris.

But in some aspects, I was right. I followed Gerangi’s advice and let the best fighters teach me to fight. I used the emotions to weaken them and then I practiced the moves they used on me, back on them. I fought against so many uspecs from all the different spectrums, that when I left the pits, I was without doubt, in fighting skill alone, one of the best. But this was not were my arrogance lay, I did not believe I was unstoppable because I was a skilled fighter, I believed I was the greatest because I had mastered the magic of two emotions without any formal education. Two emotions out of five. I cannot help but laugh at the ignorance of my youth. And with emotions only one of four forms of spectral magic, I had only mastered a subset of a subset of the spectral magic available.

Luckily, I was only ignorant of the full extent of spectral magic while I fought in the pits. It was after my fighting ended that my education begun. I think of how much time I spent in the pits, and how much I learned there, and feel like it should account for the majority of my story, but it cannot. Because the real adventure of my life only begun after I left the pits.

Of course, the tale of my time in the pits would not be complete without the story of my last month spent there. And so, I return to the story. I take you back to the last day I spent as a fighter in the pits.

Fajahromo had only come to watch me fight twice. It came to watch my second fight, the one against Killman. And it came to watch my last. My last challenger was a mutual acquaintance of ours. I will never forget that fight, it haunts me even while my eyes are open.

Part 6
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My stay in the infirmary was cut short after the visit of the pious ones. I did not know how much time I’d spent sleeping before the pious ones arrived, but I was sent from the infirmary the day after their visit. I spent that last day on my sickbed learning how to bring the anger lifeforce out and make it just as permanent as the pain lifeforce had become. It wasn’t too difficult once I figured out exactly how the pain, or rather the lifeforce in it, had come to be my constant companion. The hardest part was recalling how the pain came out.

I had filtered through my memories of the fight to pinpoint the exact moment when the lifeforce had emerged. I remembered Killman aiming blow after blow at my head, and receiving those blows without being able to trigger the appearance of the lifeforce. But then Killman had tried to cut of my tail and the lifeforce had emerged. Though, the lifeforce had not come simply from the pain of Killman sawing off my tail with its horn, it had come after, when I’d twisted free of Killman’s grip and landed on my tail on the hard ground underneath the okun. That landing had pushed my tail into me, directly inserting a part of the feature of the kute spectrum into my body.

The kute spectrum was the pain spectrum, it was the spectrum which was most bound to pain and as such, I imagined that the feature of the spectrum had to be in some way connected to the emotion so closely bound to it. Since the moment that the tail had been forced into me, I hadn’t stopped feeling the lifeforce in my pain. It was a conjecture, a hypothesis based purely on speculation, but as soon as the idea crossed my mind, I decided to test it.

So, I utilized the first moment I was left alone in my sickbed. I reached for one of the scales on my neck and had been momentarily startled to find it much bigger than the previous scales which had grown there. This scale was so large it fit squarely into my palm. Quickly, before another scale could grow to take its place, I cut a straight line into the newly exposed skin of my neck and partially inserted the large scale into it. Then I’d waited, expecting an instant return of the lifeforce in my anger.

It hadn’t worked quite that rapidly.

It had taken the rest of my stay in the infirmary for the scale I inserted to reattach to my neck and for the cut I’d made to form around the scale, becoming as one with it. But after that, after my body and the scale fused, the lifeforce came alive in me, burning with a simmering heat that differentiated it from the lifeforce in the pain.

And with both of my lifeforces burning brightly in me, I felt like a different person. When once I had walked through life with only my perceptive senses to guide me, now I walked with the knowledge gleamed from the lifeforces in me. Suddenly, everyone I encountered was as an open book to me. I could read their pain and anger, I could toy with the emotions, taking the emotions from one person and transferring them to another. In a single moment, a heavy-hearted imp became light as a bird and a stone-faced warden, bent over, howling in pain. An uspec who sneered with anger at me for my sacrilege of allowing myself to be born irira, suddenly became anger-free, staring dazedly at me as if it had suddenly lost the purpose of its existence. They always recovered after I stole their anger and gifted it to someone else, but they were left vulnerable for long moments, moments when a well-placed scale could end their lives for good.

I never killed them, never took advantage of their momentary losses, but I found myself filled with a heady sense of power just knowing all that I was capable of. Slowly, all my grievances went to the background. Fajahromo’s betrayal became a dull memory which had no effect on me. The memory of Maxad and its desire to have me killed faded to an afterthought with as much potency as a bad dream. I felt invincible, the power was drugging. It was so addictive that I spent days in a haze, walking around the areas of the pits I had access to and simply transferring emotions.

During one meal, I had pulled all the pain that each uspec sitting on one side of the room had, and transferred it evenly to two uspecs who’d sneered at me when I walked in. They’d both begun to cry so ghoulishly they became the laughing stock of the pits.

During another meal two uspecs ganged up on a third and beat it. I did not know the cause of the fight, but I could feel the anger of the uspecs doing the beating and the pains of the one being beaten. I decided to turn the tables and so I gave the angers of the attacking uspecs to the other and the pain of the beaten uspec to the aggressors. The aggressors fell to their knees with their heads in their hands and the beaten uspec suddenly became possessed with rage. It had taken the combined efforts of four wardens to pull the suddenly enraged uspec off the two who had attacked it.

It wasn’t until the third day after my release from the infirmary that I focused on the pious one Gerangi’s words in my head. I paid heed to its warning for caution and its advice that I master the emotions. It had told me not to yank an emotion away, but to take in bits. That was an act I had yet to master. So, as I sank into the warm water of the okun in the cleaning room, I contemplated the task.

The cleaning room was a simple one. It was a large square room with a somewhat deep okun in the middle. This okun was not as dirty as the one in the arena, but it was also nowhere near as clean as the one in Fajahromo’s house. The okun was deep enough that I could stand in it and be covered all the way to my waist. For most of the other uspecs, the pink liquid only reached up to their knees.

I relaxed in the okun, my ailerons brushing against the walls of the stream, as I watched another uspec walk into the room. I waited for it to reach me with the carelessness of one who knew it could not be harmed. The uspec walked across the sludge ground and came to a stop standing outside the stream. It had massive scales on its neck, features which showed it was of the hooni spectrum, and all of its outer eye-sockets formed. It turned to me, glanced at me and then looked away emotionless. It was an uspec I had never seen before. I would remember one with scales such as mine.

The uspec jumped into the okun and swam the length of it. It swam from one end to the other three times and then it stopped in the center of the stream. It snapped, saying a word which sounded different in accent and language from the tongue I was used to. It repeated the word and then frowned as if upset. I did not know what it wanted until it stomped over to the imps who stood outside the okun on the side opposite me. It climbed out of the okun and proceeded to give the three imps a thorough beating. It somehow managed to kick or slap or hit all three of the imps at the same time, making it so that none could escape from its anger. When all three imps were reduced to masses of pain laying on the floor it marched out of the room angry.

I took its anger when it was just past the curtain and then gave it to one of the imps. That anger seemed to drive the imp to its feet. It kicked the imp closest to it, while the one furthest away crawled on its arms and knees to get away from the crazed imp. I took the pain of the one that crawled and gave it to the angry one. The imp turned from beating the other imp and ran towards the closest wall in the room and it began to hit its head against the wall. It cried out in pain, but it did not stop banging its head against the wall.

The other two imps stared at it as if they could not believe what they saw.

I reached for the anger and tried to take only a part of it from the imp banging its head against the wall, but all of it responded. I sent it back to the imp and tried again, trying to take only a piece of the anger, but I met with the same result.

I leaned back, deep in thought as I puzzled on how to split the emotions. I knew it had to be possible, because if it wasn’t Gerangi wouldn’t have suggested it. It had to be possible, I just didn’t know how.

When my attention returned to the imp, I noticed that it was still banging its head against the wall. I frowned, puzzled at it. Had the anger not abated? I reached for the anger, expecting it to be much smaller than it had been when I’d given it to the imp. Instead I found it unchanged in size. That didn’t make sense to me. Emotions waned. That was why an uspec could feel angry one moment and not the next, that was just the way of life. So why did this one’s anger not subside?

Again, I reached for the anger, but instead of taking it, I studied it. It took all of my attention and made me unconscious of the rest of the room, as it had when I had studied my pain. I felt as though I was in myself, even though I wasn’t, not really. I could not see my innards, could not see the lifeforces in me. Actually, I did not really see anything at all. Where I was all communication happened by feel. It was like being in a trance where my sight had been glazed over but the lifeforces gave me all the vision I needed.

I examined the imp and found something odd in this anger. The imp’s anger was polluted. It was as if two different strains had mixed to form a new type of anger which could not naturally subside. It was not solely the imp’s anger or solely the uspec’s anger, it was a hybrid. I found the pain was the same.

With a detached curiosity I wondered if this had happened to every uspec whose emotions I had traded and played with. Had I left them different from what they’d been before? Had I made them insane?

I pulled out of myself, releasing my anger from the bond it had formed with the imp to examine its anger. And then I went back into myself. I could feel the lifeforce of my anger and I sensed its intensity. It burned hot, as if I was in a rage. I wondered if I could alter it, if I could somehow dial it back, make it less intense. When I tried to do that, the lifeforce split into two, one anger was at full intensity while the other was only half intense.

I came out of myself and the room came back to focus in my mind. I could feel the separate lifeforces in my anger. I felt the one that burnt at full rage and the one that was only mildly enraged. They were like two different parts of me, like two hands I could use. I reached for the imp’s anger with my mild anger and only parts of its anger came. I transferred that anger evenly to the other imps and the imp stopped banging its head against the wall. It simply fell to its knees and began to weep, screaming and crying as it reached into its hair with its hands and yanked viciously at the strands.

I went quickly into myself and divided the pain as I had the anger. I reached for a part of the imp’s pain and shared it amongst the other imps. Finally, the imp stopped crying. It stood, its head turning from left to right as its empty eye-sockets took in the room. I exhaled as the imp went back to join the other ones and all three seemed to be sane. I could still feel the polluted anger and pain in each of them, but it did not appear to be high enough to make them act crazy.

I smiled, relieved to have freed the imp of the unearned suffering. I did not know what would happen when next it felt anger. Would its anger mix with the polluted anger or would it remain its own and wane as natural anger tended to do? I hoped for the imp’s sake that the anger remained separate from the polluted one I had created in it.

I suddenly felt exhausted and famished. With shaky hands, I pulled myself out of the okun and walked out of the cleaning room, dazed by what I had learnt of my own powers. I knew then how easy it would be to tell if an uspec’s emotions had been tampered with. It would be obvious because the emotion would not abate as others did. Gerangi’s words had a new meaning for me now. I could not continue to win by controlling emotions and I could not continue to yank emotions, I certainly could not simply give them to an uspec who would walk out of the pits, the way I had to the noble one. I shivered as I thought of how close I had come to getting caught. I had to be more careful.

My body felt exhausted. It was hard to believe how exerting splitting the lifeforces had been on me. I was weak, but thankfully not too weak to walk into the eating room and get a bowl of gruel and a few pieces of hard bread. I almost sighed in ecstasy when I was able to sit on a bench and dig into my food.

After consuming a piece of stale bread and half a bowl of gruel, I could feel the strength begin to return to me. My previous lethargy decreased, and my body hummed with excitement as I continued to dwell on my emotions. Not only could I control emotions, I could apparently drive people crazy by polluting the emotions within them. It was a thought that still scared me as much as it had when I saw the imp slamming its head into the wall, but now, with food in my belly and my eyes roaming about a room filled with uspecs who despised me, it was a thought that brought me much comfort. Much indeed.

A smaller uspec appeared in front of me. Well, compared to me the uspec was large, but compared to the other uspecs who fought in the pits, this uspec was small. It was only a few feet taller than I was and was barely any bulkier than me. As the uspec sat, eying me warily, I could feel anger simmering in it.

On an impulse, I reached into my anger and used the lifeforce which was fully enraged, to reach out to the anger in the other uspec. As I reached for the anger, my mind was wary of the repercussions of transferring the uspec’s emotions and potentially polluting another uspec, which could drive it crazy. And so, instead of trying to transfer the emotion, I simply wanted it gone. I communicated with the uspec’s anger through mine and I made my desire for it to leave known.

Suddenly, the uspec slammed its fist on the table and swiped angrily at its bowl, sending the bowl crashing onto the floor and the gruel pouring out of it. After the uspec did this, it smiled, relaxing into its seat. I reached out for the uspec’s anger and there was nothing. It was gone. The uspec had spent it all. I scooped some gruel into my mouth, with my bread, and used the chewing to distract from the smile which had formed on my face from the jolt of power.

Not only could I transfer emotions, I could spend them. It seemed that I could make an uspec use all of its emotions at once, in one big reaction.

“Salutations my friend.”

My head snapped up. I met the uspec’s gaze and was surprised to see it smiling at me. I did not return its smile, I simply stared at it, wondering what it wanted.

Its voice lowered. “I am Uspecipyte my friend.” It said as if sharing a dangerous secret. “Tiyoseriwosin?”

I did not reply. I was tempted to. I had heard the strange words so many times now that I was starting to wonder what they were and why everyone seemed to care so much about them. I wanted to know what it meant to be ‘uspecipyte’ and what the question ‘tiyoseriwosin’ asked. But I didn’t ask. I had no intention of making friends with this uspec. Instead of responding, I took my attention back to my gruel.

“The Kuworytes despise you.” It said conversationally, as if taking my lack of response as a prompt for more discourse. “They hate your guts. An irira killing the best fighters in the pits. If you continue like this, the Uspecipytes will worship you and the Kuworytes will plot to have you killed. Not that they will, mind you, not when the birthplace of Hakute must remain above the chasm. Tell me my friend, how does it feel to bear the sole responsibility of exposing the hypocrisy of this place?”

I stabbed my bread into the bowl, scooped up some more gruel, and stuffed it into my mouth.

The uspec chuckled. “How it must kill them to have to support an irira. The founder’s justice comes for us all, my friend, it comes for us all.”

I rose my head up to meet the uspec’s gaze and the questions almost fizzled out of me. Luckily, I was stopped from indulging in my sudden desire to accept the friendship the uspec offered. Two wardens walked into the eating room holding an imp in their hands. This imp was different from all the other imps I’d seen serving in the pits. Unlike the others, it had both of its eyes, and none of the black streaks on its skin. It looked as it would have in its umani life.

The wardens pushed the imp to the ground and every uspec in the room seemed to freeze.

“Same rules.” A warden announced gruffly. “If you take an eye you keep it. If you have two imp eyes, you gain spectral magic and are free from the pits.”

There was silence. No one moved. All eyes seemed to be fixed on the imp. The imp cast nervous eyes around the room. It made a pathetic choking sound as it begged. It had its hands together, but it spoke in a tongue which I could not understand. Not that I needed to, its gesturing was easy to comprehend.

An uspec sitting across the room stood.

That uspec was followed by another and then another. Until almost every uspec in the room was standing.

All at once they ran towards the imp. They descended on it. They fought each other, grabbing onto ailerons and pulling uspecs away in their hurry to get to the imp. It didn’t take long before I heard the imp screaming. I could feel its pain. It was strong, so strong I was tempted to take it, for no other reason than the joy of transferring the emotion. I refrained.

I watched the mass of uspecs fighting over the imp. The pain emanating from the fight was enticing. I could feel different lifeforces. Some were sharp, some dull. Some felt like the pains associated with a fatal wound, others were mild, the result of innocuous blows.

A small object emerged from the group as if thrown. The object rose up in the air and then landed on our table. I blinked when I saw what it was.

It was one of the imp’s eyes.

My hand moved towards it, drawn to the eye out of an overwhelming desire to once again fill my outer eye-sockets with an imp eye and be one step closer to gaining the understandings that came with the different spectrums.

My hand was just a few paces away from the eye when I felt a bolt of pain. I stared dumbfounded at my hand and the piece of the broken material sticking out of it. I rose my eye to the uspec who’d called me friend.

It didn’t even look at me, not even to offer a token apology for stabbing me. It just grabbed the imp eye from the table and shoved it into one of its outer eye sockets. The imp eye went from white to black and then a very light shade of blue.

Once I saw the color of the eye, I knew what would follow.

The uspec shook forcefully and then it collapsed. Its head fell onto the table. White foam came out of its mouth and blood seeped out of its center eye. The blue imp eye popped out of the socket and turned into dust once it hit the table.

I looked at the dead uspec and shook my head.

I stood up, pulled the shard it had stabbed me with out of my hand, and walked out of the eating room. I remembered then the trader’s warnings against trying to take the wrong imp eye. An imp eye could only be used if the imp’s umani life had either begun or ended in the same plane as the uspec who tried to take it. They had never said that taking the wrong one could kill an uspec. There was a lot that the traders had not said.

I sighed, removing the dead uspec from my mind. I had more important things to focus on. I had emotions to master and fighting to learn.

I'm so happy that everyone is enjoying it, because although it started out as a Novella, I don't think it will end that way lol. I'm learning that I don't know how to write Novellas. This is definitely looking like a novel. I don't think it will be as long as the in-between, but it will definitely be as long as the awakening. That being said, I'm really excited about it, it's turning out to be a lot more fun than I originally anticipated...well, at least it's fun to write, I'm counting on y'all to tell me if it remains fun to read Thank you!

@elyna thank you! Glad you like it

@Fazemood lol, thank you. To be honest I miss Osezele and Nosa too, but I'm pretty sure that this story will enhance the series (at least I hope so)

@Peaceyw hehe. I'm taking your speechlessness as a compliment so thank you

@monalicious Thanks so much. I'm so glad you're getting into the story, hopefully it hooks you even more as we go on. It's already hooked me

Part 5
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It wasn’t till I left the arena that I realized the level of pain I was in. My head throbbed, pounding as if Killman’s blows had been absorbed and were now being recreated within me. I could feel the trickle of blood flowing from my side, from the wound which Killman’s horn had inflicted upon me. I stood still, too wary, or perhaps too indifferent to care. At that moment I did not care where I was or what awful fate would befall me next. I cared nothing for nothing, and I almost considered slinking to the side to sit and rest my head against the walls while the blood dripped out of me. I considered letting myself bleed to death, it seemed a much easier fate than the one that now loomed over me: the promise of a life fighting for the entertainment of others.

