Chapter 25

Anogwin has five moons. Luna, the white moon; Menta, the purple moon; Secca, the green moon; Reva, the red moon; and Pathis, the blue moon. Each moon waxes and wanes at its own pace, and each phase of each moon is said to have some kind of effect on the world below. These effects range from enhanced fertility, peaceful nights, or psychic sensitivity, to being a good sign for taking revenge or going on a hunt. These effects remain unproven, so many remain skeptical, but plenty of people believe in them and act accordingly.

Day 156 Quenchenday

“Alright, Iver, let’s start with the basics. Who does the order follow?” Thallos quizzed, hand clasped behind his back with a riding crop. He passed back and forth in front of me in a small office that must have been his.

The office was the size of Mystagogue Thrasher’s office, but the decor was totally different. The walls were a uniform striping of light and dark gray bars running horizontally across the walls. I sat in a steel chair that was designed to be fashionable but was uncomfortable to a distracting degree. To my left was a plain steel table adorned with a row of books between two panther head-shaped onyx bookends. The books toward the door to the office were all school textbooks on topics like an encyclopedia of venoms and poisons, a book on advanced magic theory that I knew Thallos had never read, and a field guide to being combat-ready at any time. The books to the side closer to his desk were all cheap pulp fiction novels and horror stories by one H.P. Lovecoast. The wall above the table displayed a stuffed and mounted set of chimera heads, a flame salamander head, all eight of the beast’s legs set in pairs framing said head, and a dried and tacked kelpie hide from tail to snout. 

There was a table on the right wall matching its twin on the left, but this one displayed more trophies. A dried green hide troll hand, the stinger of a manticore held in a glass octagonal case balanced point down, and the mounted fangs of what I guessed was some massive spider that I would never want to meet. Mounted to the wall behind this table was a single trophy. A single bird wing that spanned the entire wall and wasn’t even fully extended. My best guess was the wing was from a thunderbird. 

Thallos’s desk was carved from black marble with silver-white veins, sleek and flat on every surface with no ornamentation, but the edges and corners looked to me to be intimidatingly sharp. But that factor of intimidation paled in comparison to his back wall. Flanking his black leather chair was a matching pair of cu sith heads below a pair of black shucks.

Also known as cu sith, also known as fairy hounds, were rumored to be capable of speech and making fey quality deals as well as teleportation. While that was impressive, the black shuck heads were a step above. Also known as black hounds, they were seen as omens of death and ill fortune. Just looking at the mounted heads, I could see why many thought of them as demon dogs, their fur oil-slick black, massive jaws filled with just as massive teeth held in a perpetual snarl, and their eyes a bloody red and glowed from what I could only guess were lights set behind the orbs.

But the most terrifying presence of the room overshadowed His chair and hound. Mounted above his chair and posed to be looking directly where I sat was a manticore head. Its semi-human semi-lion features were frozen in a snarl, bearing a row of fangs the size of daggers, the whole thing framed by a perfect, glossy copper mane.

It was that head I stared at. I swore I could see the bloodlust in the beast’s glass eyes as they seemed to peer into my very soul and found my skill wanting. 

I was snapped back into focus by the sting of a riding crop against my thigh.

“Aw!” I rubbed what would soon be a welt with the flat of my hand.

“Again, who does our order follow?”

“The Fractured Goddess.” I answered, even as my face curled at the pain.

“Good. What are each of the fragments called?”

I tried to dredge up the memory of covering this in class. “Um, Her Fragment of the Birthing Forge, Her Fragment of the Warriors Eye, Her Fragment of the Whistling Phantom?” The third answer was more of a question, and I was answered by another slap from the riding crop across my bicep. I hissed in pain as I clutched the site that burned.

“Whispering Phantom. Not whistling. Continue. You still have two more.”

“Umm, Her fragment of Beating Silence.”

