Morgan Rice - A Land of Fire

Darius tried to take solace where he could; at least in his region, the Empire did not kill them. He’d heard of other regions where the Empire did not even keep people alive to be slaves, but rather sold them off to slave markets, split them from their families, or just spent the days torturing and killing them. He had heard of yet other places where they starved the slaves, feeding them once a week, and of still others where they beat the slaves so bad, all day long, that few of them even reached Darius’s age.

At least here, in Darius’s province, outside the great Northern Empire city of Volusia, they had come to a cold agreement with the Empire, where the Empire kept them as slaves, but did not beat them often, allowed them to eat, and allowed them to live. And at least when Darius’s people retreated to their own village at night, they were far enough away from the prying eyes of the Empire to build up their own, secret resistance. When the day of labor ended, they gathered and trained; they became better warriors, and slowly but surely, they gathered weapons. They were crude weapons, not iron or steel like the Empire, but still weapons all the same. They were slowly preparing, in Darius’s mind at least, for a great uprising.

Yet it frustrated Darius to no end that others did not see it that way. Darius smashed another boulder, wiping sweat from his brow, and grimaced. His fellow villagers, especially the older ones, were all too safe, too conservative. They had talked of uprising Darius’s entire life, and yet no one ever took any action. All they did was train and train to become better warriors—and yet no one ever acted on it.

Darius was reaching a breaking point inside. He’d allowed himself to maintain his pride, despite his situation, all his life, because he lived for the day of uprising, for the day of asserting his freedom. And yet, increasingly, as he watched others settle into a life of apathy, his fears grew that that day would never come. Darius smashed yet another rock, wondering if all this training might just be a way for the elders to keep them down, to keep them occupied, to give them hope. And to keep them in their place.

Yes, perhaps they had it better than most, but even so, this still was not a life. He had seen too many of his cousins die from random acts of cruelty, had been lashed himself one too many times, to ever forgive or forget. Darius loathed the Empire with everything he had. He wouldn’t just lie down like the elders and accept life for what it was. Darius felt that he was different from the others, that he had less of a tolerance for it, less willingness to accept it. He knew deep down inside that he could not continue to wait for the elders much longer. Eventually, if no one else acted, he would, even if it led to his own death. Better to die struggling to be a free man, Darius felt, than to live a long life as a slave to someone else.

Darius looked around him at the hundred or so boys in this field of green dust, all of them smashing rocks, all of them covered in the dust that had come to mark their identities. Some of them were his close friends, others were family members; still others were boys that he trained with, muscular boys, most of them larger and bigger than he, and older, some sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and some even in their twenties. Darius was one of the youngest and smallest of the bunch—and yet he held his own, fought as hard as any of them. They respected his skills, and they accepted him, though they tested him often.

Darius also had something else that none of the others had—something he had kept a secret his entire life, determined to never let anyone else know of. It was a power, a power he did not understand. His people scorned sorcery and magic of all sorts; it was strictly forbidden, and it had been ingrained into him since he was a child. It was ironic, Darius thought, because his village was rife with seers and prophets and healers who used mystical arts. Yet when it came to sorcery in battle, it was considered a disgrace. They would all rather die as slaves at the hand of the Empire.

So Darius had kept it close to himself, knowing he would be an outcast if it was discovered. He also, he had to admit, was afraid of it himself. He had been shocked the day he had stumbled upon it, just recently, and he still was unsure if his power was real, or if it had just been a fluke. He had been pushing back a rock, preparing to smash it with his ax, and he had unearthed a nest of scorpions. One of them had made for his ankle, a jumping scorpion, black with yellow stripes, the most lethal of all, and Darius knew that the second it touched his skin, he’d be dead.

Darius had not even thought—he had just reacted. He had pointed his finger toward it, and a light, so fast, like a flash, had shot forth. The insect had flown backwards, several feet, landing on its back, dead.

Darius had been more scared of the discovery of his power than he had been of the scorpion. He had looked all around to make sure no one had seen him, and luckily no one had. He did not know what they would think of him if they had. Would they consider him a freak?

Darius suspected that, deep down, his people did not really scorn magic; he guessed that the real fear of the elders was that the Empire would find out. The Empire had a scorched-earth policy for anyone discovered with any sort of magic powers. When people from other towns were discovered or suspected to have powers, the Empire had come in and devastated the entire town, murdered every last single man, woman, and child. Perhaps, Darius thought, the elders frowned upon it so much out of self-preservation. Secretly, of course, they would love to have powers that could topple the Empire. How could they not?

Darius tried to focus on his work, smashing rock twice as hard, trying to block these thoughts from his mind. He knew they were not useful. This was his lot, at least for now. Until he was prepared to do something about it, he had to suppress his feelings.

There came a sudden rumbling, followed by distant screams. Darius stopped and turned with all the others, the air falling silent for the first time that day, as they all examined the horizon. It was a familiar sound: the sound of a collapse. Darius looked to the red mountains looming over them in the distance, where thousands of his people worked, those less fortunate, who had been assigned to till underneath the earth, mining inside the caves. It was hot here, even for Darius, and they all worked with no shirts under the beating sun of the Empire, on these hard red sands; but up there, on the mountain ridges, underneath the earth, it was even hotter. Too hot. Hot enough to cause the weak soil of the ridges to give way. Darius’s heart fell as he watched the final crumbling of a mountain ridge, and saw dozens of Empire guards shouting as they plummeted into the earth.

The two Empire taskmasters watching over Darius’s group, donned in the finest armor and weaponry of the sharpest steel, both turned to the horizon with alarm. They broke into a run, as the Empire often did when one of their own was injured or killed. They left them alone—yet, of course, they knew that the slaves would not dare run. They had nowhere to go, and if they tried, they would be hunted down and killed—and their entire families killed as retribution.

Darius saw his friends shake their heads grimly at the sight, all pausing from their work, studying the horizon with grave concern. Darius knew they were all thinking the same thing: they were lucky they hadn’t been the ones picked to mine underground today. They looked weighed down by guilt, and Darius wondered how many of them had friends of family trapped or dying up there. It had somehow become a way of life, being immune to the deaths that happened here every day, as if all of this was normal. Death tainted the air here in these arid lands, in these rolling deserts and mountains swept by heat and dust. A land of fire , his grandfather called it.