Then footsteps sounded and I turned to find the curtains shoved aside and two wardens walking in. I noticed as they approached me that I hadn’t even taking the time to study my surroundings. As the wardens moved towards me, their batons swinging from their belts, I took my time to study the small pentagon shaped room. The walls and ceiling were the same dark shade of brown as sludge, but the ground was different. The ground was light brown, it was the color of quicksand.

In a part of my mind I was aware of the fact that the quicksand from the arena had brought me here, to this strange furniture-less room, but I hadn’t connected the dots. I could not imagine how it worked yet, that is, how the quicksand knew when to act as the portal for teleportation and when not to, but I finally knew how the journey from the cells to the arena was made.

The wardens stopped in front of me. Both of their hands went instantly to rest on the head of the batons hanging from their belts, as if they expected a fight from me. My apathetic eye rose to study the sneering faces of the wardens. With very little care, I noted that these wardens looked just like the previous wardens I’d seen. They had all of their outer eyes formed and none of them filled. They were big, but not as imposing as either of the uspecs I had faced in the pits. And from the looks on their faces they found me to be as revolting as the first pious one.

I did not care.

I took my gaze from their disgusted faces to the curtain they’d walked through.

“Come.” One of the wardens snapped. It turned and begun to march forward. For a moment I stood still, my body too tired and in too much pain to crave any sudden movement. I paid for my lethargy when the second warden pulled out its baton and slammed into the side of my head.

There was an explosion of pain in me as I absorbed the blow. But I found myself dwelling on something else, I dwelled on the lifeforce I felt. It was not as it had been before, it was somehow different this time, as if the lifeforce hadn’t been born anew, but instead had simply being alive in me the whole time and I had been too out of my mind to care. Whatever had prevented me from noticing it was gone, as the lifeforce remained alive in me even as the sharp pain from the warden’s blow receded to a dull ache.

Suddenly, I was infused with new life. The lifeforce burnt in me with an energy that I could not explain. It did not take away any of my pain, it just seemed to make me more aware of the pain within me, showing me that there was more to the pain than just pain.

I began walking, distractedly following the warden as I let the lifeforce educate me. It was as if the lifeforce was one with the pain, but also different, like a superior member of the same species. I focused on the pain in my side and somehow became aware that the wound, while dangerous, would not kill me in seconds. I had at least an hour of slow bleeding before I would exsanguinate. Next, I turned my attention to my head and learnt that although it felt as if my brain was being split in half, there was no serious damage which I wouldn’t recover from with time.

I stopped focusing on the pain then. I hadn’t realized how much focus had gone into the communication I’d had with the lifeforce until I was out of it and my dazed eye blinked, taking in the new surroundings.

“...but that is where you go to clean.” The warden leading me seemed to be finishing up a conversation as it pointed at a sludge covered path which led to large curtains. It turned to the left and I blinked wondering how we could have moved so much without me noticing.

In that moment I had a terrible premonition of how dangerous it could be to get lost in my lifeforce. It was different from speaking through my lifeforce to other people’s pain, when I had done that I had remained in full awareness. But in examining my own pain, I had lost all consciousness of my surroundings. It was a knowledge that filled me with so much trepidation I chose to focus instead on the path in front of me.

We walked into a large circular room. The curtains leading into this room were pulled back giving unobstructed access into it. There were several large benches and tables scattered around it. There were several uspecs seated on these benches. They had bowls in front of them and they ate the gruel in those bowls with pieces of bread. I couldn’t help noticing how silent the room was. There was no conversation, no light-hearted discourse as the uspecs ate. Some of the uspecs broke from their meals to watch me and I could feel the hatred emanating from them. One stood, stared pointed at the scales on my neck and spat onto the sludge in the ground. Then it walked out.

I was not even a little bothered by its obvious derision for me. I turned my focus to the front of the room, where four imps stood behind a smaller table with two large black pots on it. These imps like all the other imps I’d seen in the pits were naked.

I veered to the right, following the warden leading me.

“You eat here.” The warden said monotonically before pulling aside the much smaller curtains and walking through them. The curtains fell from the uspec’s hands and snapped shut in my face. I pushed the curtains aside and let them fall after me, taking a bit of pleasure at the grunt the second warden let out when the curtain closed in front of it.

We walked down a narrow walkway which led to yet another set of curtains. The warden held back the curtains but remained standing on the other side of the room. It gestured with its head, making sure I knew that I was to go in. I walked into the room and the curtains fell behind me.

Two new wardens stood inside of the room, by the curtains. I spotted them through my peripheral vision, but my attention was too focused on the room in which I stood, to pay close attention to them.

The room was filled with the stench of herbs and spices. There were two rows of bed-like structures and on three of these structures lay unconscious uspecs, with different bandages wound around various parts of their bodies. I concluded that I was in an infirmary even though I had never been in one before. The row facing me was sparser than the one closest to the wall, it had three large spaces between the beds with curtains obstructing my view of the rooms behind them. There were more curtains to either side of the room.

I began moving forward, drawn to study these large bed-like structures, but a warden’s bark stopped me.

“Wait.” It said.

And so I stood, resigned to study the beds from my current position. I noted that the beds were higher, much higher than any beds I had seen before, and that they had a seemingly soft brown material on top of them. The awing part was that the beds had holes in them, with a net like material which dropped underneath them. I looked at the uspecs who lay on the beds and noticed how their bodies lined up so that their ailerons fell through the holes and into the nets. I gawked at it.

One of the curtains in the wall in front of me was pushed open and a slender uspec walked out of it. The uspec’s gaze was behind it as it walked into the main room. It nodded at the room it walked out of and turned to face me.

Another pious one.

I clenched my fist and fought down the storm of anger which filled me.

The pious one walked towards me. It had a straight face and four filled outer eyes. It stared at me with speculation.

“Fools!” the pious one screamed when it stopped in front of me. It poked at the flesh around the wound on my side and screamed at the wardens. “Fools! You leave a bleeding uspec standing? Fools!” It turned wide eyes to the curtain it had just walked out of and yelled, “Thelma!”

An imp ran out from behind the curtains as the pious one continued its close inspection of me. I began to relax when I studied the symbols on the pious one’s fraise and noticed that it was of a different order from the previous pious ones I’d met. It was of the order of Remediation. They were the healers.

“Master?”

“Take it to Ward 1.” The pious one commanded.

“Yes master.”

I followed the imp as it led me away from the curious sight of a pious one scolding two uspecs for their careless treatment of me. Granted, the pious one’s scolding did not come from a place of personal concern for me, but it came from an impartial concern for an injured uspec and that was just as gratifying. The pious one had not seen an irira, it had seen an uspec.

The imp held a curtain open and I walked into a smaller room. This room had a single tall bed on one side of a drawn curtain. I made to move to the other side of the curtain, but the imp stopped me with softly spoken words.

“Please lay here domina.” It said, gesturing towards the bed.

I turned to the imp and frowned at it. I could not imagine what my face looked like as I made my displeasure at its interference known, but the imp did not seem the least bit perturbed. It smiled at me instead. I shook my head, my frowning becoming even more severe as I studied the smiling imp’s face. I could not imagine what it meant by the genuine smile. I could feel its concern. An imp concerned for me…it was disconcerting.

“Please lay here domina and I will treat the wound in your side. It must be very unpleasant, yes? Just lay here and I will make it better.” It tapped the bed, and I found my feet moving towards it. With narrowed eyes, I watched the imp closely as I sat on the bed, wondering what its motives were. Kind deference from an imp was not something I was used to.

I lay stiffly, feeling the odd sensation of my back lying on a surface which was not my ailerons. The ailerons fell into the nets underneath me and I had to admit that these beds were more comfortable. It was strange to fill my back against the soft material, very strange indeed.

The pious one burst into the ward muttering, “dumb oafs” underneath its breath. It came directly towards me and placed a hand on my forehead. I couldn’t help gazing up at it and wondering what it was doing even as it calmly commanded, “sleep now.”

Instantly, mind went dark as if driven into slumber by the pious one’s words.

I woke to the sounds of hushed voices. I blinked languidly, my mind searching frantically to recall where I was. I turned and felt the restriction of my ailerons hitting against the edges of the holes carved into the bed. I remembered where I was then. I remembered the fight with Killman and the infirmary I’d been taken to. As soon as the memories came, I expected the pain to come back too.

I waited for that, but there was nothing. No pain, it was all gone. But the lifeforce remained alive in me.

I was just about to sit up in the bed when I heard the sound of a curtain drawing and feet moving in the sludge. On a whim I closed my eye and pretended to be asleep.

“It will live then?” A familiar voice asked. It did not sound happy.

“Yes Maxad, it will live.” Another somewhat familiar voice replied. The uspec sounded piqued. “Excuse me.” I heard footsteps and then the sounds of the curtain being drawn and falling back into place.

“We should kill it.”

A voice laughed. “Do you fear it so Maxad?” This voice was new, completely unfamiliar.

“I do not fear it Takabat.” The familiar voice spat out venomously. “I am only speaking reason. Look at what it inspired in the arena. Regardless of what goes on outside the pits, there has always been peace within. The last time the irira fought the uspecs almost brought the bloodshed in here. We cannot let that happen again. The birthplace of Hakute must remain above the chasm.”

The unfamiliar voice laughed again. “Maxad, Maxad, you cannot push your Kuworyte agenda in here. It is forbidden. Like you said, the birthplace of Hakute must remain above the chasm.”

There was a heavy silence.

“Takabat,” the familiar voice was slow, deliberate, “are you declaring yourself Uspecipyte?”

There was a tsking sound followed by chuckling. “Of course not Maxad, I am simply saying that the birthplace of Hakute must remain above the chasm.”

A sigh. “What do you say Gerangi?”

I almost stopped breathing when I heard the familiar name. I froze, and then I worried that the pious one Gerangi would be able to sense that I was awake.

“Think Maxad, the irira cannot die outside the arena. The birthplace of Hakute must remain neutral, above the chasm. This irira is the first bone we’ve had to throw to the Uspecipytes. If it dies, it must die where they can see the cause of death and not blame us.”

Silence. “You are right Gerangi, wise as always. Perhaps we can help the irira along in its death. A little bit of pansophy and the irira will go down easy in its next fight. Only the founder knows how its survived this long.”

“I forbid it.”

A gasp. “Careful Takabat, your true colors are beginning to show.”

“I am the second prelate in this order, and I forbid it. If anything is done to this irira I will know, and I will have your head for it Maxad. That is an oath. I swear it by the founder.”

The words were followed by the sound of angry footsteps storming out of the ward, and then the curtains falling.

“I long for the day when that lineage is brought down. They are all Uspecipytes you know, all of them, to the last unworthy one. It still boggles my imagination that that nonentity Fajahromo had the gall to come here and make demands of me. Fajahromo brought this irira to me and now its sibling, Takabat, fights so resolutely for it. What do you think they plan to do with it? Why are they so invested?”

“Your guess is as good as mine Maxad.” Gerangi replied.

I could place them now. Maxad was the pious one who had taken me from Fajahromo, it was the one I hated. I did not yet know how I felt about Gerangi.

“How has it survived? How does an untrained de trop kill two of our best fighters? It is impossible…” Maxad broke off. “Unless…it cannot be, can it?”

“You speak in riddles Maxad.” Gerangi replied.

“Can it be kun?” Maxad asked. “Is it possible?”

Gerangi inhaled sharply. “It would be detrimental to the birthplace of Hakute if a kun born here was sent to the slums. I would think carefully before voicing that again Maxad.” Gerangi’s voice sounded strained as each word was pronounced carefully and distinctly.

Maxad sighed in resignation. “Of course, you are right my friend. Of course. The irira will die then, soon. Luck can only take one such as this so far.” I heard footsteps leaving then, and the sound of the curtain being drawn.

I waited a few moments before daring to open my eye, just in case there was anyone left. My patience paid off. I was just about to open my eye when I felt a soft touch on my head. For the second time since I woke, I froze.

As soon as the uspec touched me I felt my thoughts being taken. It was as if someone had reached into my mind and pulled out the thoughts in my head, leaving me with a frightful feeling of emptiness. Then suddenly, the thoughts were returned making me question if they’d ever been gone. I heard footsteps leaving and as soon as the footsteps left, I heard Gerangi’s voice in my head.

“Master it my friend. There is only so much luck that is believable. Master the emotions, they can be controlled. Do not simply yank, seep, that is, take in bits, control the uspec by controlling its emotions and then every adversary you face in the pits turns from a foe to a potential instructor. Let them teach you how to fight and then slowly wean yourself off using the emotions to win. Learn my friend, and you just might live long enough to make it out of the pits.”

I jumped to a sitting position in my bed, my eye flying open as I took in the room. All of the uspecs were gone and I was alone, just me and Gerangi’s words in my head. I was short of words. How was it possible? How did Gerangi know about my control of emotions? How was it able to put its words into my head? It was as if it had simply taken my thoughts and returned them with an added thought of its own. But how was such possible? This was nothing like the spectral magic I had been told of by the passing traders. Nothing at all.

But as I settled back into a lying position on my bed, I reflected on the uspec’s words. Of course, it was right. I couldn’t rely on the emotions completely, because I could be caught. And if I was caught, something told me Maxad wouldn’t have a hard time convincing uspecs to kill me then. I didn’t understand most of the pious ones’ conversation, but I understood that Maxad wanted me dead and I was loath to give it what it wanted.

I would live long enough to kill it. I just had to ‘master it’ Gerangi’s words rose in my head. ‘Learn my friend,’ Gerangi’s voice said, and suddenly I started to believe that it really was my friend. I did not trust it, not as I had Fajahromo, but I allowed that it may not mean harm to me as the other pious one did.

Part 4
-------

I woke in much the same state as I had been the first time I fought in the pits. I was lying in the shallow pool of the okun. This time I fared much better as I was already aware of my surroundings. I pushed myself off the floor and the pain I felt was almost enough to send me back into the okun. Gritting my teeth, I tried to ignore the pain, choosing instead to take my attention to the study of the crowds which had come to watch me fight. I hadn’t thought it possible for the stands to be any fuller, but they were.

This time, my presence was met with silence. There were no avid fans screaming out my name at the top of their lungs as they had after the last fight I’d won. But there was also no laughing. There was no jeering, not taunting calls for the death of an irira. It was as if the entire populace of people there were waiting, as if they could not imagine my presence and so they waited to see if I was a myth or a legend. As an uspec who had lived off stories told of the fights in the pits, I could imagine how the retelling of my last fight must have gone. And so I could hazard a guess as to the queries plaguing the viewers’ minds.

Had they come to see yet another myth disproved? Would I show myself for the weakling they expected me to be and by so doing grant them a peaceful return to the normalcy they craved? Or had they come to see a legend born? Could I make the impossible possible?

I took my gaze from the crowds to the hole which was forming in the okun. I watched my challenger arrive with a feeling of feverish anticipation. I was not eager to fight, but I was eager to feel the lifeforce in my pain. When I had found the anger, I had been in so much of a rage that I could not enjoy the lifeforce, could not luxuriate in my seeming ability to communicate with the emotion. But the pain would be different. I knew it.

The silence in the arena grew. It was a pregnant silence, one heavy with expectations. Who would it be? I wondered. It was not as if I knew any of the fighters’ names, but I had an inkling that if it was an important uspec, the crowds would inform me.

I saw cyan horns first. Over ten cyan horns emerged from the ground. The horns sprouted from the uspec’s scalp. They took me back to the day in my slum when Junte had stabbed the imp. I knew that it had only been mere days ago, but it felt like the slum was a different lifetime.

As soon as the rest of the uspec’s head emerged from the ground, the crowds went crazy.

“Killman!” they screamed. “Killman!” they chanted its name differently than they had Juwara. “Killman!” the screams became even more frantic as the uspec emerged fully from the ground.

It stood in front of me in the okun and I took my time to look over it. The uspec was about the same build as the warriors who’d flown into the slum. It was not a giant like Juwara. It had long strong arms which would have no difficulty in strangling me to death. Large ailerons emerged from its back, but I could not tell how filled they were. It had strong feet and a face with all its outer eye-sockets formed. Like Juwara, none of the outer eye sockets on the uspec’s face were filled. It was not irira, as the only features it had were the horns, the distinct features of the mejo spectrum.

I gaped with fascination at the horns. They were impressive, by far larger than the horn which Junte had had. Some of the horns curved slightly, some seemed straight, almost like the spikes I had seen on Fajahromo’s chest, and some bent in strange wriggles.

Killman smiled and then did something that I had not expected. It jumped up, landing with a large splash which sent liquid all over the front of my body. Then it began to run around the edges of the arena egging the sycophantic screams of the crowds. When it had entered the arena they cheered it as if it were a star, some sort of legend which lived in the tales of stories passed on for generations. Now they cheered it as if it were a god. It was disgusting to watch.

Killman stopped in front of me. It smiled a patronizing smile of false sympathy as it asked in a booming voice, “are you ready to die my friend?” Its voice was strained, as if the muscles in its throat had to work more than they desired to force the foreign tongue out. But it had spoken in the kute tongue and so I could understand it perfectly.

I did not speak.

Killman did not seem interested in my response, or lack thereof. It turned around to face the screaming throng and yelled, “are you ready to see the irira die? Are you ready to see Killman kill it?”

The mob screamed even louder. “Killman!” they roared. “Killman!!” They yelled, but they refrained from answering its question. Unlike the last time when they’d been begging Juwara to take my life, this time they did not mention me at all.

“Then I will oblige.” Killman screamed, as if it had taken their answers as an affirmative. It grabbed onto two slightly bent horns on the edges of its head and it pulled the horns out. Then it ran towards me.

My eye darted over to the stands and there it was.

I blinked a couple of times as the noise of the crowds faded away when our eyes met. It stood in the first row among one section of uspecs. It stood out from the other uspecs around it because it was the only one with the golden bands around its arms.

A surge of pleasure rose in me when Fajahromo smiled. I knew that I had been right all along. Suddenly, I felt guilty for the doubts which had been in my mind, I felt guilty for considering that this uspec had not truly considered me a friend. Because here it was, here to free me from the pits. I vowed never to lose hope in it again.