THWAP!! My cheek lit with a fire by a force that drove my head to turn. “ACK!” I wailed as I tipped back in the chair. I felt the balance shift in the chair as I leaned it up on two legs and knew that I was going to crash. I tried to correct my weight up only wound up pinwheeling my arms. Abruptly, my rapid descent stopped mid-fall. I looked under the chair to find Thallos’s booted foot hooked into the support bar welded horizontally between the two legs of the chair. He brought the chair back to standing with the jarring force of a stomp.

Thallos crossed his arms over his chest, the crop still in hand, as he leaned up against his desk. He gave me a look that said he knew I could do better. He voiced those very words. “Come now, boy, I know you can do better. You’re not a mental slouch, and this stuff is the basics that everyone needs to know. There is no reason this should dack your brain. You need to keep in mind that this is me going easy on you. It’s only going to get worse from here.”

“Worse?! How much worse are we talking?” I was scared of the answer.

He just shrugged and looked into the distance. “Broken bones, dodging arrows and myst shots, plenty of endurance training. It’s gonna hurt, but it shouldn’t kill you.”

My face paled with each answer he listed. I started second-guessing my choice to join the sect. But there was no turning back, I had to remind myself. I needed to think of this as a pass-or-die system.

He saw the look on my face and gave me a kind smile. “If it makes you feel any better, I had to go through the same training and worse when I was a student. Now, I’m not going to chop off your hand and have it magically reattached every time you fumble an answer. But you need to keep in mind that even the punishment is a form of training to get you used to pain and keep you on your mental toes at all times.”

I gave an audible gulp of nervousness. Pain endurance training was not what I signed up for.

He flashed me the same understanding smile. “I know you can do this, Iver. You’ve got the chops and mettle to turn this training into an afternoon jog through the park. You got this.” 

He pulled himself back up to his full height, his serious face back on. “Now, one more time. Her Fragment of…”

I closed my eyes and took a centering breath as I thought. Did the room smell like cinnamon and clove? I chided myself for the distraction and refocused.

“Her Fragment of Beating Stillness.” 

“Very good.” He tousled my hair in affection. “Now you’ve got one more. What fragment do the mages and scholars follow?”

The answer jumped straight to my mind. I looked up at Thallos and gave him a confident grin. “Fallen Lineage. Her Fragment of the Fallen Lineage.”

“Well done, kiddo.” he praised with a soft clapping of his hands. He leaned back against the desk, this time setting down the crop and bracing himself with both hands and a foot. “Now for the new material. Sharpen those ears and keep a lid on what I’m about to tell you. Got that, boy?”

I clenched my fists in my lap and gave a single resolute nod of confirmation,

“Good. Let’s start with the name of your sect. You are a trainee of the Sect of the Dark Hunter. All members of the sect are known as Dark Hunters. Not hard to remember.”

I shook my head, mute with focus and fascination.

“The title Dark Hunter was originally given in relation to a type of creature by the same name. The creature called a Dark Hunter is a rare occurrence in the world. When someone who dedicated their life to slaying evil was slayed under very specific conditions could return as this type of Restless Dead. To go into detail, the person in question has to be viewed as a leader of people, be it a king, noble, chieftain, or even a priest. They also need to be a skilled warrior or powerful mage. In the process, the subject must be slain by some form of terrible evil on sacred land under a full blood Luna moon, a full Reva moon, and a new Pathis moon. If these conditions are met, the slain person is raised by Revnerra, the Thayen goddess of death, among other domains. But what really matters about the goddess is she presides over the domain of death and has a penchant for meddling with those who seek revenge on their deathbed. Legend has it that the goddess descends to the slain on wings of shadow and ravens to rip out their heart, take a single bite from it, lacing the organ with potent Dark and Death Myst before laying it back in the chest where the wound will heal and scar over the course of the night. After three nights, the corpse rises as a Dark Hunter and lives with the sole purpose of living up to that name, hunting dark and evil creatures. They will only find rest if they kill whoever originally killed them in a very specific ritual. You following, boy?”

