Will Wight - Of Dawn and Darkness

After half a year of constant torment, he was released. His supervisors at the Guild seemed surprised to see him, but the ensuing barrage of tests were mild compared to the treatment that had damaged him in the first place. When they finally concluded that he was in one piece, they released him into the Guild.

Years later, he found out that something had gone wrong during his test. He’d reacted badly to some of the alchemical processes, so while most candidates are kept at the agonizing stage for six weeks at the most, Urzaia spent six months feeling like his skin was stuffed with knives. They had expected him to emerge mad, if he survived at all.

But he was as sturdy on the inside as he was on the outside, and he left the care of the alchemists, as one of his supervisors put it, “Saner than when he went in.”

After his release, the Champions finally treated him as—

“I’m sorry,” Calder said, interrupting.

Urzaia lowered his hands mid-sentence. “Is something wrong?”

“They almost tortured you to madness? ”

The former Champion shrugged one shoulder. “I am a very happy person. I have been, always. My mother once said that I was born with a smile on my face.”

He smiled wider in demonstration.

Calder shook his head. “I start to wonder if we shouldn’t just round up and execute all alchemists.”

“Eh, it takes strong pain to make strong men. Injections into the bone are bad, and you do not want one. But the one giving you that injection, he is not always bad.”

“That’s…noble of you.” Calder wouldn’t have let the alchemists go, any more than he spared the ones who tormented his father.

“I am a noble man. Anyway, after my release, the Champions finally treated me as one of their own…”

Mental conditioning was a core part of Urzaia’s Champion training. His trainers did not tear him down, but built him up. He was pitted against normal human opponents, with no enhancements or invested weapons, and made to feel invincible. Constantly, the older Champions would talk about how lucky he was to have joined their Guild, and how weak the others were.

After a year of this, Urzaia was ready to believe it. His wounds healed overnight, he was immune to most poisons, and even many Soulbound powers no longer affected him. His strength and reactions grew beyond anything he’d ever imagined, and his eyesight was as sharp as a hunting bird’s.

He strode out into his first assignment feeling like he could take the world apart.

It was appropriate that he was sent straight to the arena. One of the fight masters, who owned an entire team of successful gladiators, had begun to monopolize the markets for new fighters. He’d bribed his way into all the prisons in the city, and as soon as they received a criminal with combat training, he snapped them up. None of the other masters could compete, and his team was milking the arenas dry.

So his opponents had pooled their earnings to hire a Champion.

For his first job as a member of the Guild, Urzaia had picked his weapons: a pair of hatchets crafted by an Izyrian master smith. Urzaia’s father had used battle-axes in the arena, and he himself had gotten used to hatchets while chopping up firewood at the Guild. More than anything, the weapons simply felt right. He was no Reader, but he thought it must have something to do with their Intent.

He stood at the arena, sand under him and blue sky overhead, surrounded by a screaming crowd, and he felt invincible. The enemy had a team of eighteen, released to fight him in pairs. The first pair had spears and shields, while he carried only a hatchet in each hand.

He fought them two at a time until all eighteen lay dead or crippled, watching the fight master’s face grow paler with each defeat. When he won the ninth fight in a row, the crowd stood to their feet and roared.

Urzaia had never enjoyed a fight more.

From then on, he expected similar fights every time. Odds stacked against him, fighting to correct someone who had twisted Imperial law to his own advantage, righting wrongs and defeating worthy opponents.

Instead, his second assignment shipped him north of the Dylian Basin. He was headed as far north as any man had ever been, where tribes had set up a chain of villages in the snow. Apparently, they no longer considered themselves part of the Aurelian Empire, and had formed their own society with their own rules. Urzaia was there to administer punishment on behalf of the Emperor himself, who had assigned this mission to the Guild. It was with a sense of pride that he set out, determined to hammer the primitive armies into the ice and return with documents of surrender inside a month.

The first year, he enjoyed his work. It was harder than he’d imagined to fight in the snow, so even when the villagers organized hunting parties of thirty or more, it was rare that he could kill even three or four before the others melted away. This was a challenge in itself, even though their warriors could not fight him evenly.

The second year, he wished for an enemy Soulbound. The ambushes had grown frustrating, and even when he flattened a village, the inhabitants would just pack up and move somewhere else.

The third year, he was beginning to question why he was there in the first place. Navigators seldom brought any news or orders for him, and when they did, it was only an order to stay where he was and continue working. Not that he was seeing any results. He had probably killed two or three hundred warriors, from various villages, but no single group took too many casualties. And none of them had even come close to surrendering.

By the fifth year, he had all but given up on performing his duties for the Empire. When he became bored, he would hike up the mountains and lure a Kameira—usually a Brightwolf, or an Icewinder, or a Hydra of some kind—down toward a village, where he would fight the warriors and the Kameira both. This was chaotic and often unsatisfying, but created a few interesting fights.

One day, everything went wrong. He couldn’t remember exactly what led to it, but he woke at the bottom of an icy pit, a dead Brightwolf lying on his chest and slowly squeezing the life from his lungs. Both his legs were broken, his hatchets were missing, and the pit was surrounded by the corpses of fifty warriors from several local villages.

He fully expected to be flattened beneath the body of a Kameira, but a scouting party from a far-off village found him first. They dug him out, loaded him on a sled, and dragged him back home.

Stories of his violence had reached them, but none had seen him personally. They failed to recognize him, and so they let him live as one of them. While he was there, he realized they were living perfectly well without the Empire. Why did they need an Emperor anyway?

So he asked them why they had chosen to rebel, and they told him.

They paid taxes because their ancestors had always done so, but they never received anything in return. There were no roads. No one gave them food or shelter from the winter storms. No Guild came to defend them from the frequent Kameira attacks, and there were no chapter houses within a thousand miles. Quite simply, they had never been part of the Empire, except in name.

But the final blow came when an Elderspawn had invaded, years before. It moved from village to village, spreading a disease that slowly turned people into monsters. By the time the Blackwatch arrived, the whole region had been infected.

They offered no explanation, and taught the locals nothing. Instead, they killed everyone affected, and half of the seemingly uninfected children. Then they vanished during the night.

At that point, the villages had done something new: they called all their leaders together, from all over the region, and jointly decided to stop paying taxes.