Then my head snapped to the side so violently I had to push myself to the other side to keep from falling. I blinked, dazed by the violent blow which I’d received from Killman. That punch took my attention back to the fight. But even as the pain exploded in my head, a new resolve had come alive in me. Fajahromo was back, I thought with hopeful glee, Fajahromo was back to set me free.

Killman’s hand swiped in the air bringing the sharp end of the horn to close contact with my stomach. I lurched backwards just in time to miss the weapon. Its other hand was already drawing closer. I side stepped when its left hand came towards my face, and dodged the blow it had aimed at me.

My eye darted to Fajahromo. I noted that it no longer stood alone. Raban stood beside it. Even from so far off I could see the crazy eyes fixated on me. It was almost as if Raban was panting in its excitement for the fight.

As I returned my attention to the fight, a pang of fear begun to rise in me. Where was the lifeforce in my pain? I wondered. I was in more pain than I had been in the past few days. Each movement I made seemed to spur the pain further, but I stayed on my feet, dodging Killman’s blows with a deftness brought on by a sheer desire to live which I hadn’t felt for a long time.

Killman seemed to be adapting to my evasive moves, because it faked an attack from its left side, which had me swerving to the right and then it stuck its sharp horn into my side.

A loud cry came out from my mouth before I could lock my lips trapping the sound within me.

Pain exploded in me.

And in the midst of that pain I found myself smiling. It will come, I thought, finally the lifeforce would come. And so, I just stood there, my arms hanging uselessly from my sides, my body racked over with so much pain that I could not move even if I had wished to. I stood and awaited the awakening of my lifeforce.

I waited in vain.

Killman’s hand wrapped around my neck and it laughed. It lifted me up in the air and I felt myself shake from the force of the guffaws it released. It laughed so hard and so heartily it felt as if the entire arena would vibrate from the sheer force of the laughter. Suddenly, the entire place filled with laughter. Over a thousand voices all laughing at me.

Broken and resigned, my eye darted towards Fajahromo. It did not look surprised. Unlike the previous times when our eyes had met, it did not smile. There was no tilting of its lips, no gesture of friendship. My heart ached with a sense of loss I had never experienced before. I heard the crowds laugh and the sound only served to chafe my already raw feelings.

Just lifting my arm to Killman’s face seemed like an insurmountable task, but I was determined. I was determined to fight back, determined to put that smile back on Fajahromo’s face and get my friend back. I put all the strength I could muster behind the blow which landed on Killman’s distracted face.

The uspec’s shocked gaze locked on me. It was as if it had not expected me to fight back at all. It frowned, displeased by the token effort I put up, and it did not leave me guessing long as to what its retribution would be. Killman pulled me forward and slammed its forehead into mine. The pain was so much I felt my eye moisten. I swallowed the tears, disgusted with my body for daring to produce them in the first place.

Killman pulled me back then, and slammed its large fist into my face. It held me up so that I was at the perfect height to receive the blows and then it just punched and punched and punched until I was sure of death. I had thought that the pain I’d subjected myself to in the past days had been a torment, but Killman taught me new depths of pain which I had thought impossible. With each blow of its hard hand against my fragile head, I wished for the oblivion, for the defense my body had retreated behind during previous moments of intense pain.

But as each new blow landed, sending my body into new heights of torture, I realized the real repercussions of what I had put myself through over the past few days. Contrary to forcing the lifeforce in my pain out, which had been my intention, I had instead taught my body to withstand it. I had taught my body that unconsciousness was not a recourse to overwhelming amounts of pain. I had taught my mind to stay alert.

I was a fool.

Killman released me and I fell on my stomach in the okun. The liquid rushed into my mouth when I landed, and the pains I felt rose to new heights when I made contact with the hard floor. But I had gotten a respite from the assault. Or at least so I thought.

Killman grabbed onto my tail and lifted me up by it. “Irira!” it screamed. My gaze remained fixed below as my arms and legs hung uselessly beneath me. Drops of my blood fell from the gash in the wound Killman had made and landed into the okun. I watched with a glum sense of fascination as the drop of blood became indistinguishable in the pink liquid. Was this why the arena was an okun? So that blood wouldn’t stain the ground?

“Irira no more!” Killman promised.

I could not imagine what the uspec meant by those words until I felt the sharp end of its horn tear into the base of my tail, ripping the side off. I jerked in reaction, straining Killman’s grip on me. Killman released me. This time I fell on the tail which had just been cut. I fell into a sitting position, and the hard ground underneath the okun pushed the ripped edge of my tail into my body.

My mind went blank.

This was pain to a degree which surpassed the paltry blows which Killman had given me. The pain of my own tail being forced into my body seemed to be my undoing. Apparently, there was a level of pain that even I could not endure. So, as I felt my mind go blank, I smiled, happy to know that I would wake in possession of the ultimate freedom, one only death could provide.

My mind slipped, my eye closed, and I was just at the fringes of consciousness when I felt the lifeforce.

The lifeforce snapped me out of it, pulling me back to full consciousness. That was when I felt it.

It was all around me. There was so much pain surrounding me. Suddenly, I could feel it all. I could sense the pains of hundreds of whipped imps, of battered uspecs, of wronged uspecs, of lonely uspecs, of desolate uspecs. All the pain combined, and I reached for it. I reached out through my pain to take the pains of the frantically screaming mob, and I gave it to Killman.

The pains of thousands of people all settled on a single uspec.

Killman howled as if it was deranged. It stepped back, moving away from me and dropped the horns it had fisted in its hands. It swiveled, turning its back to me, and then howled, crying out over and over again. But the frenzied mob just swallowed up its bellows and screamed even louder as if interpreting Killman’s cries for cheers.

I saw my opportunity and so I seized it.

I jumped to my feet, ignoring the pain the action wrought, and bent to grab the horns that Killman had dropped. I ran over to the uspec and tore into its flesh, slashing at the back of its knees.

Killman howled and the crowd went silent.

Killman dropped to its knees in the okun. I released the horn in my left hand and grabbed a hold of one of the horns in Killman’s head. I used that horn to tilt Killman’s head backwards and then I dug the horn in my right hand into its throat. I pulled the horn out and repeated my actions. I stabbed its neck as if I was crazed. I could feel the energy of the mob change as blood poured out of Killman’s neck, but I did not stop until I could no longer feel it twitch.

Then I released the uspec, and it fell into the okun.

“Irira!” the chant started slowly.

“Irira!” it was picked up.

“Irira!” they cheered with new vigor. “Irira.” They repeated. “Irira! Irira! Irira!”

I turned in a bit of a daze as I noticed the three sections on their feet jumping and screaming out my name. My gaze scanned quickly over the mob, but they held no interest to me. Their chants brushed off my skin. There was only one uspec’s applause I craved.

Again, my eye darted to where Fajahromo stood with Raban. In the back of my mind, I noticed that that section of uspecs were the only ones not cheering for me. I noticed that while the imps and other uspecs screamed, yelling and jumping, the uspecs in the section Fajahromo stood gave me menacing looks filled with disgust.

“Hair of horns and a chest of iron.” A lone voice begun the chant from the section behind me, the section of uspecs who had been cheering me on.

“Irira!” more voices joined in.

“Skirt of tails and a neck of scales. Irira!” The voices boomed now, and it was almost as if every single uspec behind me was singing.

The uspecs in the section Fajhromo stood in begun to riot. “Sacrilege!” they yelled. “Sacrilege!” They screamed for silence and made threatening motions towards the other uspecs, but the ones behind me would not stop singing.

“Not one but all. Not weak but strong.
Say you, ‘Tiyoseriwosin?’
Say I, ‘Uspecipyte’.”

The uspecs in Fajahromo’s section were livid. Some of them flung themselves at the fog and were instantly repelled by it. They tried to break through the fog which surrounded their section, but they could not. The light fog was an inviolable barrier, and as the frenzied uspecs tried to reach through it, I finally understood what the fog was there for.

Their efforts did not stop the group of uspecs behind me from singing.

“I am iron strong, unbreakable, I see you shake.
Standing my ground, while I hear you quake.
Against me you set your best?
Apologies, but to death they are next.
Say you, ‘Tiyoseriwosin?’
Say I, ‘Uspecipyte’.”

After the song was done the uspecs returned to their chant of, “irira!”

And somehow, on some level, I understood that I was the reason for the sudden rift which had formed between both sections. I also understood that the rift must have existed before which was why the uspecs had been broken into sections, but I could not understand how I had accomplished the task of inciting such a riot. Not that I put much thought into it.

All of my focus was on Fajahromo who had returned to smiling at me. Even Raban screamed. Although, what and why it screamed I could not tell, but it screamed and clapped and laughed, and in that moment, I did not mind Raban’s insanity. I smiled at my friend and waited for Fajahromo to tear through the fog with its progenitor’s warriors and free me from the pits.

I waited patiently with a smile on my face.

And for the second time that day, my wait proved in vain.

Fajahromo nodded at me and then it turned around and walked away. Raban followed, clapping excitedly. While I was left there, and all I could do was stare.

I am ashamed to say that I was so desolate, so heart-broken that my eye filled with moisture.

I pushed it back. I would not cry, I did not know what it was in me that was so disgusted by tears, but I would not cry. In my entire life, I had never been as close to tears as I had been as I watched Fajahromo leave, but I did not succumb to them. Instead, I finally learnt the lesson I should have learnt when it left me at the behest of the pious one. I learnt that it was not my friend.

I learnt that an uspec could not be trusted solely because it was irira as I was. I learnt that uspec’s had layers and masks of deceit, and thus to put one’s freedom in another’s hands was insanity. My heart turned cold and I dreamt of the day that I would make Fajahromo pay.

The liquid in the okun pulled back, forming a hole in the ground. The hole which was revealed showed a hard ground covered with sludge. That sludge turned slowly from dark brown mud to light brown quicksand. I knew it was meant for me and so I stepped into it, resigned to spend the rest of my life in the pits, loathing the uspecs who’d put me here.

@Rynne thanks for joining the party I'm honored to have you back. Hope you enjoy!!!

Part 3
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A blunt object poked at my ailerons. I fidgeted on the hard bed in an attempt to chase the poking object away. But as I turned in my bed, I felt an explosion of pain. Everything hurt. My head, my body, my legs, every part of me felt like it was under attack, as if tiny creatures had entered into me and were gnawing away at my insides. My first instinct was to yelp, to share my discomfort with my surroundings, but I didn’t.

As I woke, I remembered my last moments of consciousness. I remembered the fight in the pits. And even though I could not remember how I had done it, I remembered that I had killed the best fighter in the pits. It all seemed to have happened in a blur. One minute I was preparing myself to die and then next I was possessed by an anger so consuming that it devoured every other emotion in me. I remembered fleeting moments of pain accompanying the anger, but when I was in its throes, the anger had overshadowed the pain.

I remembered the lifeforce in the anger. I remember feeling as if there was a language I shared with the anger and being able to communicate with the anger. It hadn’t felt as if I could control it per se, it had felt more as if I could cajole it. As if I could ask it to move. And it had, the anger had moved when I wanted it to. It had left the giant uspec, giving me the opportunity to kill the greatest uspec in the pits.

But this was strange, because I had never heard of a thing like this before. The entirety of my education came from traders, and the traders had discussed spectral magic. They had talked in detail about the different spectrums and the magic that they could get once they gained the understanding, but they had never mentioned communicating with emotions. They had said that certain emotions were tied to certain spectrums, but never that emotions had a life, that they could be spoken to and reasoned with as I had Juwara’s anger. The traders had never said that.

So, as the pain rose to new heights in me, I found myself twisting even more to increase it. With each movement I made the pain sharpened. But I had a theory. I was a kute-hooni crossbreed. I knew that the hooni emotion was anger. So, if there was a lifeforce in anger and I could reach it, then I must be able to reach the lifeforce in the emotion tied to the kute spectrum. I had to be able to find the lifeforce in my pain. It was just possible that I had never been able to reach the lifeforce in pain because I had never been able to stay conscious long enough to feel it.

Anger was different from pain.

When I felt rage, it motivated me, strengthened me. It kept me alert and kept me driven towards revenge. Pain seemed to have the opposite effect on me. When I felt pain, it was as if my body preferred to shut down to spare me of it. As if my mind had deemed me too weak to manage the pain and as such it was shielding me from it. I refused to oblige my mind as such. I wanted to feel the lifeforce in the pain. I wanted to know if it existed, and to see if it could be of use to me.

It was plainly evident to me, that for me to communicate with another uspec’s pain, the lifeforce in mine had to come out. I assumed that it worked the same way as my anger, and I had only been able to speak to the other uspec’s anger when mine was dominant, when mine was alive.

I continued to writhe on my bed, exposing myself to more and more pain. My mind began to grow foggy, but I gritted my teeth and tried to force myself to stay alert. I was so satiated with pain that I paid little heed to the finger poking at my aileron. I continued to writhe.

“Stop it.” A voice said.

I refused the voice. It was trying to deny me the lifeforce in my pain. I had to find it, I had to teach my mind to stay alert long enough to reach it.

Hands grabbed onto me and held me down. Those hands held me immobile, stopping my body from moving. I felt a spark of anger rise in me, and as it did, the fogginess in my mind receded. That inspired me. I realized then that I had to combine the both of them, to stay alert long enough for the pain to reach the front. At least until I trained my mind to endure the pain and then I wouldn’t need the anger.

I was eager to get started. But I had to deal with the hands first.

I opened my eye, tilting my head upward so that I could see the uspecs holding me down. A wave of anger rose in me when I saw that it was imps. As soon as my gaze locked on the imp’s eyeless face, it took its hands off me and ran away. I noticed that all the hands holding me had suddenly gone and I heard the sounds of feet slapping against sludge.

I clenched my jaw, welcoming the pain as I forced myself up from my lying position, to sit on the bed.

The bed.

I frowned realizing that a lot had changed. I had a bed. I was not in the room with the other iriras all waiting to rot to death. I was in another room. This room was so much smaller, but it had a bed, and a curtain draped over the entrance. The imps stood horded together as far away from me as they could get. Even though they had no eyes for me to read, I could see the fear in their posturing as they stuck to the wall.

I smiled. I had now become an uspec that imps feared. It was long overdue.

I took my attention to the other side of the room, and was taken aback when I noticed an uspec sitting on a stool in front of me. The uspec had all of its eye sockets formed and four of its outer eyes filled. My gaze went to its neck and I saw the fraise. Another pious one.

“Salutations pious one.” I greeted apathetically. The greeting was perfunctory, it came from years of learning of a society with the customs and rules of a hierarchy that we de trop never planned to need but were forced to learn regardless.

The pious one’s face was emotionless. It did not stare at me with the scorn I had come to expect from the religious. It must know that I was irira, so why did it not make it clear that I was disgusting?

“Tiyoseriwosin?” the pious one asked.

I was dumbfounded. It took me a long time to remember that the word the pious one spoke came from the song that I had sung when I had been trying to get away from the rotting iriras. I remembered the exact line from the song then, and I remembered the line that came after, but I refrained from using it, choosing the truth instead.

“Forgive me pious one, but I do not know what it means.” I confessed flatly.

The pious one smiled and then it burst out laughing. It laughed for so long and so hard that I worried I had another Raban on my hands. Was this another crazy uspec? I had not even known that crazy uspecs were possible, but if the Kaiser’s offspring could be crazy, I was certain it was more common than I’d thought.

The uspec sobered. “Salutations.” It greeted. It had a smile on its face. The smile reminded me of Fajahromo, not because it was similar, but because it was so different. Unlike Fajahromo’s, the pious one’s smile felt warmer somehow.

I did not smile back.

“What is your name?” the pious one asked.

I almost replied, spitting out my name, but then I stopped myself. I don’t know why I did, I couldn’t think of what was suddenly so precious about my name, but I felt the need to protect it. I remembered the chants of the mob after I’d won my fight and I replied, “I am irira.”

The pious one pulled back in shock. The smile on its face wavered. “I know what you are. I am asking who you are.” It said.

“I am irira.” I repeated.

It sighed. And then nodded as if in acceptance. The pious one turned to the imps by the curtain and tilted its head towards them. Two imps left. My gaze went back from observing the imps to looking at the pious one. I found that it was studying me.

“It is said that you hate them.” The pious one’s voice held a note of mild curiosity. “That the sight of an imp turns you barbaric. Why?”

I did not hate imps. I had no feelings towards them. I only got angry when they insulted me. Did I not have the right to not be insulted by slaves? I was an uspec and they were imps. There was an order in the world and as a de trop irira, I was aware of my place in it. Why weren’t the imps? I kept my thoughts to myself. To the pious one I said nothing. I don’t know why I refrained from opening up to it. Perhaps it was the malice brought on from my anger at the pious one who had put me in this situation. If not for that first pious one, I would still be with Fajahromo, my friend. That pious one drove Fajahromo away.

The pious one sighed. “You have dazzling feathers.” It said, after a long pause. I almost missed the plural, feathers. I had more? It seemed to be aware that it had piqued my interest, because it smiled and said, “very dazzling feathers. One of a kind.”

“Feathers?” I asked, unable to stifle my curiosity.

The pious one’s smile grew. It nodded. “I counted at least ten on your ailerons.” It went on. “I was also told that your tail has grown longer than it was before the fight, and that you have formed an extra eye socket. The pious one who brought you in told me that.”

The mention of the first pious one brought back the feelings of resentment. That was when I had my suspicions confirmed, I did hate it. I hated it for taking me away from the glorious life I could have had with a wellborn irira.

The pious one seemed to notice my distress because it asked, “What is wrong my friend?”

I snapped. It was hearing that ‘my friend’ that pushed me over the edge. “I am not your friend.” I said. My voice sounded different to me. It was deeper, more menacing somehow. Had this changed during the fight? “A pious one took me away from my friend. I will not call another pious one friend.”

The pious one’s mouth hung open in shock and then it shook its head. “Fajahromo is no friend of yours.” It replied cryptically.

I frowned and turned my face away refusing to believe it. Of course, it would lie to defend another pious one.