I silently gave a vigorous nod in answer. I found all of what he said fascinating. Dark Hunters sounded awesome, like something a god of metal music would come up with. I mean, come on! A noble, heroic figure dies tragically and rises again to become an agent of a goddess of death. That sounds like the synopsis of a metal song if I’ve ever heard one. 

“Good, now to continue to how you and I are classified as members of the order.”

“But Thallos,” I interjected. He looked at me expectantly. “What about the fragment of the sect? Shouldn’t I know who I’m devoting myself to?”

“That’s a secret for later on down this road, my boy. For now, just call her The Hollow Fragment and think of her as a dark defender working from only the deepest shadows.”

I nodded at the answer, not really appeased by it, but I accepted it as a stepping stone. 

“Now, as I was saying about how we are classified. Single sect members are type one members, Mastloks are type two members, and we are the last type, type three members. Type ones do most of the work both in-house and in-field. In-house we have clerks, technicians, researchers, theorists, smiths, communications specialists, librarians, mechanics, cryptographers, and so on. While out in the field, we have adventurers, scouts, spies, hunters, advisors, assassins, construction specialists, escort guards, black market sappers, and so on. Most clerical work falls to Blackened Crown and Sightless Eye. Most research, device testing, theorists, and mechanics belong to Burning Hand and Blackened Crown. To be honest, Blackened Crown has its fingers in most pies. They work in the field in both combat and noncombatant roles.”

“Wait- I thought only casters could join Broken Crown?” I asked, completely confused.

“What?” Thallos looked at me in complete bafflement. “No, I thought you caught on to that shallow farce. Anyone who did any level of digging into files for the sect’s study through your therra-node or discussed with a Mystagogue about options for noncombatants would learn that Blackened Crown and Sightless Eye have positions for those that can’t hold their own in fieldwork or in the other sects. We won’t keep anyone who won’t do the work or doesn’t have the talent. That said, if you can do the digging or ask honest questions and keep good grades in standard classes, we won’t throw you out on the street. We trim the dead weight and keep those that can prove themselves useful.”

“Really? Those two sects are the ones with all the clerks, mathematicians, and historians?” I pressed, not comprehending what he was saying. “I’m not sure I believe that,” I voiced.

Thallos folded his arms over his chest, lifted his nose, and closed his eyes, looking for all the world as a dignified man conveying wisdom to a disciple. “Best believe it, my boy. Do you really expect warriors to file papers, assassins to do advanced calculus, and spies to decipher enemy messages?”

“Actually, yes. Specifically on that last one. I’m pretty sure spies should know cryptography. It kind of seems like their job.” I pointed out, feeling I had a valid reason to prove him wrong.

“You do have a point on that case, I will admit.” Thallos gave a dip of his head to secede the point.

“Then what about the cooks? Or the janitors? Who keeps up with yard work to keep the grounds looking nice or building maintenance?”

“Whoa, whoa.” He said, pressing palms toward the floor in a slow motion. “Cool those heels, boy. To answer your question, we train the mundane staff in at least one or two upkeep duties and circulate them between upkeep work and their stand to make sure no one handful of workers has the same job for longer than a month or two. We’ve found that it’s a great way to alleviate stress and keep morale up if everyone cycles through jobs every so often.”

“That makes sense, but what does this have to do with us?” I felt so lost in what this had to do with me. It was cool knowing how the cogs of the machine of the order worked, but I didn’t see how I fit into it all.

“Sorry, I went off on a tangent. The point is that those workers and all single sect members are type one members. They are the day-to-day workers who handle most standard matters. The Mastloks are type two, the ones that are flexible and able to handle most deviations from the norm. In short, they are the ones that step up when something goes wanky or difficult most of the time.”

“I’m not sure that I understand. Can you give examples?”

“Think of a Battle Mage, a caster with warrior skills. Or a spy with assassin skills being sent in for a longer-term infiltration ending in a murder meant to look like an accident. Or a spy mechanic meant to take up the role of a royal tinker or a high-level scientist when they need to collect information on a secret weapon being tested. How about an assassin with a skill for hacking or a spy who needs to be able to fight their way out of a hostile scenario or take the guise of a gladiator? The list goes on. If you can think of a problem, most of the time, there is a Mastlok that can handle the job.”

“That makes sense. But if that’s the case, where do we fit in? Members of five sects, where would we be needed?”

“That, my boy, makes us type three. When a job is too dangerous for any one man, when normally a group is needed to get a key component or tidbit of knowledge, but they can send only one individual in, that is where we come in. Dark Hunters are sent in for missions deemed impossible or too dangerous by others. We can’t just be members of each sect. We must master each sect’s skill set. We are the ones that seek in the dark for answers unfindable by any other. The ones who enter the fortress, ready to fight our way out and disable every vehicle along the way to make sure enemies can’t follow. We are the spies capable of clearing a room of critical targets while we hide among their number when our enemies gather. We are the casters that become another person and leave the scene the sole survivor, even as we burn down the compound.”

With every line, my eyes grew wider and wider. He made it sound as if I could become the kind of hero holo-movies portrayed. Like I could become the man who could save a nation with no sweat off my brow. I was going to become that hero.

“Good. I can see that you want to become that kind of man. That is what I will shape you to become. The road will be hard and bloody, but if you keep at it, you can reach that goal.”

I leaned forward in my seat. I knew my eyes shown with eagerness, and I didn’t care. I was going to become a hero, even if it killed me.

Thallos stepped around behind his desk, jumped feet first into his desk chair, and planted his right foot atop his desk in a dramatic pose that made my blood burn with dedication. He pointed down at me, his nose turned up. “Are you ready for the hell that I will put you through? Are you ready to be forged in the flames of the deepest hells to become a blade that shall pierce the heavens and cleave the lands?” His voice was resolute, brimming with the promise of a devoted master ready to cast his pupil into total chaos to make something of beauty unrivaled.

I gave him a vigorous nod, my hands planted upon my knees, elbows set wide. “Yes, uncle. I am ready to become a legend.” I almost demanded of the man.

He jumped down from atop his desk to stand before me. He tussled my hair before lifting my chin with a single finger to look him in the eye. His expression showed just how much faith he had in me. “Very good, my boy. Your father would be proud to see the path you have set yourself on. This path will test you, body, mind, soul, and heart. Are you ready?”

I locked my eyes with the man and gave a single nod, an eager grin on my face.

“Good. Now, let’s begin the real training. Get ready to shed blood.” 

“What is the classification of Mage that uses an Ellyudide Convergence Gauntlet as a focus?” Thallos demanded.

“W-Wizard.” I stammered.

CRACK!! “DAMN IT!” I howled as the whip struck my thigh, the jar atop my head wobbling, ready to join its comrades, shattered across the ground at my feet, volatile myst crystals splayed across the floor of the empty training room. Sixteen lashes marked my flesh across my chest, arms, and legs, five of which were bleeding from torn skin. I stood on one foot atop a steel vase, banned from using my hands to hold the jars by Thallos. My legs were cut and stabbed from my knees to the soles of my feet from falling unto the shards of razer glass. Only two jars ago did Thallos add the volatile crystals. If I hit them, they should detonate with enough force to sear my flesh and carve out small notches from my body. I had yet to fall since the crystals had been added, and I wasn’t about to.

“WRONG!” Thallos snapped. “The Answer is Elementalist. Elementalists use Iron Wood wands as a focus because they can withstand the weight of earth magic and the heat of fire magic. What is the name of the marks an Elementalist uses to bind the wand to themself? Hint: Druids and Shamans can use the same system.”

“Uhhh.” I played for time as I tried to adjust my propping foot. I tried to roll from the ball around to the heel to stretch the muscle and relax some of the pain. “Is it Ogham?”