I heard the stool move as the pious one stood. “You were born here. I remember the day you were born, I remember the sight of your progenitors. One of your progenitors had the same dazzling feathers that you do. Isn’t it funny how life comes full circle? I thought I would never lay eyes on you again, but now here you are.”

My head snapped up and my gaze locked on the pious one’s face. I could not think of what to say. “Who are you?” was the only question that came to mind.

The pious one smiled. “I am the pious, Gerangi, fifth prelate serving under the magistrate of the order of Procreation. We preside over the birthplace of Hakute.”

The fifth prelate was a high position. It was the sixth highest pious one in the port’s order. I knew that the magistrate was the head pious one in any port’s order and that the pious ones all served under it.

“Why are you in the pits then? Is procreation so boring that you must be entertained by watching uspecs die?” the question came out before I could stop myself.

The pious one chuckled. “I am not here for the entertainment. This is where I reside. This is the birthplace of Hakute.” It said.

My mouth hung open in shock. “But…” I sputtered. I cleared my throat. “This is the pits, is it not?”

“They are one and the same my friend.” It smiled at me. “And if the day should ever come where you get yourself out of fighting in the pits, I will tell you who your progenitors were. Till then, take care of yourself my friend. Perhaps I will see you again.” It gave me one last smile, and then it walked out, leaving me with more questions than I desired.

The imps that had left came back with a bowl and a long roll sticking out of it.

Food.

I watched ravenously as the imps walked with trepidation towards me. The one carrying the food came further. It placed the food on the stool where the pious one had been seating, and then it turned around and ran out of the room.

I was finally alone.

I reached for the food and the pain came back as I stretched. In my discussion with the pious one I had forgotten about my resolve to find the lifeforce in my pain. I picked the hard roll out of the bowl and used that to scoop up the gruel served in the bowl. It was the worst thing that I had ever eaten, but I was so hungry that I didn’t care.

As I ate, I thought of the pious one’s words, and the promise it had made before leaving. It had said it would tell me who my progenitors were if I ever made it out of fighting in the pits. The words only inspired the slightest traces of curiosity in me. I did not care who my progenitors were. Knowing who they were and what they’d done with their life would have no impact or bearing on me then. I was de trop which meant that I was unwanted. I was sent to the slums because my progenitors decided that they did not want me. Why then should I want to know who they were?

Were.

I realized then that it had used the past tense, probably meaning they were dead. Which was even less reason for me to want to know more about them. What use was a dead uspec’s name to me? I found the idea of the pits being the birthplace of Hakute widely more fascinating. If the pits was also the birthplace, then this was where every undead came to procreate. I still did not know how uspecs procreated, but I could not help puzzling at why a place associated with death would be the same place associated with birth.

Once my bowl was empty, I placed it on the foot of my bed and took my mind back from the thoughts of birthplaces and progenitors, to the much more interesting topic of finding the lifeforce in my pain. And so I forced myself up from the bed. The pain was so overwhelming my mind went blank instantly.

I woke up sprawled over my bed and I did it again. This time I remembered the insult that I had been dealt by the different imps. It was not enough to send me into a fit of rage, but it was enough anger to get my blood boiling and to keep me alert. But not alert long enough to reach the lifeforce in my pain.

So, I kept on passing out from the pain, waking up and continuing. I did not stop. Days went by as I pushed myself. I put so much strain on the internal wounds that they could not heal, and the pain never died. But with each time I exerted myself, I felt my body growing a little more resistant to the pain.

Sometimes I woke up to food on my stool and I ate. Sometimes I woke up to imps gawking at me from behind the curtains. One look at them and they scampered. I never ventured past the curtains, never wondered what was beyond my cell. I was obsessed with finding the life in my pain. All other curiosities were pushed to the back of my mind as I continued to subject myself to the worst torments.

I did not give up. And nine meals later, I found it. I found the lifeforce in my pain. It was in the moment right before I passed out, but I felt it; I felt my pain roar to life, and as my eyes closed, I knew that the next time I would be able to last longer with the pain.

Unfortunately, I found out when I woke that the next time would not be in the comfort of my room, but in the arena of the pits.

Part 2
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I opened my mouth to breathe and for a second it felt as if I was drowning. In my mind I was back in the slum with the uspecs holding my head in the okun. I drank the liquid of the okun, gulping it down as I fought to breathe.

I was drowning.

I began to panic. I could hear sounds. It sounded like there were a million uspec voices in my head. They made a sound that felt familiar to my ears but that my addled mind could not place in its state of half consciousness. But as my mind woke up, the fogginess of my last sojourn in oblivion fading, I began to understand the sound.

I realized that they were laughing. A million voices in my head and they were all laughing.

Slowly, I opened my eye, blinking a little warily at first as my eye tried to adjust to the natural light of the orange dots in the sky. Then opening it fully and leaving it open long enough to see why the uspecs had been laughing.

They were laughing at me, or at least at the flailing I had done to keep myself from ‘drowning’.

I jumped to my feet and stared at the oddity beneath me. I was standing in an okun. It was one unlike anything I had seen before. The liquid in the okun was murky, much murkier than the okun in my slum. But it was surprising, because the okun was so shallow. I had never imagined a shallow okun. One that I could lie in horizontally without being fully covered by the liquid. It barely reached past my ankles.

I blinked, my wide eye opening even wider as I rose my gaze up from the shallow okun to the roofless ceiling and then to the rows and rows of uspecs surrounding me. With varying amounts of trepidation, I reached the conclusion that I was in the pits. Obviously, I had known from the pious one’s words that I would be brought here to fight. But I had not imagined this. I had not imagined that there would be so many people.

My mouth hung open as I stared upwards, turning around and around in circles as I gazed at the crowd. They laughed at me, some called out taunting insults, some dismissed me, but they all laughed.

As I stared at the pits, I gained a new appreciation for the traders and the stories they told. I realized then that I would never be a great storyteller as I could not think of any way to describe the awing effect of standing in the pits and gazing up at all the people who had come to watch me die.

The okun which I stood in was circular. It was a somewhat large circular arena with nothing but pink liquid in it. The air seemed a lot clearer than the red fog which I had grown used to in the slum. Outside the circle of the okun arena, there were short wooden stands and behind those stands benches filled with people. The benches started at the ground level and rose all the way up for at least twenty steps. Beyond that I knew that there were more benches, but I could not see them because those benches were hidden by a thick red fog.

The lower benches appeared to be broken up into four sections. Behind me, there were rows filled with uspecs having different number of eyes and eye sockets, but they all had the tail of a kute. The same could be said of the uspecs seated in front of me. Both of these rows of uspecs had a very thin layer of fog in front of them. The layer was thin enough that I could see through to the uspecs behind them, but not so thin that I could not tell it existed. Between the sections of uspecs there were imps.

I gritted my teeth as I stared at the imps who’d joined the uspecs in laughing at me. It was a shock to see imps, and so many of them. Did their masters let them out to watch uspecs fight? I could not believe that a master would do such a thing. Where was the respect? I had expected to die, and when I knew it would be here, in the pits, I had expected to die for the entertainment of other uspecs. But to die for the entertainment of imps?

I clenched my jaw and looked away. At least I could seek solace in the fact that it would be the last humiliation I would be forced to endure.

The laughter from the mob stopped and its place rose cries of applause, of loud cheers, and endearments. Slowly, a chant began to rise as the mob cheered.

“Juwara!” they all cried out in unison. “Juwara! Juwara! Juwara!”

I turned to my side and noticed that a hole had formed in the ground in front of me. The liquid in the okun seemed to have formed a low wall around the hole. A green head rose from that hole.

I let out a small cry as I watched the rest of the uspec appear.

I took a step back. And then another one.

The uspec rose completely from the ground and the mob went crazy.

“Kill the irira!” a voice called out from the mob.

“Kill the irira!”

“Kill the irira!” The cry was picked up and it began to rotate with the cries of “Juwara!”

The uspec’s gaze fell on me and I swallowed nervously.

It was a giant. It was by far the tallest uspec I had seen. It was taller and larger than the warrior uspecs who’d flown into the village. I stared with a wide eye at the uspec who had all of its outer eyes formed but only its one center eye filled. As I looked at it, I remembered the tales the traders had told, of how fighting made an uspec grow physically. They had not been exaggerating in their descriptions of the fighters in the pits.

The uspec took a step towards me and I took a step back.

My gaze ran over its bare chest and then stopped at its waist. It was of the soaru spectrum. That much was clear in its features. I was so captivated by those features that I almost forgot that I was about to die.

The soaru spectrum had long cyan tentacles which came out of their waists covering their legs and falling all the way to the ground. Those tentacles had suckers on the other side of them, which could grasp another uspec and make it impossible for the uspec to break free.

The uspec took another step towards me and my attention returned to the present. I took my eyes from the long tentacles which swayed as the uspec moved towards me. I felt an overwhelming urge to run, and I almost indulged it. Until I remembered that there was nowhere to run, and that this was the fate I had chosen.

Now that death seemed so close I began to wonder how bad decaying would really have been. At least it would have been a peaceful death. This giant of an uspec did not seem capable of impacting a peaceful death. But it would be quick, I reminded myself. And so, I stood my ground and waited for death.

The uspec stalked towards me. It was two maybe three steps away from me when I heard it.

“Filthy irira!” it said. “Kill the filthy thing! Kill it Juwara! Kill it!” The voice dripped with derision, with disdain for me. For me!

My gaze fixed on the imp who’d called out the insulting words and I was overtaken by anger. I could not believe the gall of the imp to insult me. Me! In my rage, I moved. I ran right past the giant uspec, shoving it a little in the process.

I think the uspec was stunned and that was why I got a few steps away from it, before it remembered to react.

I was so blinded by rage that I completely forgot about the pits and about the uspec I was meant to fight. The only thing on my mind was reaching the imp who’d dared to insult me and reaching into its mouth. I wanted to hold it by the neck and rip out its tongue. I wanted to make it cry in pain as I had the osin who had come into my slum and insulted me and my friends. My heart thumped with a rage induced bloodlust. I had to punish it.

Suckers grabbed onto my leg and pulled me back. I was pulled down. I landed hard on the firm ground underneath the okun. Still, I was desperate to get to the imp. I couldn’t see beyond my rage. I felt the sucker which had grabbed onto me and I reached down with my hands to pull it off. It didn’t matter how hard I pulled against the tentacles, the suckers refused to come off.

An unexpected blow landed against the side of my head. I felt it. I felt the pain as the blow was followed by another and then another. The pain filled me. It warred with the anger I felt, and the emotions kept me alert. They kept my heart beating to make the imp pay and they kept me fighting.

The giant uspec reached down and it grabbed my head in its massive hands. It released my leg from the grip of the suckers on its tentacles and pulled me off the floor with its hold on my head. I felt the pressure of its hands exerting force on the bones in my head. Then its thumbs moved to cover my center eye and they pushed down on it. The pain just kept coming, over and over again. But the anger would not die. It made me fight. It made me fight for no other reason than to make the imp pay.

Somehow my flailing hands reached for my neck. I dug out one of the tiny scales which had grown in my neck, and I stabbed the sharp scale into the giant’s hand.

It dropped me.

With the scale still in my hand, I scrambled to my feet and continued to run blindly towards the offending imp.

Again, I felt those suckers grab onto my leg, depriving me of reaching my target. In a mindless rage, I reached down and cut off the part of the tentacle which had grabbed onto my leg. I sawed through the tentacle with my neck scale and watched the piece of it release me and drop into the okun.

I continued towards the imp.

The uspec stopped me. It grabbed onto the back of my neck from behind, lifted me up, and it turned me around to face it.

The uspec was angry.

Like the previous times with Fajahromo and the warden, I could feel this uspec’s anger. The anger had a lifeforce and I felt it. I felt it grow. Unlike the previous times, something stranger happened.

I spoke to it.

I was in so much of a rage that I felt the lifeforce in my anger reach out to the lifeforce in the uspec’s. It was as if my anger had a voice of its own and it could communicate with the uspec’s. I tried to reach for it, to take the uspec’s anger, to absorb it and add it to mine. But the uspec’s anger resisted. It wouldn’t come to me.

My gaze locked on an uspec standing behind the thin wall of fog.

It was the noble one, the one who had gifted me to Fajahromo.

My rage increased as I remembered the insult the noble one’s imp dealt me. I remembered how I’d yearned to make it pay.

The noble one got angry too. But it was only a little angry, nowhere near as angry as I was. The lifeforce in my anger reached out to the lifeforce in Juwara’s anger again. This time I didn’t try to take the anger in myself, I combined it with the noble one’s anger and sent it back to the noble one. I took all of the giant uspec’s anger away and gave it to the noble one.

Juwara was stunned. It stared around the pit dazed as if it could not think of what it was doing there. It looked lost and confused. Its perplexed gaze turned inquiringly to me. It still held me up by the back of my neck, but it seemed to have lost its drive to kill me.

I rose my hand to its neck, placed the edge of my scale against it, and cut. I drew a long deep line across the uspec’s neck and its blood came shooting out, spilling all over my face and chest.

It let go of me and fell lifeless into the okun. I landed in the okun, still in a fit of rage. My eye darted over to the noble one and I saw it being held down by other uspecs. I could feel its rage, the rage I had given it. The rage seemed to have driven the uspec into a mindless frenzy. It swung at all the uspecs around it, fighting off their grips as if it were crazy.

I did not care about the noble one.

I took my gaze from it back to the imp who’d yelled out the taunts. With clumsy steps I ran towards the section the imp stood in. The moment it realized I had come for it, it began to panic. I grabbed hold of the imp and pulled it down from the stands into the okun. I knelt on top of the screaming imp and put my scale into its eyes. One after the other I scooped the imp’s eyes out.

It cried and begged for mercy, but it wasn’t enough. The imp’s feeble cries could not pacify me. It wasn’t in enough pain to soothe my rage. I wanted more. I wanted to kill it, to stop it from ever insulting another uspec.

I slammed my fist into the imp’s mouth, forcing it open. Then I grabbed onto its tongue and I cut. I cut the tongue off. It choked on its own blood. The blood stained its face till there was nothing of its milky complexion showing in the face. But it still wasn’t enough. I reached for its right ear and begun to cut that off with my scale, when I felt a hard blow to the side of my neck.

A hand clamped onto me and I fought it. More hands clamped onto me and I fought them all, desperate to return to my act of punishing the imp. But there were so many hands and the grips were relentless. Still I fought them. I fought with every fiber of my being to get back to the imp. But the hands that held me would not let me.

As I continued to fight, my captors returned the favor. They hit me with batons and kicked me. I felt feet landing painfully on my belly, some went to my sides and my head, and as the pain increased, it took over the anger. My anger began to fade and as it left, it took my drive to keep fighting and the stranglehold I had had on my consciousness.

The beatings continued until all of my anger was gone and all that was left was pain. There was so much pain. It was as if the anger had somehow numbed most of the pain from the giant uspec’s beating. Now that the anger was gone, that pain combined with the new pain and it was all too much to bear.

I began to slip into unconsciousness.

Before my mind went blank, I heard the cries of the mob. “Irira!” they screamed. “Irira! Irira! Irira!” they chanted.

My eye closed.

@Peaceyw hahaha yes, I agree Nebud is crazy haha. And the battle with Juwara is definitely...we'll find out soon

@tunjilomo Well...I really hope it is surprising

@Fazemood Poor Nebud, hopefully something good comes out of this tough period in its life

@spixytinxy Welcome back! Lol, sorry oh! I'm glad to have you back and I'm happy you still like it

==========
VOLUME TWO
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Part 1
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In the First Metropolis of Lahooni
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I was so different in those days. Sometimes it baffles me to think back on the time and realize that I had ever been that young and that naïve. I had been full of trust. I saw a friend in every uspec who smiled at me. It did not take long for the pits to cure me of that affliction.

Now I look back on my life through the colored lens of age and ponder even deeper on the choices that I made for you, my offspring. I sent you to the pits when you were young, it couldn’t have been more than ten years after your birth.

I will never forget the look you gave me when I left you there.

But how could I explain? Fear is not my emotion and so I can not read it as easily as I can pain and anger, still I could read yours.

You were so full of it.

It is not my way to coddle, it has never been. This is not because I do not know how, although I must admit that I do not. It is because I have been forced to see what the world really is. And our world is no place for a weakling. I learnt that in the pits. I learnt a lot in the pits. I learnt far more than I could teach you.

I will never forget the way you had looked at me before I sent you there. There had been so much hope in your eye, and awe. You were in awe of me. It was a sentiment that made me smile, one that on more than one occasion made my chest swell with pride. But there was too much at stake for me to let pride get in the way of your safety.

We were at the brink of the great war, and we knew it. You and I had responsibilities, more so than any other uspec. You did not know what those responsibilities were, but I knew and that was why I sent you to the pits.

The years we spent apart were the hollowest of my entire existence. I hope you find comfort in the pain our seperation brought me, if there is any to be found. But you came out of the pits stronger. The hope in your eye was gone. When you saw me, you saw an uspec with flaws, not one to awe at, but also not one to trifle with. You became wary of me, how could you not after hearing the stories etched into those walls. But even in your wariness, you were never afraid.

The pits did to you what they did to me. The pits forged us in fire. Everything I am today I owe to the pits. It was a horrible time, a despicable way to live, but it was life, and it was an education I could not get from the most learned one.

Again, I diverge. Back to the story.


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In the pits. The third burg in the second metropolis of Hakute
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I could not say that I had missed the sludge.

The imps had taken me to a large hallway. We stopped with our backs to the wall and the imps just stood there, waiting. The place looked bleak. There was a narrow path in front of me and cells were built in to both sides of the path. The ground was sludge and the air was hot and clammy, just as it had been in my slum.

A tall imposing uspec came out of one of the cells to my right. The uspec had a belt on its waist and a thick wooden baton hung from it. Its eyes scanned me as it moved towards me, the baton swinging as it walked. My gaze locked on that baton and I swallowed nervously. I knew that the baton meant that this uspec was a warden. It stopped in front of me and jerked its head at the imps.

The imps left.

The uspec remained standing in front of me. It sized me up, its single center eye roaming over my body. I tried to hide my fear when its gaze stopped on my neck and it sneered. I focused on my own study of it. It was a physically intimidating uspec. It wasn’t quite as large as the warriors who’d flown into my slum, but it was definitely taller and larger than the other great uspecs I’d seen.