“Correct.” Thallos praised even as he wrapped the whip around his free hand for another strike. “Ogham is a sacred language to the Elves, but it didn’t start with them. Who created Ogham and the Druid casting style?”

“The Tuathee.” I answered.

“WRONG!” Snapped Thallos with another crack of his whip. Its tongue carved a furrow through my left cheek, forcing me to cringe in reflex. The jar atop my head tumbled end over end to the floor, its shatter and echo in the room sounding my failure as a half-dozen more volatile crystals joined the group of almost three dozen scattered across the floor among the shards of glass. I stepped off my vase and picked up another jar off the table behind me, placing it atop my head like so many others before it, and braced it with my hands while I stepped back atop the vase to take a posting crane stance as I centered the jar’s balance. I had found a slight method of cheating by slightly bracing the jar against my horns, but I wasn’t about to tell Thallos. The training was so brutal that I needed every edge I could get.

“The name of the species is Tuatha. The Tuatha are the species that first formed the Elves on Anogwin. Where did the Tuatha originate from and return to after crafting the Elves?”

That answer was easy. The Tuatha ventured into the plain of Anogwin and were fascinated by its stable laws of reality and crafted the Elves. After they made the new species, the Tuatha returned to their realm, and the Elves tried to follow only to be butchered on mass by the horrors of… “TierNog, The Fae Wilderness.”

“Good.” Thallos tossed me a hard candy from his pocket. I tried to catch the sweet with my mouth but missed. I growled in annoyance.

“Now, what was the next species to join Anogwin after the Elves?”

“That’s a trick question, Uncle, and you know it.” I accused.

“Oh, yeah?” he gave me a mocking grin. “So what’s the answer?”

I gave an aggravated sigh. “Technically, the Orc species came next, but they were genetically and magically designed by the Primordials. And almost all studies of the lost species say that while they had technology and magic far surpassing anything we can understand today, they were still mortals. Dwarves were the next species designed by higher powers, so while they technically came almost a millennium later, they are considered the next Sophic Species to inhabit Anogwin.”

“And why did this debate come about?”

I gave my uncle an annoyed grunt before answering his query. “The Orc species was designed as slave labor and were thought a lesser species until they earned independence during the Bloody Tusk Rebellion.”

“Well done, my boy. Now, what is the name of the emergence of the Dwarven species?”

“The Birth from Stone.” I answered with confidence, even as I wobbled atop my stand.

“Close. Half credit. The answer is The Birth from Stone and Mud.” Thallos pulled free a walnut from his pocket. He clutched between two fingers and the thumb of his left hand as he wound up and hurled it at me at top speed. If I failed to catch the skavy nut, he would shift to shooting me with myst shots that I’d have to dodge while balancing the damn jar.

I shifted my head to the right and caught the nut in my left hand even as I caught the jar in my right. This was the fourth time he had pulled this trick, and I had learned quickly that half-answers meant something that could be a minor reward or a nasty punishment, depending on how I reacted.

I popped the nut in my mouth and aggressively chewed it before recentering the jar atop my skull.

“Now, boy, what are the breeds of Dwarf?”

“Oh, dreck.” I cursed, even as I thought. “Mountain, Hill, Plains, and Canyon?”

”And Gem Dwarves?”

“I heard they’re a genetic mutation from generations of overexposure to a specific type of Earth Myst.”

“Correct!” He threw me another hard candy that I had to catch with my mouth. This time, I managed to catch it with my teeth. But as I caught the hard candy, the jar atop my head wobbled, unstable, about to fall. I tried to correct the balance of the glass vessel without using my hands so Thallos wouldn’t give me a lashing. The jar tumbled from atop my head to crash among the field of gleaming shards below. 

I violently cursed at the field of hungry glass around the hard candy that tasted like a sour apple that I gingerly held between my teeth.

“Op! You dropped a jar while catching a candy. You know what that means, Iver! It’s time for a shatter round!” Thallos sounded a disturbing level of excited at this. But I had passed every time before, so I just had to keep up the streak. He dropped his normal whip and picked up a cat of nine tails, a handle sprouting nine whips, but each one ended with a vicious hook that could carve my flesh as easily as a razor tore through paper. He flicked the whip around, and the nine tails wrapped around my neck. Each hook latched onto the cords of the whip as easily as if they were designed to do so, forming a makeshift noose. He tugged on the whip to tighten the grip of the whip around my neck, its nanofiber cords catching on the skin of my neck like latex. He pulled harder till it was so tight that I could barely breathe.

“In a few words, I want you to tell me how the Dwarven clans differentiate themselves from each other.” By the gods, he sounded like he enjoyed doing this to me. I really had to wonder what was wrong with him.

I needed to think quickly. If I didn’t answer, he would choke me out with the whip and most likely pull me forward into the hellish pit of glass and explosive shards my failed answers had wrought before me. How did Dwarves differentiate? Skin? No, their skin varied in every breed. Hair color? No, Dwarven breeds each had their own range of hair colors. But it had something to do with hair. What was it? 

The cords tightened around my throat, forcing me to think faster even as I gasped for breath. The smell of the cord that tightened around me, that rubber-metal smell, had me thinking of cords used to hold beads in braids. My father had a Dwarven friend who stopped by once or twice when I was younger. I remember that when he hugged me, he stank of what I now know was Zedzen Brew. I remembered that he had rubber cords and metal beads in his bread. I thought harder to remember details on the Dwarven lush. He had three braids in a strange pattern. That was it!

“Braid number and styles.” I half gagged out even as I felt a line of barbed hooks, their metal backs squeezing against my esophagus.  

“Very good!” Thallos praised, even as he twitched his wrist to send a ripple down the tendrils to detach the hooks. I took yet another deep breath of fresh air in relief. 

“Please, Uncle Thallos, it’s almost midnight. I’m so tired I can barely stand. Can I please go to bed? I have class in the morning. I need rest.” I pleaded.

Thallos propped the hand that held the whip under his left elbow as he pinched his chin in thought with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. “Well, tomorrow you do have class with Master Mystagogue Neckar. She is supposed to get you caught up on the basics of myst control and its parallels. I guess I can let you go to bed, but realize that not every day will be as easy as today.” Thallos sounded as cold as a tombstone as he spoke those words, a claim as solid as steel and as immovable as Seraph’s Rise Mountain.

Even as I left the room to head to my dorm, I mentally fortified my resolve. The first day of training was hard, and I couldn’t lie to myself. I hated every second of it. But Thallos set a goal before me. I needed to handle anything that could come my way. If he thought that day was easy, then I was in for one hell of a trial by blood and fire.

As I passed through my dorm room door, I gingerly stripped and bandaged my wounds. I was going to need to hit the medical center first thing in the morning. As I flopped into my bed, I thought about all the greatest warrior classes throughout history. The Elven Blade Dancers, the Dwarven Stone Forgers, the Gnome Dream Shapers, the Ceangar Dread Riders, the Dracose War Talons, and the Primals Berserker Ferals. This wasn’t even all the legendary warrior classes throughout history, not by far, only the ones that I could remember. But all of them were nightmares on the field for the enemies and iconic symbols of hope for those in need. Each and every one had to suffer through training just as bad as what I had gone through that day, if not worse. 

Even as I crawled under the blankets, bloody, raw, and sore, I focused on what I could become if I passed this training. I wouldn’t just find my father’s killer, but I would make my father proud of who I had become. Hells, I might even hunt down my mother and solve the mysteries of the black box and my birth. I drifted off into sweet and blissful nothingness, dreaming of finding the woman who made me and why she left me with a Wild Elf. Dreams of being a lost prince, a destined warrior, a hero bound by fate to free a nation. I clung to those dreams as I drifted off. A reason to continue. A reason to push through. A reason to become more.