The uspec’s arm came out as it reached for me. Suddenly my fighting instincts came out and I struggled to evade the uspec’s grasp. It was as if my previous state of calm acceptance and resignation to the situation had fled. And in its place was born a desperate need to flea.

I tried to run but my efforts proved futile. The uspec simply grabbed onto my arm and held me still as if it had been expecting it. I continued to twist and turn, and when that didn’t work, I began to fight. I kicked with my legs and threw blows with my free arm. It was all done without any particular rhythm or thought. I fought like a maniac.

And the uspec laughed.

“You will die easy irira.” It said. “Easy.” And then it continued to laugh as I continued to fight. Then I felt a hard object slam into the back of my head, and I fell onto the sludge ground unconscious. The last thing I heard was the sound of the uspec laughing.

I woke up in sludge, and for a moment I forgot where I was. For a few blissful seconds I thought that I was back in the slum. I could almost hear Junte’s laughter. Then I tried to get up and found that I couldn’t move. My feet were somehow trapped in something.

I opened my eye and all I saw was darkness.

I panicked. I twisted, turning my body in the sludge, but my lower body wouldn’t move at all and my upper body only swiveled in the sludge. I reached beneath me to extricate my feet from whatever they were stuck to. My hands met with a hard surface. I traced my fingers from the callused surface up to my legs and frowned. I repeated my actions, and my fingers met with the same textures.

It was as if my legs hadn’t simply been chained to something but had instead been ensconced in it. As if my feet were somehow buried in the hard surface. I could not move.

That was when the real panic set in. My arms came out, thrashing around in my desperation to find or learn something more about my surroundings. My hands kept flailing until finally they came in contact with another object.

I heard a grunt.

The object moved and my arms could no longer reach it. I realized then that I was not alone. Wherever I was, there were other uspecs too. I forced my mind to calm down and my ears to listen, and I could hear little sounds. I heard distressed breathing, sounds of sludge being shifted, and muffled sobs. There were a lot of uspecs in the room.

I pulled my arms back towards me and formed a pillow with them. Laying my sludge stained head on my arms, I listened. By far the most disturbing sound was that of the uspec crying. It was so faint I knew the uspec had to be trying desperately not to let it out, but it obviously was incapable of suppressing the emotion. It was disgusting. I could not imagine how an uspec could reduce itself to the point of crying. No matter how low life brought me, I would never succumb to tears. Suddenly I was filled with an uncontrollable urge to tear my legs free of their hold for no other reason than to shut the crying uspec up.

Tears.

I was beyond the point of irritation. An uspec who would cry was a disgrace to the entire race. I clung to those tears. I listened to them, absorbed them, and let them distract me from the darkness and my immobility. I let my disdain of an uspec who could cry fill my mind, driving away the fear. It was better to think of the crying uspec than to think of my life and the painful death that awaited me.

But after a while the tears lost their novelty. I found my mind drifting away from the crying uspec to other things. In the next few hours I allowed myself to dream. I indulged in hope. As soon as I did, my fears seemed funny. Of course I wouldn’t die. How could I, when I’d made a powerful friend?

Fajahromo. I expected the uspec to come back. I couldn’t believe that it would leave me there. It was my friend, it was just like me, and so of course I knew it would come back for me. It would come back with its progenitor’s warriors and tear the whole place apart until it found me. It would save me.

That fantasy kept me sane and distracted for the first few days as I imagined all the different ways Fajahromo would come to my rescue and the glorious life I would live when it took me out.

Then came the smell.

I could only identify it because I’d smelled it before. The first time I’d smelled it was after the uspec who’d taken me in died. I had been so young and completely unaware of what it meant for an uspec to die, that I hadn’t known the smell of rotting flesh meant that the uspec who’d taken me in was dead. Bentuj smelled it and took the uspec’s corpse away.

That was what I smelled then. The smell of rotting flesh. There was at least one dead uspec there. It probably died of starvation. I was sure that days had to have gone by in the darkness. I was certain of it. Which meant that it had been days since I’d last eaten. I could feel my hunger. I could also feel the weakness that came with not having eaten for days. There were times when we’d gone without food in the slums. Times when the jejas had been too hard to catch, or when we’d simply become unable to take another bite of the disgusting things.

I heard the uspec cry again and for a moment I almost understood the level of desperation that could lead to such forlorn tears. Almost.

In that second, as I inhaled the pungent fumes of a stinking carcass, one thing became imminently clear to me. Fajahromo was not coming back. I realized then that there were even worse ways to die than in the pits. I would rather die fighting than rotting.

After all, that was the real pits. Uspecs pitted against each other, fighting to the screams of a mob. The traders had told us stories of the fights they’d watched in the pits. We had learnt the most about the different spectrums from the stories of the fights. I remember being puzzled when a trader had said that being kute in a kute spectrum pit was not a blessing. I had thought it was a kindness. Kutes were saved from fighting in the pits, why wouldn’t that be kind?

Now I understood. At least when you fought you knew how the death was going to come. You could see the blow being struck and it was final. It was more painful than being drowned in the okun, but it was better than slowly rotting away. I imagined myself becoming so desolate that I succumbed to tears and that thought removed whatever doubts I had.

I had to get out of this place.

And so I did what the trader who’d liked me warned me never to do. It had said it was the quickest way to get oneself killed in Hakute. It was almost funny how I’d gone from fighting death to embracing it, and now, hoping for it.

I cleared my throat and begun to sing, thankful for the memory that kept the lyrics in my head. While I did not know the meaning of all the words and the implications behind them, I was well aware of the fact that I was pointing myself out as an irira and daring them to fight me.

“Hair of horns and a chest of iron. Irira!
Skirt of tails and a neck of scales. Irira!
Not one but all. Not weak but strong.
Say you, ‘Tiyoseriwosin?’
Say I, ‘Uspecipyte’.
I am iron strong, unbreakable, I see you shake.
Standing my ground, while I hear you quake.
Against me you set your best?
Apologies, but to death they are next.
Say you, ‘Tiyoseriwosin?’
Say I, ‘Uspecipyte’.”

As soon as I was done singing there was silence. For a moment I was left to wonder if in my fear my voice had been too low, or if the uspecs were just too weak to care. But then I listened and noticed it was a different silence. While the silence which had existed before was a silence filled with little sounds. This was a complete silence. The crying uspec stopped its tears. The uspecs who’d been shifting around in the sludge seemed to have stopped moving. There was a dearth of sound.

And so I sang it again.

And was stopped before I was even halfway through the song.

Suddenly, the room filled with light.

An uspec carrying a white light source walked into the room. I had to blink for a long time to give my eye enough time to get oriented to the light. I heard groans and sounds of pain as the other uspecs adjusted to the light. It was my first view of the room lit. I had to swallow down the bile that rose in my throat. They had packed us together like jejas in a small can. Everywhere I turned there was another uspec.

But not just any old uspec. Iriras.

Every uspec in the room was a kute irira. We all had tails and something else. I had never imagined that this many iriras could exist.

“Who?” The uspec with the light asked. Like the previous warden, this uspec also had a baton on its belt and nothing else.

The other iriras dropped their gaze so that their eye didn’t meet the uspec’s. They shrunk away from it, in their own unconscious declarations of innocence. The uspec’s eye traced the room. It went from one innocent face to another until its gaze finally settled on me. I cannot imagine what it saw in me because as soon as its eye met mine, it reached for the baton.

I sang again. As the warden came closer, I continued to sing. I cannot say what possessed me to sing so loudly or to continue to sing when it was already obvious that I was guilty, but I sang and the warden’s anger grew. I found myself getting angry too. I felt the warden’s anger, just as I had felt Fajahromo’s. And again, I was filled with an inexplicable sense of loss when I could not take its anger. It was a strange sensation, but I did not have time to dwell on it.

The warden had reached me.

Its baton was about to descend on me when a strong voice stopped it.

“No.” the voice said. It was familiar. I had heard the voice before. “Let us indulge it. The irira thinks that it can kill our best? Then let us give it our best.”

The warden was shocked. It turned around and I saw who the new uspec was. It was the pious one, the one who had sent Fajahromo away, the one who had denied me my friend. It didn’t even glance at me.

“Take it to the pits and set it against Juwara.”

Gasps filled the room. I had never heard of Juwara, but from the pious one’s words and the gasps from the other iriras, I guessed that Juwara was the best fighter they had in the pits.

I smiled and started singing again.

“Shut it up.” The pious one snapped.

Even as the baton descended, promising with its swift approach to knock me into oblivion, I continued my song and thought of the coming fight in the pits. From the traders’ stories, to be the best fighter in the pits was not an easy thing. Pitting me against their best meant that finally, I could be sure of my fate. It meant that, at long last, the twists of my life had come to an end and I could be assured of a quick death.

What a relief.

Part 8
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I lay still on the soft bed, my mind whirling as my heart pounded in my chest and my eye stayed locked on Fajahromo.

The pits.

I had never been more despondent in my entire life. As I lay on my bed, every dream I’d had over the past few days came crashing down. It became painstakingly clear that I would never be all that I dreamed to be. I would never see my ailerons covered fully with dazzling feathers. I would never gain an outer-eye, never get an understanding and never use spectral magic. I would never own an imp slave. I would die as de trop. Worst than that, I would die as a nameless de trop amidst the riotous cries of a frenzied mob.

I was so engrossed in my thoughts of the death that awaited me in the pits, that my mind acted slower than usual. My mind was so slow in fact that I missed the return of the imp slave Kyrie. I missed Fajahromo taking of its shirt. But I wasn’t distracted enough to miss the sight of the uspec’s chest.

I gasped.

Fajahromo swiveled. Its eyes locked on mine and for a second, I feared I saw a glimpse of the real uspec behind the guise of Fajahromo the friend. That uspec was cruel. There was murder in the uspec’s eyes, murder and all sorts of unimaginable savagery. Then Fajahromo returned, and the cruelty left its eyes.

It smiled.

There was something about that smile which left me feeling chilled. I imagined it had to do with how quickly Fajahromo’s face had changed. In the blink of an eye, the uspec had gone from fiend back to friend.

I shivered a little.

“You are awake my friend.” Fajahromo’s tone was light, a little teasing.

I swallowed nervously, my eye still fixed on its unclothed chest, then I nodded. I took a deep breath and sat up. My heart thumped against my chest. This time the beating of my heart followed a more orderly rhythm. Perhaps I had finally accepted my fate. I knew I would die. How could the uspec let me live after what I’d seen?

Fajahromo, its gaze never leaving mine, spread out its arms and let the slave clothe it. “You see why I call you friend?” it asked, a smile on its lips.

I swallowed and nodded.

Fajahromo turned so that the slave could fix the pieces of the cloth together, and my gaze fell on the uspec’s tail. It was a tail fully grown. The end twitched a little, but it remained on the ground. I took my attention to the ailerons and noticed that those were also mostly filled. The feathers were not as dazzling as mine, but that was of no consequence to me, not in the face of what I’d seen on that chest.

The slave’s work done, Fajahromo turned back to face me. It watched me for a while, its gaze pensive, but the smile never left its face. Then it said, “rise my friend. We must go.”

An awful thought crossed my mind at that moment, and I was so terrified of the prospect of the pits that I almost did it. I almost blackmailed the great uspec. I knew what I’d seen, and the uspec knew as well. I knew what it was, I knew that it was just like me.

I knew that it was irira.

When the uspec had taken its shirt off, it had revealed a chest and back filled with cyan spikes. Those spikes where the distinct feature of the boga spectrum. The boga spectrum eyes could give an uspec the understanding of fogs. It was the understanding which the noble one had used on me earlier, it was an understanding which could give an uspec the power to use spectral magic to take another creature’s life. The spikes on Fajahromo’s upper body, combined with the tail, showed that it was a crossbreed, a kute-boga crossbreed. An irira, an abomination just like me.

And so I thought to blackmail it, to threaten to expose its secret if it took me to the pits. To tell the world that it was irira. I didn’t have to ponder on the idea for long to realize that it would be a foolish thing to do. I couldn’t name what I had seen in the uspec’s eyes when it had caught me staring at the spikes on its chest, but it had not been pleasant.

I had no doubt that this uspec would kill me without blinking if I crossed it. No doubt at all. And I was irira, the only person who knew I was here was the noble undead, and it had made it clear what it thought of me. It wouldn’t care if I was dead. No one would care if I was dead.

I had no choice. So, I got up from the bed and stood warily in front of Fajahromo, my ‘friend’. “Where do we go sirga?” I asked, pretending as if I didn’t already know.

Fajahromo studied me for seconds before replying. If it suspected that I had been awake the whole time and overhead what it said, it didn’t show it. “To another friend Nebud.” It said.

And then I saw it, the knowledge in its eyes. It knew. I was sure of it, it knew that I had heard it all. It knew that I knew and it was watching to see what I would do. But what could I do? There was no place I could go. I was alone in a foreign land. I was completely at its mercy.

I nodded, accepting its answer, and the uspec smiled.

“Raban.” Its voice was gentle as it walked over to the other great uspec and shook its shoulder. “Rise Raban.”

Raban rose and jumped up from its bed as if it had been chased right out of its sleep. Then it turned wary eyes to me and lurched towards me. There was so much malice in its face that I found myself moving back. Fajahromo stopped it before it could come any closer to me. It turned to face Fajahromo and then it laughed. It laughed so loudly I was sure that it would wake every imp in the hovel. Then it stopped suddenly.

Fajahromo spoke to Raban in a different tongue, one which I couldn’t understand and Raban laughed some more of its eerie laughter. And then it began walking.

“After you my friend.” Fajahromo said, waiting for me to precede it. Any hope I had harbored for an escape, faded in the face of Fajahromo’s determination.

I followed Raban. It led the way back through the curtain I had come in through with the noble one. Kyrie held the curtain back as Raban walked past it.

A hole had formed on the ground in front of us. That hole was filled with quicksand. Raban squealed excitedly before walking into the quicksand. I looked behind me, and found Fajahromo standing there, its smiling gaze fixed on mine. My lips quirked as my mouth tried its best to return a convincing smile. Then I turned back around, took a deep breath and walked into the quicksand.

We were teleported to a small enclosed space.

There were wide curtains in front of us. Four naked imps stood by the curtains with buckets in front of them. Three of them dipped their hands into those buckets and pulled out wet cloths. They wrung the cloths and ran over to us with them. The imps wiped away the streaks left from the quicksand.

As the imps worked, I felt my legs shaking. The cloth the imp used to clean me was not as smooth as the one that had been used in Fajahromo’s hovel. I tried to force my mind to fixate on that, and not the feeling of doom which threatened to devour me. My heart drummed with fear in my chest and I could do nothing but stand still and wait to see my fate. It was the first time in my life that I had felt helpless.

For some reason, standing here with these great uspecs, and knowing that they intended to give me to the pits felt more dreadful than being in the okun with Bentuj and the uspec’s from my slum who’d meant to drown me. I couldn’t understand why I had faced one end with courage, fighting with each breath I stole from death’s grip, while the other I walked into resigned. Perhaps I had known then how inconsequential Bentuj was. Perhaps I had known that I stood a chance in a fight against it.

Not with Fajahromo. There were demons in Fajahromo’s eyes, demons that scared me. Bentuj had been a simple uspec. It would have taken no pleasure in taking another’s life. Not Fajahromo. Fajahromo had depths even I could see. The uspec was not one to be trifled with. If it was Fajahromo’s will for me to die, I knew it would be much better for me to accept the death and seek as much solace in it as I could. Much better than trying to fight against one like Fajahromo.

The imps moved back, taking the cloths with them. They returned the cloths to their buckets and held the curtains aside.

Raban walked in first.

I followed after the uspec. As I walked, I felt that odd sensation again. I felt a spark of hope. Here I was, for the third time in two days, facing a sure death, and I felt hope. My hope came from the oddest source. It came from my ‘friend’ Fajahromo. “You see why I call you friend?” The uspec’s question came back to me. It was irira, just like me. It was odd, perhaps even a little asinine, but I was sure that Fajahromo would not want me dead. I was sure it would feel as much comfort in my existence as I did in its. Suddenly, the uspec who’d brought me the fear of death was the same one with the promise of salvation. My thoughts seemed so contrary I decided to turn my focus from them, to the room I stood in.

The room I walked into was lit by the same white light-source which I had seen in the canoe. There were three of them hanging from different locations. The room had a long table and a stool as its only furnishings. Two imps stood behind and to the sides of the uspec that sat on the stool.

My eye widened when I saw the uspec seated on the stool. It was the first pious one I had ever seen. The pious ones were the uspecs who moderated the orders. They were in some sense the keepers of our society. Their fields of expertise ranged from justice, to procreation, to education and even to dissemination. They were the ones with the power to turn a regular imp into an imp with spectral magic. They had a deeper understanding of spectral magic than all other uspecs. It was a sacred position.

My eye fixed on the fraise on the uspec’s neck. The fraise was a thick red cloth which the pious ones wore. It fully covered their necks and the top of their shoulders and chest. A pious one’s fraise had symbols on it, which showed the order it belonged to. I could tell from this one’s fraise that it belonged to the order of Procreation.

It took me a while to realize that the pious one was returning my frank assessment. It studied me as thoroughly as I studied it.

It did not seem pleased with what it saw.

Not that I was surprised. I could not stop myself from thinking of the pious ones as religious, and every religious uspec had a duty to uphold the founder’s will. And so, a pious one could not allow the commitment of a grave sin, could not allow an irira to live.

“Salutations pious one.” Fajahromo greeted. I did not need to turn to know that it had that smile on its face. But I did turn, I turned to confirm, and there it was. I had never known another uspec to smile that much.

“Salutations.” The pious one replied grudgingly, its eyes never departing from their study of me.

“I am here for my sibling, Takabat.” Fajahromo stated.

The pious one’s eyes slowly lifted from me to rest on Fajahromo. Those eyes which had stared at me with disgust focused on Fajahromo with scorn. It was a strange thing for me to see an uspec regard Fajahromo with discourtesy. I realized then that in my mind I had raised Fajahromo up higher than any other uspec.

“Is your visit familial or is it related to the pits?” The pious one’s eyes darted to me for a few seconds after it was done speaking. There was something in that look, a meaning which seemed to be reserved for Fajahromo as I could not decode it.

“The pits of course.” Fajahromo’s voice turned hostile to match the pious one’s. “What other reason would I have for bringing an irira here?”

“What other reason indeed.” The pious one mocked.

There was something else going on between them. It was evident in the mockery from the pious one and in Fajahromo’s stiffening. I turned and saw its hands clench by its sides. The smile was completely gone from its face. In its stead was a mask of pure loathing, all of which was directed at the pious one.

“Takabat?” Fajahromo asked.

The pious one was quiet for a while and then it spoke. “Your progenitor sent for it. You must deal with me.”

“I will wait.”

“No.”

“No?”

The pious one’s lips tipped up as an awful smile crept onto its face. “No Fajahromo. You and your sibling disgust me. I have been forced to watch as you conduct your backhand deals, as you insult the Founder. Well no more. I will assume that you are here to do your duty and so you have brought this irira to face the founder’s justice. I will assume that you have brought this irira to gift its life to the pits of Hakute. I will assume this because the contrary would be unthinkable, especially for an uspec of your status.”

I could hear Fajahromo’s breathing change, as it heaved. But it remained silent.

“Fetch the irira.” The pious one ordered, and an imp left its side and came towards me.

That was when the fear really set in. I had allowed myself to get lulled into a false sense of security by watching the uspecs speak. I had allowed myself to forget that I was in the pits and that irira never left the pits alive. The imp came towards me and the reality of my situation set in. Not even Fajahromo was powerful enough to save me from death. I had been spared a peaceful death in the okun, to die in the pits.

The imp stretched out its hand reaching for me, and I steeled, anger slowly rising in me as I became indignant that this imp would dare to reach for me. The anger was so much better than the fear that I was happy to let myself dwell in it.

I didn’t need to.

Fajahromo’s tail rose and it wrapped around the imp’s neck. The imp’s hand rose to the coiled tail and tried to pry it loose.

“How dare you?” Fajahromo snapped.

My heart swelled with pride. I smiled. I saw in Fajahromo’s defense what I had been searching for from my friends in the slum. Loyalty. The uspec had not known me for that long but it was willing to fight for me. It really was my friend. It was a thought that brought unparalleled joy.

“Unhand the imp.” The pious one commanded.

“How dare you?!” Fajahromo’s voice rose and I realized then that its question had been meant for the pious one and not the imp.

The pious one rose slowly to its feet. “Unhand the imp!”

“Do you know who I am?” Fajahromo’s voice was filled with so much rage, I felt it. It was as if the uspec’s anger had a life of its own. For a moment I felt that rage, like a force in the ether. I felt it push slightly against me, like a homeless uspec begging for shelter, and then it was gone. I felt a sudden pang of loss. I wished I had opened the door and let the rage in. I wished I had known how.

“You are nothing.” The pious one snapped. “You are the twenty-second offspring of the duke of the second metropolis. Twenty-second.” It laughed condescendingly. “Your fool friend is more likely to become something than you are. Even as crazy as it is, Raban will surpass you. The wisest decision you ever made was to tether yourself to that fool. Raban may be an idiot, but it is the idiot third offspring of the Kaiser of Hakute. It will at least own a burg. And perhaps you will manage the burg for it. That is all you could ever amount to.”

I was shocked speechless. Raban was the offspring of the Kaiser of Hakute. The Kaiser! I could not believe it. I had shared my story with the offspring of the Kaiser.

“Now unhand the imp.” The pious one continued. “Or I will make sure the Kaiser is made aware of what you use this sacred place for. Your progenitor will disown you in a heartbeat. What use does a single uspec have for twenty offsprings? It will kill you with its own bare hands before it lets you discredit it to the Kaiser.” The pious one stopped to calm itself. “Now unhand the imp and deliver the irira to the pits as you came to do. Then we may part as friends and your sacrilege need never be known. What do you say my friend?”

Seconds ticked away as I waited for Fajahromo to respond. I waited for it to use its magic to reduce this pious uspec to nothing. It was a sacrilege just to think it, to wish ill on a pious one ordained to the founder’s service, but I was already a sacrilege. It didn’t even occur to me how much of my faith I had lost in the span of days. All I knew was that Fajahromo was my friend and that it had fought for me. I knew it would continue to do so.

At least I thought it would.

I watched stunned as Fajahromo released the imp. My legs seemed frozen to the spot as my shocked eye stared at Fajahromo.

“You should be more careful of who you make an enemy of.” Fajahromo said. “You may have won this round, but this is not the end. Come Raban.”

And then it was gone.

Just like that, Fajahromo, my friend, left me in the pits. Without saying a single word to me, it had left me there.

“Send it below.” The pious one ordered.

As it spoke, I stared at the curtains Fajahromo had just walked through. My mouth hung open. I was too stunned to think, too shocked to be afraid. The flapping of the curtain slowed as the last evidence of Fajahromo faded.

And then it was truly gone, and I was alone. Fajahromo had left me alone to die in the pits.

@Fazemood Thank you. Yes, Nebud's story has a bit of twists and turns, but I'm really trying to get us to the destination faster than the previous books. Let's see how well that goes.

@tunjilomo lol!

@monalicious I like that 'unimaginable imagination'. Thank you!!!

@Peaceyw thanks. I'm so glad you're enjoying it. I can't lie, a lot of the time I smile sheepishly as I write this story

@phoenixchap thank you for being so patient about following

@monalicious Thank you, glad you like it. but I've posted 4 chapters over the last two weeks. I posted 2 the Saturday before last and 2 two days ago.

Part 7
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The quicksand brought me to another enclosed area. This one was much smaller, and the ground was soft and formed around my feet, as it had in the slum after the imps used magic on it. I stood behind the noble one and watched the impatient tapping of its foot.

There were three sets of curtains around us, and a hard wall behind us. The curtains to the left and right were pulled back as four imps, two carrying bowls the other two holding cloths, came running out of them. These imps were like the osin which had come to our village. Their eyes remained in their faces and their skins were free of streaks. They wore beautiful colored clothing like the one the osin had worn. The clothing was in two pieces which covered their tops and bottoms separately.

The four imps stopped around the noble one and cleaned it. They wiped the brown streaks caused by the quicksand off it. Then they moved backwards to me and repeated the motions. They wiped me clean using a scented liquid and a soft towel. When they were done, they left, going back through the curtains to the left and right of where we stood.

The thick blue curtain in front of us was pulled back then. Another imp stood to the side, holding the curtain back so that the noble one could walk through. I noticed that this imp wore only clothing covering its bottom half and it had the black streaks and eyeless sockets of the imps who’d used spectral magic in my slum.

I walked in after the noble one.

I stopped, staring at the largest hovel I had ever seen. This living space looked so much grander than anything that the traders described. They had mentioned mansions and great houses where the greatest uspecs resided, but I could not have imagined this if they had described each feature in detail.

The room was circular with notches built into the walls, which held white light sources like the one in the noble one’s canoe. There were colored carvings done into the wall which seemed to tell stories I had never heard before. A long semi-circular table covered the right end of the room and on that table there was an assortment of food and drinks the likes of which I had never seen. A mixture of eyed and eyeless imps stood around that table in varying levels of UnCloth.

In the middle of the room there was a small okun with shimmering pink liquid. The liquid in the okun was so much cleaner than that in my slum. And around the okun there were four long beds. The beds were shaped very differently from the beds in my slum. These beds were covered with a type of foamy material and had cylindrical rests at one end. Two uspecs reclined on two of those beds. They lay on their sides with their arms on the cylindrical rests while they held grey cups and laughed.

The uspecs’ attentions were fixed on two naked imps strutting around in front of them. The imps jumped and kicked their legs in the air, before landing back on their feet and making some gyration motions with their arms. I did not know what the imps were doing.

I took my eye off them to continue my perusal of the room.

I was so obsessed with studying the room that it took me minutes to realize how cold it was. It was a very strange sensation. I was not used to cool air. The foggy air in the slum was hot and clammy. It clung to the skin, while the air in the room seemed to just drift by, sharing its coolness with me. I did not know how such cool air was possible, just as I did not know how such a clean okun was possible.

I realized that there was much I did not know.

“Domax!” one of the reclining uspecs screamed, its gaze fixed on the noble one. It stood up and smiled, and I was shocked when I saw it. The uspec was taller than the noble one, but it was missing two of its outer eyes. It was not the uspec’s physical appearance which stunned me as in that day alone, I had seen greater looking uspecs. It was the clothes. That was the first time I had ever seen an uspec wearing clothes. I could not believe it. The uspec wore black clothing covering its chest, and nothing below its waist. There were three golden bands on each of its arms. I looked at the bands, but my eye darted back to the clothes. I could not believe that an uspec would wear such.

The noble one bowed slightly to this uspec. I stared shocked, imagining how great this new uspec must be for the proud noble one to bow to it. “Salutations Fajahromo.” The noble one greeted.

“Salutations my friend!” the other uspec smiled. It walked over to the uspec still reclining on the bed and poked it with its knee. “We have a guest Raban.” It said, its voice slightly scolding.

The uspec rose its head up long enough for me to see that it only had two of its outer eyes filled. Then it dropped its head back without speaking.

“Salutations Raban.” The noble one greeted.

The reclining uspec grunted and the standing uspec laughed cheerfully. “Come Domax, join our party!” The uspec’s head tilted to the naked imps doing strange things as it said, “we are watching what the umanis call dancing.”

The reclining uspec burst out laughing. There was something amiss in the laughter. I could not place it, having never heard anything like it, but it was a sound that left me feeling disturbed.

“No, but please accept my gratitude for the invitation. I must not dally.”

The uspec walked closer. It stopped by the dancing imps and whispered something to them. The imps stopped their movements, bowed and left the room.

“No!” the reclining uspec whined. “Noooooo!” It dragged the word out as if in pain. “No! No! No! No…”

“Raban.” The standing uspec snapped, cutting the other uspec off.

The reclining uspec whimpered and then began to whisper to itself, mumbling loud enough to be heard, but not too loud to be spoken over. The other uspec ignored it, speaking over it as it walked closer to the noble one. “That is right.” It said. “I heard rumors that my progenitor sent you to a slum to avenge its osin.”

I gaped as I realized who the uspec was. I should have known from the name, Fajahromo, Fajahr – omo, child of Fajahr. This was the offspring of the great undead, the duke of the second metropolis of Hakute.

The noble one nodded and then its head turned to me. That was the first time that the uspec realized that the noble one hadn’t come alone. Fajahromo looked at me and smiled. It was a warm smile of friendship. I did not know why such a great uspec would want to be friends with me, but I couldn’t stop myself from smiling slightly back at it.

“A gift.” The noble one said. “I know how much you…desire uspecs such as this.” The noble one paused. “Perhaps this will settle my debt?”

Fajahromo’s eyes remained on me. It walked closer and studied me. There was so much cunning in those eyes. Its gaze racked over my body and I felt myself stiffen in defense as if to protect myself from an unknown evil. I could tell there was more to this uspec than the friendly mask it wore.

Smiling it asked, “What is your name my friend?”

I was shocked that it would call me friend.

“You can see what it is.” The noble one’s voice lowered. “It is de trop, it is an irira de trop. You can call it whatever you want, and if its smart, it will be grateful to you for keeping it alive.”

Fajahromo ignored the noble one. “What is your name my friend?” it asked again.

“Nebud, sirga.” I replied, adding the ‘sirga’ tittle which was the generic honorific for all higher born uspecs.

“Salutations Nebud. Welcome to my home.” Its warm smile never wavered.

“Salutations sirga. I am grateful.” I replied nodding.

Fajahromo’s smiling face turned to the noble one. “Of course your debt is settled my friend. We should drink and jubilate.”

The noble one shook its head. “I must return to the great one.” It said.

Fajahromo paused. “I assume the great one’s troops saw you take Nebud. What will you say when my progenitor demands the uspec?”

“It is irira. I will say it was a grave sin to let it live and I could not suffer the founder’s wrath. I will say I killed it. My imps will bear witness.”

“My progenitor thinks so much of the imps it may just listen to them. I would never take an imp’s word. But the founder’s grace be with you my friend.” Fajahromo said.

The noble one nodded. “The founder’s grace be with you Fajahromo.” It turned, gave me one last condescending look and then it began to walk away. It stopped midway through the curtain an imp held open and turned around to say, “be careful with that one, it hates imps.” And then it left.

I was stunned. I didn’t hate imps, I just expected them to know their place.

Fajahromo laughed. It warded me towards the center of the room and gestured for me to take the bed closest to the one it had been resting on. Then it reclined on its bed and I sat stiffly on mine, not knowing what to do or say. I was all too aware of the uspec’s scrutinizing gaze on me. I wasn’t sure what was expected of me, so I just remained as I was and let it have its look.

The other uspec said, “who?” in a loud screeching voice that made me jump.

Fajahromo chuckled. “A friend Raban.” It said. “Its name is Nebud.”

The other uspec, Raban, looked away uninterested.

I was close enough now to see the uspec, Raban’s, form. Raban seemed about as tall as Fajahromo. It had four golden bands on each of its arms. I wished then that I knew what those golden bands stood for, so that I could tell how great the uspec Raban was.

“Kyrie.” Fajahromo called.

An imp with its eyes removed and black streaks on its skin came forward. The imp wore two sets of clothing. “Yes master.” It said, kneeling by Fajahromo’s bed.

“Bring food and drink for my guest.” It ordered.

“Yes master.” The imp rose and walked over to me. It knelt by me and asked, “what shall I bring you domina?”

My chest swelled as the imp knelt by my feet and called me domina. I had never been called that before. It was an honorific given to ‘important’ uspecs. An imp would only call its master ‘master’, and it would call every other important uspec domina.

My gaze rose to meet Fajahromo’s. I did not know of any other meal except for the jeja stews we made in the slum. I couldn’t begin to imagine what manner of delicacies this great uspec would have.

As if sensing my distress Fajahromo ordered, “make it a tray Kyrie.”

The imp nodded and rose. “As you wish master.” It said before leaving.

“Friend. Friend.” Raban chuckled as its gaze turned to me. It laughed aloud suddenly, and I frowned at it. There was something off about the uspec. Raban just continued laughing and drawling “friend, friend” in a singing tone.

With nothing else to do, I retreated into my mind and thought about the events of the day. In hours my fate had shifted from sure death in the okun, to almost sure execution by a duke, and then now complete uncertainty as I sat in the duke’s offspring’s home. The noble one’s words echoed in my head hauntingly. It had said that Fajahromo desired uspecs like me. What did that mean? Did it desire de trop uspecs or irira uspecs? Neither of those seemed like a good thing. I couldn’t think of a single reason why an uspec would desire unwanted ones or abominations.

An imp stopped in front of me. It placed a short stool by my legs and walked back. Two more imps came forward. One carried a large plate filled with a variety of things I had never seen before. It put the plate down on the stool and stepped back, making way for the last one, which carried a decanter filled with a strange purple liquid and a cup. The imp poured some of the purple liquid into the cup and left the decanter on the stool.

It was in staring at the food that I realized I was hungry, famished even. I turned to look uncertainly at my host. I didn’t know what the custom was for eating in the presence of great uspecs.

Fajahromo smiled and its eyes lit. “Eat.” It said.

I bowed slightly to it. “Gratitude sirga.” I said. Then I turned my focus to the plate and wondered what to start with. There were orange round things, long black pipe things, white square things, and some oddities in irregular shapes and having colors I could not place. I reached for a white square and warily put into my mouth.

I must have groaned because Fajahromo burst out laughing.

I was too delighted by the food to be embarrassed. It was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten. I reached for another thing and was equally delighted. My face filled with a smile as I ravenously gobbled every item on the plate. Tastes that I had never known existed flooded my mouth and every new bite felt like a trip to a foreign paradise. I was sad to see the plate empty. I reached for the cup and took a sip of the drink. It was as if an orchard filled with a variety of fruit had sacrificed its wares for my benefit. I gulped down the rest of the drink in my cup.

“So, Nebud my friend, tell us about life in the slum.” Fajahromo ordered.

Raban’s head rose. “In the slum?” it shrieked.

“Yes Raban. Our friend Nebud is from a slum.”

“De trop!” Raban squealed excitedly. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone that animated at the mention of an unwanted uspec. “De trop!” it clapped its hands and smiled. “De trop!”

“Shhh Raban, let Nebud tell its story.”

I turned to Fajahromo and did as it ordered.

I told my story.

It wasn’t much of a story. But I tried to read them as I told it and so I spent long moments on the things that made them laugh, like some of the more lavish stories the traders told, or the way it felt to step in sludge. It astounded them that there were parts of the spectral existence still covered in sludge. I told them about our hovels and the simple life we lived filled with jeja stews. And they appeared sympathetic for me. I learnt from them that there were actually spectrums that considered our jejas to be a delicacy. We all laughed at that thought.

My story continued, from the day to day of my boring life in the slum, until finally I reached the fateful day that had changed everything for me. It wasn’t news to them that I was irira, and so I did not feel the need to hide it. I told them how I’d been sentenced to death and how the noble one saved me. They laughed when I described the delights that the day had revealed. Like the variety of imps, the great uspecs who could fly, the noble undead, the canoe and themselves.

I spoke for so long that I even surprised myself. I had never spoken that long before, and I had never had anyone listen to me as Fajahromo did. It was a strange feeling, but as I spoke to it, I felt as if I truly were what it called me, a friend. Raban laughed and injected some riotous comments every so often, but I could tell it was listening and that made me happy. It made me happy to capture their attentions so fully.

We must have talked for hours about life in the slum.

When we finally stopped talking, Raban was already asleep. Fajahromo and I continued speaking. It asked for more details about the imp I had molested and the eye I had taken, and I supplied it with all the information it wanted. It wasn’t long before my discomfort eased completely and I was lounging on the bed, as Fajahromo did, and laughing with the uspec as if I were its peer.

It felt nice to have Fajahromo as a friend.

Then Fajahromo slowly drifted off, and I found myself lying comfortably on the bed. I knew that I would live and that it was due to the debt the noble one owed Fajahromo. It was a thought that brought me much joy and relief.

As I slowly drifted off into sleep, I dreamt of the great life I would have as a friend of Fajahromo, the duke’s offspring. I could already see my ailerons filling and flourishing. I could see my outer eyes filled. I was so in awe of this new uspec, that I imagined myself wearing clothing as it did. I owed my life to this uspec and in my heart I swore it my loyalty. What a great friend Fajahromo would be, I thought as my mind went dark.

I heard the splash of liquid as a foot walked into the okun.

The sound woke me up.

My eye fixed on Kyrie as it knelt by its master and shook it. I did not move, I did nothing to show that I was awake. I just watched in silence.

Fajahromo woke up and turned its eyes to the imp. “What is it?” It asked.

“I just got word master, your progenitor is on its way here.” Kyrie replied.

Fajahromo jumped up.

“Have a portal prepared and fetch me a change of clothes.” It ordered.

“As you wish master. Where will you be going?”

“I’d hoped to delay this by a few more days, but I must take the de trop imp to the pits now. My progenitor cannot see it here. Hurry!”

I froze.

Will the twists and turns of my life never cease?

My friend, Fajahromo, planned to take me to the pits. The pits. Just thinking of it made me shiver. The pits were where irira went to die. Death in the okun would have been kinder than the pits.

Part 6
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A white glow filled the room, illuminating the canoe. I bent my head, my fascinated gaze fixing on the odd contraption from which the light came. But I did not move towards it, certainly not close enough to see how the artificial light was created. I stayed far away from the center table where the contraption was.

My heart pounded in my chest. I tried to hide the shivering, the signs of my fear, as I watched the bustling imps moving all around the canoe. I saw two doors in front of me, on the other side of the table. One imp came running out of one of those doors. The imp wore the same simple tunic as the ones above. It ran towards the left of the room, towards a curtain which covered the front of the canoe.

I watched as it pulled back the curtain, exposing two new imps, and the paddles which controlled the canoe. The curtain was drawn, and I was shut out again. I stayed where I was, at the base of the stairs which had led me down into the heart of the canoe. The imps cleaned the table, raising up the light-source. Then they moved into one of the rooms behind the closed doors and I was left alone.

I heard buzzing sounds coming from the light-source. Those sounds pulled my attention, drawing my focus long enough to distract me from my own nervousness. I welcomed the distraction, drawing closer towards the source. I was a few steps away from the table when the sounds of loud steps pulled my attention away.

I spun, my heart racing as I watched the noble one descend into the canoe. It walked distractedly, its gaze fixed above it as it came down the stairs. Then it stopped when it reached the bottom, its eyes darting around. All six of those eyes fixed on me.

Its eyes remained fixed on me.

It couldn’t have been more than a second which it spent looking at me, but it was the longest second of my life. There was an air of power around the noble one, it was power the likes of which I had never seen before. It felt as if it only had to snap its fingers and I would be dead. As if life itself bent to its will. I held my breath as it stared, and sagged in relief when its eyes finally darted away.

“Patrick!” It snapped. Its feral voice filling the bottom of the canoe.

The imps came running out of the room. They backed away from the noble one, standing a good distance away, and then bowed their heads in silence. Then the curtain at the front of the canoe was pulled back and the imp who’d walked in earlier, walked out. It drew the curtain behind it and walked over to face the noble one.

The imp stopped before the noble one and bowed. “Yes master.”

“We go to Fajahromo.” The noble one ordered.

“As you wish master.” The imp replied. “Shall I have food or drink brought to your room?”

The noble one shook its head curtly. “There will be no dallying. We will go by quicksand.”

“As you wish master. And your guest?” the imp’s empty eye sockets turned to me.

The noble one frowned. “Guest?” It asked, confused.

The imp inclined its head towards me.

The noble one turned. Its eyes glanced over in my direction and then returned to the imp. “That is de trop you fool. It is not a guest.” After saying that, the noble one walked into one of the rooms on the other side of the table. It slammed the door behind it.

The imp it had spoken to whispered hushed words to the other imps around it and then it returned to the area behind the curtain. The other imps broke up. Some of them followed the first imp behind the curtain, the rest went into the other room. The curtain twitched and an imp walked out of it. It walked passed me, not acknowledging my presence as it went on its way to the stairs. It walked halfway up and then stretched its hand upwards to cover the opening to the bottom of the canoe. Then it walked towards the room the noble one had gone into and knocked on the door.

“Come.” A growl came from behind the door. The imp walked in.

I started to relax once I was alone. A million questions floated around in my head. But as nervous as I was to face the great one, I looked forward to seeing a metropolis. Like every other de trop, I had never been out of my slum. In a single day I had seen more great uspecs than all the other de trop combined. I was sure of it. Just as my mind began picturing the big metropolis, the steady ground on which I had stood began to shake.

I fell on my tail on the hard-wooden floor.

The shaking got even more vigorous. I found myself sliding across the floor with each tremor the vehicle made. The canoe tilted downwards and I was sent tumbling towards the front of the canoe. Then it tipped up, and I rolled to the back. My body slammed against the staircase. I cringed from the pain. The canoe continued to tip upwards, as if it was soaring higher, above the sludge. Then it moved forward and came to a stop.

The door to the noble one’s room opened.

I jumped to my feet, my body aching as I desperately tried to hide my exertions from the tumultuous movement of the canoe. The imp came out and held the door open for the noble one. The other imps came out of the second room. They ran towards me, and then up the stairs. Hurriedly, they pulled the beams back, opening the canoe.

From the imps’ ministrations I could tell that we had arrived, but that fact was accompanied by a rather high degree of impossibility in my perplexed brain. I could not imagine how we could travel so quickly from the slums to the metropolis. Then I remembered the noble one’s order to travel by quicksand and it made sense. We had teleported. It was the magic of the hooni spectrum. Just thinking about the hooni spectrum reminded me of my neck scales and the execution that awaited once the great one discovered I was irira. Of their own accord, my fingers rose to my neck, gently stroking the neck scales. I couldn’t hide them anymore than I could hide my tail.

The noble one stormed out of its room.

My heart raced when it stopped at the base of the stairs and stared at me. “Come.” It barked out, before walking up the stairs and out of the canoe.

Warily, I walked after the uspec, my feet shaking as I prepared to face the great undead. I climbed the steps, taking them one at a time, as my curious eyes rose above me. As terrified as I was to meet the great undead, I was eager to soak up my first view of a metropolis.

I stepped out of the canoe and stood on its wooden covering.

----------------------------------------------------------
In the first burg in the second metropolis of Hakute
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My mouth parted as I studied the area.

It was a completely enclosed space. The walls were covered with a thick red material which seemed to have the unbelievable ability to produce light. This material let out a soft pink glow, lighting the area in which I stood. The pink hue which emanated from the material reminded me of the liquid in the okun in my slum.

I looked down.

The canoe had docked in the oddest sludge I had ever seen. The liquid in the ground was a much lighter shade of brown than the thick mud that I had grown used to. The liquid seemed light enough to swim through, but not as light as the okun, not light enough to drink. It baffled me to see.

“Excuse me, de trop.” A voice called out from behind me.

I froze.

A wave of anger rose in me so hard and fast, I thought I might stumble from the force of it. My hands trembled by my side and my jaw clenched.

“De trop.” The voice called out behind me. “Excu…”

The imp did not get to finish that statement. I turned around and slapped it so hard the imp fell. It lost its foothold on the top of the stairs and dropped, landing on the hard floor in the bottom of the canoe. In a blind rage, I made to follow it.

Suddenly, red fog surrounded me.

It enclosed me. The fog seemed to suck out all the air around me. I could not breathe from within it. I choked, gasping for air as I felt the life drain out of me. It was as if the fog had reached into me and was pulling out my life force, as if it was killing me. I tried to breathe, to fight against the fog’s powers, but my struggles were futile. I felt drops of blood seep out from my nose as my heart beat slowed.

And then it was gone.

The fog left, just as mysteriously as it had appeared. I dropped to my knees on the hard floor of the upper deck of the canoe. I inhaled, filling my deprived lungs as fully as I could. My hands landed on the ground as I tried to reorient myself. I breathed, panting as I did.

A hand clamped onto my shoulder and pulled, dragging me to my feet before I was ready to rise. The hand remained, holding me steady long enough for my legs to stop shaking and firm up underneath me. Then the hand went away. I followed the hand back to its owner.

The noble one was displeased. “You do not have permission to touch my slave.” It said. “Do you understand me, de trop?”

I shivered.

We heard a lot about understandings from the traders’ stories and so we knew that spectral magic existed and that it was a great thing, but I had never had spectral magic used on me. Now that my mind was clear and I could think back on what had happened, I knew that the noble one must have used its magic to alter my lifeforce. It was a type of magic gained from the understanding in the eyes of the boga spectrum. It was an understanding which allowed its owner to control the fogs. That was the magic that kept de trops walled up in our slums, knowing that if we crossed into the border-fogs we would die.

“It called me de trop.” My voice was small and weak, but even in my fear, I could not let the imp’s insult go unanswered. I knew that I was de trop, but for an imp, a slave to call me that, it was unthinkable.

“You are de trop.” The noble one snapped. Its eyes darted over me, sizing me up in an unnerving manner, and then its gaze stopped on my neck. It looked at my neck for long enough to let me know that it was not unaware of the scales that existed there, and what those scales revealed me to be. “You are less than de trop. Do not touch my slave again. Do you understand me?”

I felt another bout of rage, but this one was tempered. Where my anger at the imp had been a fierce onslaught, this one was a dull ache which built slowly in me. It was an anger without rashness, one that allowed for reason. My jaw clenched, but I forced the words out, “yes, noble one, I understand you.”

“Come.” It ordered.

Then it turned around and walked off the canoe, and I followed, all the while burning with a sense of indignation which I had no right to but clutched like a balm to salve my battered ego. The oddest urge rose in me. It was an urge so alien it shook me, and a desire so unattainable I quickly chased it away. But in that single moment, when the urge had been born, I was filled with a thirst to make the uspec pay. And in that single moment, there was a part of me that felt strong enough to do it. That thought scared me, just as it had scared me to own a feather more dazzling than the noble one’s. It scared me because it raised the possibility that I was more than I knew.

I pushed down the crazy thoughts and walked behind the noble one. I watched a little dazed as the noble one stepped off the canoe and walked, or rather fell, into the light liquid. The liquid swallowed it up.

I blinked.

Then I followed it. I took a step off the canoe and fell into the liquid. It wasn’t until the liquid pulled me in that I realized it was quicksand, and that I was being teleported.

@GeoSilYe yay!

@tunjilomo there's definitely some more twists to come in Nebud's life

@Fazemood thank you! I'm so happy you like it.

@Peaceyw You think so? Yay! Is it a little easier to understand now (easier than the first posts)?

The noble uspec nodded and walked backwards. It took its gaze from me, back to the rest of the slum and announced, “ALL uspecs responsible step forward, NOW.”

I looked behind me and saw that no one else came forward. The noble uspec’s gaze turned back to me, and for a moment, I thought that I would be asked to point them out. It was one thing not to lie for them, it was another entirely to point them out. Could I do it? The last few days could not wash away the years that preceded them. In my mind, these younger uspecs were still my friends. Even Junte, even the one who’d tried to kill me.

“Have it as you wish.” The noble undead said, its tone ringing with a certain sense of finality I couldn’t decipher.

The noble uspec turned to the slaves dressed in tunics and nodded at them. Those imps walked towards the canoe the uspec had come in. One of them climbed in, walking down into the canoe, and disappearing from sight. It reared its head a few seconds later, carrying a creature I had never seen before.

The creature was big enough to fit fully into its arms. The imp placed it on the ground, and it stood on six legs. It had a long, streamlined body with a tail that ended in a single point. The creature’s face was tiny with two small eyes, dots for noses and a line for a mouth. It had spots allover its tough skin.

The imp bent back and brought four more of the creatures out. Then it reached into the canoe and brought out a bowl. The imp put its hand into the bowl and pulled out what looked like layers of an imp’s skin. It threw the flaps of skin at the creatures and they caught it, revealing a mouth filled with the most unnatural teeth. The creatures chewed the skin, turned around, and ran into the slum.

I had never seen a creature move that fast. The creatures ran on their six legs into the slum. They mingled with the other uspecs, sniffing them with their tiny dot-noses. The great uspecs who’d flown in moved then. They formed around the creatures, following them as they sniffed the de trop uspecs in my slum.

I wasn’t sure what was happening, until one of the creatures got to Junte. It sniffed Junte and then let out a loud shriek. Before Junte could move, one of the warrior uspecs flicked its tail, bringing the sharp points at the end of the tail forward. It stung Junte, piercing the uspec’s chest with the end of its tail. Junte fell to his back on the ground. The warrior uspec nodded at the imps and they carried Junte forward.

The other young uspecs, reaching the realization that I had, began to run. They probably realized that the strange creatures were somehow able to hunt them. The creatures were able to tell their guilt by sniffing them. It was the most bizarre ability for a creature I had never heard of to have, but I couldn’t deny what I’d seen with Junte.

The uspecs began to run. They ran, trying to avoid the sniffing of the creatures, and the warriors flew with their filled ailerons and caught them. They held them in place, regardless of the uspecs thrashing, while the creatures sniffed them. When the creatures shrieked, the great uspecs stung my friends, paralyzing them with their poison.

One by one, my co-conspirators were found and brought forward to the base of the stage. They were paralyzed, and so the imps who’d carried them forward, manipulated them into a kneeling position. I saw the fear in Junte’s eye as it stared at me. I could not imagine how it would feel to be paralyzed and have no control over my own body. I felt sorry for it, sorry for all my friends who knelt by me. But a new fear was starting to rise in me. If the noble uspec took my old friends with me, then the news that I was irira would spread wherever I went. I would be damned allover again.

After sniffing everyone else in the slum, four of the creatures went back to the canoe. One came for me. I stood, frozen to the spot with a certain fear of the unknown, as the creature’s nose brushed against my skin. It shrieked. I closed my eye and waited to feel the poison, but nothing happened. Warily, I opened my eye, daring a peep around me. The creature had turned around and was headed back to the canoe.

I looked behind me. Some of the warrior uspecs had formed a line behind us, the young guilty uspecs. But none of them made any move to paralyze me. I exhaled, trying to calm my racing heart, as my attention spun back to the uspec on the stage.

“It is a grave sin to lie.” The uspec said. Then it turned its attention to the warrior uspecs and said, “gift them to the okun.”

It happened so quickly, I just stood there watching with an unbelievable amount of shock. One minute, my friends had been kneeling paralyzed beside me, the next they lay on the floor, their heads cut off from their bodies. I had never seen so much blood in my entire life. My mind spun. I blinked staring first at the noble uspec who’d given the order, and then at the warrior uspecs who’d carried it out and the blood-stained cutlasses they’d used. They’d killed my friends without a single thought, over the beating of an osin, over the suffering of an imp who could not die. The imp would recover, it may be marred, but it would recover. My friends would not.

I blinked, staring in shock as the imps came forward and carried the remains of my dead friends to the okun. They threw them into the okun as carelessly as one would toss a twig into the stream. To the imps, to the great uspecs, my friends were nothing.

My eye turned to Bentuj. The uspec’s face was contorted with pain and grief, but it did not move, it did not do a single thing to avenge the loss of one it had taken and treated as an offspring. That was when I learned just how small and inconsequential Bentuj really was. That was when I learnt how inconsequential I was. I was de trop, unwanted by my progenitors, inhabitant of a nameless slum. I was nothing. Like my friends, I could be killed, and no one would raise a hand to stop it. Even worse, I was irira, which meant everyone who learnt of my abomination would be required to kill me. It would be a grave sin to do otherwise.

The noble one spoke. “For the insult to the great one’s personage, this slum will be phased out. There will be no new life brought here until the last of you dies. There will be no more visitors to this slum in your lifetime. No traders will come here, no uspec or imp will visit. That is the great one’s vengeance.”

My mind was still reeling when the noble uspec walked down from the stage and stopped in front of me. “Since you did not lie, you will face the great one in person and receive its judgement.” Its eyes roamed over my body and then it snapped at two imps. “Clean it.” It said. The words dripped with disgust, but I couldn’t concentrate on that. Not when I would face the great one.

The great one had phased out my slum, which meant that the uspecs left alive, our elders, would see no new faces until they died. After they died, the slum would be filled with new uspecs, ones unconnected to our crime. I could not even begin to imagine how well connected an uspec had to be, to have the power to phase out a slum.

From what I’d been told, only Kaisers had that level of power. The Kaiser was the overall sovereign of a port. It was the final voice on all matters concerning the port. For the uspecs in a port, the Kaiser came second to the founder, Chuspecip. There was no external body which could interfere with a Kaisers control of its port. None that I had heard of at least. So, the great uspec I was about to meet, had to know the Kaiser, it had to have gotten permission from it to deal with our slum.

The imps cleaned me. They used a soft rag and a warm scented liquid, but I could not enjoy it, not when my hope was suddenly turning into something ugly. I’d thought these uspecs would save me from death in the okun and they had, but now I feared that whatever the great one had planned for me would be worse than death in the okun.

I was led forward, towards the noble one’s canoe, and I followed, walking mindlessly into it. Suddenly, I wished I could go back in time, back before I took the imp’s eye, back when I had just been one out of many young uspecs in a slum that cared for me as much as it could. Back when no great uspecs came into our slum. But I knew I couldn’t, and as I was led deeper into the canoe, something akin to hope came alive in me.

There was still so much unknown in front of me, but I was alive. After everything I’d seen that day, I was even more determined to feel the spectral magic the imps used so casually. I yearned to fly, to show off dazzling feathers which surpassed that of even a noble undead. I wanted my tail to grow into the weapon it was intended to be, and my scales to enlarge and cover my neck. I wanted to be what I had seen; I wanted to be great, to matter.

So, even as my mind filled with fear, my heart swelled with hope. It was a dreadful combination.

Part 5
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The pointed edge of a canoe emerged from the black fog. As it came forward, the ground underneath it returned to sludge, which the canoe moved in.

This was not the first canoe that we’d seen in the slum. All the passing traders travelled with canoes. They were the mode of transportation in the spectral existence. But I had never seen one like this.

The canoe was fully covered, as all canoes in the spectral existence were, so we couldn’t see who or what was inside of it. It was large, by far the largest canoe that had ever come into our slum. It was painted white and had the smoothest finish I had ever seen in a canoe. The back end of the canoe was a wide red tail. The tail wagged, propelling the canoe further into the slum.

I knew from the tail that the canoe belonged to the kute spectrum. I’d heard stories about the other spectrums’ canoes. Each spectrum used their unique features as the propellant for the canoe to move through the sludge. I craned my head, trying to get a better look at the vehicle.

I’d been inside one once.

A trader had taken a liking to me and allowed me to go into its canoe. The trader showed me how the tail was controlled using paddles inside the canoe. It had been a lot of work paddling the canoe enough to get it to move from one hovel to another. I told the trader that I didn’t know how it did it, and it laughed at me. I remember it said that paddling canoes was imp work. The trader hadn’t owned an imp, but it had lent one from the burgs. I took my attention back to the much bigger canoe, as it made its last strides into our slum.

As soon as the canoe completely left the neighboring burg, the fog went from black back to red. The imps who’d formed two rows by the fog knelt by the channel of sludge which had formed by the canoe. They put their hands into the mud and continued their massaging motions. Their hands did things in the mud that I couldn’t see, and the canoe came to a stop. The sludge which had surrounded the canoe went away and was replaced by the firm ground which molded so comfortably against my feet. Then the imps stood and moved back.

The entire slum was silent as we watched the magnificent canoe with wide eyes. Slowly, the top of the canoe began to come down. There was a split going along the middle and the two halves pulled apart from the center, down to the sides of the canoe.

I couldn’t see much. All I saw was a flat board seemingly made of beams, lining the top of the open canoe. Then several of those beams got pushed back and a green head emerged from the bottom of the canoe.

The uspec came out of the canoe, walking onto the ground by it, and my mouth hung open. This uspec had five of its outer eyes filled. Five. That meant that the uspec had gained four understandings. The uspec was just one eye away from filling all of its eye-sockets. I had never seen an uspec with that many eyes.

I found myself slowly walking forward. I hadn’t planned to, I just felt an urge to get closer to this great uspec who was even greater than the uspecs who’d flown in. Granted, the uspec wasn’t nearly as big as the ones who’d flown in, but it didn’t matter, because this uspec had more spectral magic than the others.

The uspec walked to the stage, giving me my first view of completely filled ailerons. I stopped just a few steps behind the elder uspecs from my slum who were closest to the stage. As the uspec turned, taking its time to look condescendingly at our slum and the de trop uspecs who inhabited it, I stared at the uspec’s feathers and blinked.

A shock wave ran through my system. For a moment I felt an absurd amount of fear. And then it was gone, just as suddenly as it had come, but it left me feeling shaken. I couldn’t help turning my eye back to the cause of my fear. I stared at the uspec’s feathers and again I noticed what I’d seen earlier. This great uspec, who seemed even greater than the great uspecs who’d flown in, didn’t have a single feather as dazzling as mine.

Then the uspec cleared its throat and the thought, as well as the absurd fear which came with it, left.

The uspec on the stage had on the same waist belt as the uspecs who’d flown in. It had a cutlass hanging from one side of the belt and a whip from the other, just like the other uspecs. Where it diverged was in the arm bands. It had two golden arm bands around both of its arms. I didn’t know what the arm bands meant, but I knew it had to be an indication of great power and wealth.

The uspec spoke. Its voice was so loud and filled with so much authority it commanded every single uspec’s full attention. I heard it speak and wondered what it would take to speak as it did.

It said, “I am the noble undead, Domax, and I have been sent here by my liege, the great undead, Fajahr, duke of the second metropolis of Hakute.”

My mind reeled from the titles. I’d known that the uspec standing on the stage had to be great, but I hadn’t thought that a noble would come to our desolate slum. Especially not a noble sent by the duke of a metropolis. Dukes were just a step down from Kaisers. The most powerful uspec in the port of Hakute was the Kaiser. After the Kaiser, it was the duke of the first metropolis, and then the duke of the second metropolis. I couldn’t believe that the third most powerful uspec in our port, had sent a noble to us. And not just a noble, but a noble undead. The undead appendage to its name meant that the noble was a progenitor, it was blessed by the founder, Chuspecip, with an offspring.

The noble uspec on the stage continued speaking and I forced my mind to be quiet so that I could hear it.

“The great one has found this slum wanting.”

I took a step back. Just like that, every hope I’d harbored of finding a way to escape death, slowly faded away as I realized the uspec wasn’t here just to visit. The uspec’s tone was ominous as it continued to speak. But as it spoke, a wave of apprehension coursed through me.

“A few days ago, the great one’s osin walked into this slum and was molested. This act was performed without the great one’s permission, and the great one considers it a grave insult to its personage. All uspecs responsible must face the great one’s judgement. All uspecs responsible step forward now.”

I felt my heart pounding in my chest. I forced my head to stay still, and I kept my eye from darting nervously towards my co-conspirators, the other young uspecs who’d joined in molesting the imp. A part of me was indignant that uspecs would be called to task for harming an imp, we were after all the superior creatures, and imps were slaves.

That thought calmed me, returning reason, and with it, fear. Imps were slaves. That imp was not just a slave but a favorite, a pet. It was the property of its master, just as Junte’s horn was its property. It would be just as wrong to take Junte’s horn without permission. As the cold logic circled through my mind, I wondered where that logic had been while I’d held the imp down by the okun. And a duke’s osin? How was that even possible? What was the osin of the duke of the second metropolis doing in our slum?

“All uspecs responsible step forward. NOW.” The uspec’s voice was even more awful than it had been before. There was a snap as it said the last word, and I found myself shaking a little from it. But who would volunteer to die?

I turned my head slightly then, my curiosity to search out Junte eviscerating my self-control. Junte was staring at me. My eyes crossed from Junte to Bentuj and to the okun they would drown me in after the great uspecs left. Reality returned as I remembered that I was irira. I didn’t know what the great one’s judgement would be, but I knew what Bentuj’s was. If I stayed in the slum, I would be drowned in the okun. If I went and threw myself at the great one’s mercy…I didn’t know what would happen, but an uncertain future with the possibility of life, seemed like a better choice than a certain death.

I took a deep breath and walked forward, past the shocked faces of the elder uspecs, all the way to the base of the stage. “I am responsible.” I announced.

The de trop uspecs from my slum gasped.

The noble uspec looked down, tilting its head so that its eyes could focus on me. It was the first time that I’d had so many eyes, from the same face, concentrated on me. It was disconcerting.

“What is a grave sin?” it asked.

“A grave sin is a sin against the founder, Chuspecip.” I replied. My response was automatic. I’d had it memorized for as long as I could remember. It was one of the tenets of my faith.

“Is it a grave sin to lie?” the noble uspec asked, its voice emotionless as its eyes rolled over me, scrutinizing every inch of my body.

I swallowed nervously and then I nodded. “Yes, noble one.” I replied.

The noble uspec pursed its lips and then it nodded. “Did you commit this crime alone?”

My first instinct was to say yes. It was an instinct that had come from a lifetime of friendship and loyalty to the other young uspecs in my slum. But I found myself thinking instead. I thought about what I would gain if I lied, and what I could lose. The young uspecs who’d been my friends wouldn’t embrace me for lying on their behalf. They may be grateful, but they would still call me irira and kill me. I had nothing to gain by lying for them.

“No, noble one, I did not.”

Part 4
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It was the single most awing thing I had ever seen.

They appeared like dots in the sky, green dots which became larger the closer they got to us. I could only see them through the okun, as Bentuj’s vice grip remained fixed on the back of my neck.

Bentuj, its hand still around my neck, tilted its head backwards to get a clearer view of the red sky. Bentuj’s mouth opened, gaping in shock as the green dots grew into creatures with arms and legs.

They descended on us. One of them landed in the okun, right in front of me.

The uspecs who’d been holding me down took their attention from drowning me, to staring at the intruders. In their distracted phase, their hold on me slackened. It was a testament to the level of shock they were in, that they didn’t even notice as I slipped out of their hold and stood on my feet behind them.

Finally, I could see with my own eye who the intruders were.

I blinked, my dazed eye darting all around me. They were everywhere. There were at least twenty of them, and they had landed all over our tiny slum. My gaze fixed on the one standing in the okun, and my mouth parted as I stared at it.

It was the biggest uspec I had ever seen. The uspec towered over Bentuj. Its arms seemed, to my dazed eye, to be about the thickness of the stem of the tree I’d been tied to the night before, and its legs were even thicker. It stood with its legs spread and I gasped.

My eyes widened.

I had imagined it, as Bentuj implacably guided my head down into the okun, I dreamt about what a great uspec would look like. I imagined the tail, I imagined it being a little wider than mine, and going all the way down to sweep the floor. This tail exceeded my imaginations. This tail was much wider than I’d pictured, at least as wide as my arm.

As if sensing my perusal, the tail twitched. It flapped in the water and the end of it rose, coming out of the okun for seconds before sinking back in, slapping the surface of the stream in the process.

Junte gasped and jumped back.

Bentuj shivered.

I smiled. The corners of my lips crept up as I captured the image of the tail in my head. In my mind, I took a mental picture of the split end and the sharp points. The tail was not at all what I had expected. It was even longer than I had imagined, and it ended in two points, not one. As a kute, I knew that once my tail grew fully, it would turn into a weapon. The end of it would eject a poison which could paralyze anyone it touched. But I had never seen a fully-grown tail.

My gaze inched up, voraciously devouring the great uspec’s body. It had a thick red belt around its waist. One side of that belt held a red sword with a finely carved hilt, and the other end held a wound whip.

My fingers stretched forward, moving of their own accord towards it. I imagined what it would feel like to hold the whip, to own one. I imagined my fingers curling around the head as I pulled it out from the belt and snapped it. The whip was the badge of a master, an uspec who owned an imp slave. It was a mark of distinction in the spectral existence, one I hungered for. I shook my head and pulled my hand back to my side. De trop did not own slaves, everyone knew that.

My eye continued its hungry appraisal. I looked up, past the uspec’s impossibly large chest, to its bare neck, all the way up to its face.

I gasped.

The uspec had all six of its outer eye-sockets formed, and three of them were filled. Two of the outer eyes were black. From the stories I’d heard, I knew that those had to be the imp eyes. The other eye was red. It was on the uspec’s forehead, above its central eye. The outer eye was a lighter shade of red than the central eye. In the middle of the outer eye, there was a small green horn. That horn showed that the eye had belonged to an uspec of the mejo spectrum. That, in combination with the two black imp eyes, showed that this uspec had spectral magic.

The uspec turned around, and again I was awed.

Bentuj stared at the feathers on the uspecs aileron, and then it turned around to look at me. I knew exactly what it was thinking. I allowed myself to indulge in a moment of pride. My chest puffed out, and my face brightened with a smug smile.

The uspec’s ailerons were over three-quarter filled with cyan feathers. That was why the uspec had been able to fly into our slum. The uspec’s ailerons were covered enough to be wings which gave flight. But as impressive as the uspec’s ailerons were, none of its feathers were as dazzling as mine. That was what Bentuj thought, and that was why I smiled, a smug self-satisfied smile.

As I studied the many feathers on the uspec’s ailerons, I fantasized about what mine would look like when they filled. Suddenly, I was no longer an irira destined to die, I was an uspec who’d been giving another chance to live. I didn’t know who these great uspecs were, and I didn’t know why they’d come to my slum. But I was determined to leave with them.

Just as my mind swelled from the astonishing view of a great uspec, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye.

The uspec who’d been standing in the okun walked out of it, stepping into the sludge. As soon as the uspec was standing in the sludge, the spot in front of it rippled, like waves in a large sea.

Then it hardened, and sunk in, creating a hole in the ground.

It wasn’t the only one. Holes began to form all around the slum.

Imps came out of those holes. Unlike the osin which had come to our slum for our jejas, these imps wore nothing over their skin. It was the first time I had ever seen the naked umani form.

The imps were also eyeless. Unlike the osin which had come to our slum, none of these imps had their eyes. All they had on their face were two empty eye-sockets. And their skin looked even more different from that of the osin’s. Their skin was cracked with black streaks running along it.

The first thing I noticed was the difference. The osin which had come to our slum had a light brown skin. I had imagined that all imps had the same color skin, as all uspecs had the same color skin, but I was wrong.

Some of the imps were brown, but even the ones who were brown were not consistent in their brownness. It was as if every brown imp was a different shade of brown. Then there were the imps who seemed to have a somewhat milky skin and there were the ones with white skin. None of them looked the same. But that wasn’t the only difference, just the most striking.

The other difference was in the features they had on their bodies. These came as less of a shock, as uspecs also had different features depending on our spectrums. I imagined that the different imps with different features where of different spectrums. If that was the case, then from the features I could see, the umanis only had two spectrums, unlike us, who had five.

The two umani spectrums had different features. The first umani spectrum seemed to have two odd mounds coming out of their chests and a triangle covered with hair on their pubis. I had heard stories of an uspec spectrum with spikes that covered their chest. Those spikes were for protection. I wondered what the strange umani features were for. Surely those mounds on their chest couldn’t be hard enough to stop a sword. The other umani spectrum had a flat chest and a small, strange looking tail, dangling from their pubis. Unlike our tails which were formidable and emerged from our back, theirs appeared feeble and emerged from their front. I could not even begin to imagine the purpose of such a short front tail.

The imps populated our slum. They knelt, their knees sinking into the sludge, and sunk their hands into the mud. Their backs bent as they made some strange motions with their arms. It was as if they were massaging the mud, as if they were trying to form the sludge into something more. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what they were doing.

But as the imps worked, the great uspecs stood still, their gazes fixed impassively on their surroundings. They didn’t look around the slum, there was no curiosity in their gaze. I could see why, uspecs such as these, with so many imp slaves, would not care for our slum. They must have come from an even greater place. They looked so great, I was sure they came from the first metropolis, the capital of Hakute. The uspecs stood straight, with their feet spread and a hand on the hilt of their cutlasses. Standing as they were, they looked like warriors, like the troops of a great uspec. That thought puzzled me. I could not think of an uspec who could be greater than them.

The imps’ labors finally reached fruition. The ground changed.

In my entire life, I had never seen a ground which was not covered in sludge. But as the imps worked, the sludge gave way to a harder surface. It was as if the floor was being covered with a fine mat. Suddenly, I could picture how a common uspec would not know sludge. With slaves such as these, who could transform the mud, I could see why any uspec, not born de trop, would never know sludge.

In that moment I despised the imps even more than I had before. These imps had spectral magic. It wasn’t the noble magic which uspecs had when they gained the understanding, but it was still magic. It was magic I had never had.

The ground was filled completely from the imps’ magical ministrations, and all the sludge was gone. In its place was a much lighter brown ground which seemed to form around the uspecs’ legs.

I walked out of the okun and stepped onto the ground. I gasped in shock as the ground sunk slightly to fit comfortably against my feet. There was none of that wet stickiness which came with the sludge. I frowned, shocked as I watched pools of pink liquid form around my feet. It took me a while to realize that I was dripping from the okun. I had grown so used to walking on a wet floor, that it never mattered if I was wet.

I took another step forward, and again the ground formed around my feet. There was an underlying firmness underneath the surface, which kept me from falling, or wobbling on my feet. I had never felt anything like it. I wanted to run around, just to feel the way the ground formed underneath me. I wanted to lie down and see if the ground would form around my body the way it did around my feet.

Luckily, I was stopped from indulging in that impulse by the approach of an imp. For a moment I thought it meant to come to me, and I imagined myself as a master, as an uspec with enough clout to own an imp. Then the imp walked right by me, without sparing me a moments glance. It was as if I was nothing, as if to the imp, I didn’t even exist.

The imp stopped by the okun and knelt by it. I watched as the imp’s hand disappeared into the ground and re-emerged holding onto a small grey bowl with a white cloth in it. I looked around the okun and noticed that it wasn’t the only imp doing this. In fact, there were several imps who had magically pulled out a bowl and a rag from the ground and were filling it with liquid from the okun.

The imp closest to me stood. It walked right past me, again, and went to the great uspec who’d landed in the okun. It knelt in front of that uspec and cleaned the sludge off its feet.

There was more action around the slum.

About ten imps formed around a hovel, three hovels in front of where I stood. They put their hands on the walls of the hovel and pushed. The hovel came tumbling down as if it was made from flimsy twigs. It was another show of the imps’ magic. My jaw clenched as I watched their display of spectral magic.

They knelt on hands and knees on the ground around the hovel they’d just brought down. Their hands seemed to massage the floor as it had the sludge. Suddenly, the pieces of the hovel went away, swallowed up by the ground and in its place rose a beautiful structure the likes of which I had never seen before.

I stared at it transfixed. I did not think of the hovel which had just been destroyed and the uspec who would sleep in sludge until the hovel was rebuilt. I don’t think any of the other de trop uspecs in our slum thought of that. All of our gazes were fixed on the stage which had just been erected, pulled out of the ground with the imps’ magic.

It was a dazzling white stage, built out of a material I could not name. The edges of the stage were lined with the most mesmerizing crimson gem. The imps carried white rectangular boxes over to a side of the stage. They stacked the rectangular boxes on top of each other forming steps from the ground to the top of the stage. And then the imps moved away from the stage.

Five rippled spots formed on the ground around the stage. Those ripples became holes which sunk into the ground. One new imp emerged from each of those holes.

These imps were different. They still had the same eyeless sockets on their faces and the same streaked skin, but like the osin, they were clothed. They had a tunic which covered every part of their body except for their face. Those imps walked away from the stage, towards one of the thick fogs which marked the boundary between our slum and the neighboring burg.

They formed two rows by the fog. Two of them stood on one side, and three on the other. They just stood there waiting.

I turned, my confused gaze examining the great uspecs. I became even more confused when I saw that the uspecs had turned to face the thick fog too. Even the naked imps stood facing the fog.

I found myself turning with them, my breath caught in my throat as I watched, waiting, even though I didn’t know what I was waiting for.

Then the thick red fog turned black and I knew the wait was over.