Chương 32: Seeds of Rebellion

The whole Pit gasped at once as I was taken off the ground and the fingers were closing. But a second into the grab, I cast. I did not choose it so much as reach for the nearest spell out of instinct. A bubble of compressed air formed around me, sealing the gap between my body and the troll's fist, and I felt the fingers press against it, trying to crush it flat. So I poured mana into it.

The bubble pushed back against the grip, and I fed it more, and then more, until it strained at the fingers holding it in and there was nowhere left for all that pressure to go. Then I let it burst. BOOM! The blast tore the troll's hand open and threw the whole massive body backward off its feet. It flew halfway across the Pit, arm still curled around the empty space where I'd been, hit the sand hard, rolled twice, and came to rest in a heap. I dropped to my feet in the spot where it had held me a second before.

The crowd gasped, then broke into applause that climbed the tiers until the whole Pit thundered with it. The troll lay in the churned sand across the Pit, propped on one long arm, its head swaying, blinking at the ground as if it could not work out how it had gotten there.

"I'm sorry," I said. It did not hear me. I knew it did not. The applause was too loud and it was thirty feet away and half-stunned, but I said it anyway.

"I didn't mean to hurt you. You just... you grabbed me, and I—" Howl. I stopped. I heard my father's voice inside my own head, which took me a full second to understand. So I looked up. He was still in the air over the arena, hands behind his back, but the smile was gone, replaced by a coldness I had not known him capable of. When the voice came again it was very quiet, and it did not sound warm at all. Stop playing with it. End it now. You are the Axiom of House Aridis, not a buffoon.

"Father, I…" My words went nowhere. With all the people roaring over me, my father thirty feet up, and me not knowing how to speak into someone's head the way he'd just done. But I tried anyway.

"The troll, father, the troll isn't—""RAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!" It was already up and running, coming at me low and fast, that whole huge body eating the distance in a few strides.

"Wait!" I stomped, sending mana down through my heel and out along the floor of the Pit in a straight line. It raced out ahead of me as a seam in the sand, streaking toward the troll, and the instant it reached the ground under its front foot, I opened it. The sand erupted upward under the troll in a single column, a great fountain of it blasting straight into the air, and the troll went up with it.

All of that mass, lifted off the ground and flung skyward, limbs wheeling, the roar cut short into a confused bark as the floor simply left it. I cast a Levitation spell before it could come down and the troll stopped twenty feet up, held. The weight of it settled onto me through the spell.

Levitation spells always cost you a share of what you lifted, never the whole of it but never little either, something close to half the true weight pressing back on the caster, and the troll was heavier than anything I had ever tried to hold. It bore down at the base of my skull and through my shoulders as I flooded my body with reinforcement to carry it, braced my legs, and held. The troll hung in the open air over the Pit with nothing under its feet and nothing to reach. It thrashed, but that took it nowhere.

Its arms clawed at the air, but that was all for nothing. The fight was over. It couldn't reach the ground, or me, or anything else. All it could do was hang there, turning slowly, making the same sound over and over. End it. My father's voice resonated in my head once again. I was looking at the troll. It was twenty feet over my head, kicking at nothing, and then its eyes rolled down and found me. They fixed on my face, same as they had the moment the shackles came off, and there was too much behind them.

An animal did not look at you like that. It understood where it was, it understood what came next, and it was afraid. End it, Howl. The crowd had found a rhythm. Chanting something, my name or the house name, I couldn't tell anymore, stamping it into the tiers. Do it, do it, do it. And under it, in my own skull, my father. End it. End it. And above me the troll, turning in the air, mouth open, still screaming RAAAAAAAAAARGH! It was too much at once. My thoughts kept coming apart before I could finish them.

I wanted them to stop, to listen, to understand that the thing hanging over my head was afraid yet not one person here cared. The chanting, the voice in my skull, the screaming, all of it climbing over each other and pressing down and getting louder, and I only wanted quiet, just for a second, just long enough to be heard. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. End it now, son.

"NO!" The mana went into my voice on purpose. The word tore out of my throat and swelled, one syllable filling the whole bowl of the Pit, rolling up the tiers, coming off the far wall and going further still. And everything went silent. I stood in the middle of it all, my heart going like a hammer, knowing I might get in trouble for this, but I no longer cared. I did not lower my voice. More importantly, I let the mana stay in it for all of them to hear me at last.

"What is wrong with all of you?" It rolled up the tiers, and I watched the front rows flinch back from it.

"Look at it!" They looked at the struggling troll.

"You've been howling for its blood since it walked through that gate and not one of you looked at the thing you wanted dead. It's terrified. It has stood in the middle of this Pit shaking with fear while you laughed, stamped and screamed for me to open it up, and every last one of you finds it fun to slay an innocent?" My hands were shaking from the weight, but I did not care.

"You caged it for months! You starved it until fear was the only thing left in it, and you call that a gift? How is that a gift?!" I looked up at my father, who was now impassive. But I was too far gone now, and I found it liberating to tell them what I thought really, so I went on.

"I won't do it," I said.

"Not for the house, nor for a hundred extra years of my own life. I am not going to butcher a frightened thing in front of a crowd so the lot of you can have your afternoon, and there is nothing any of you can say that will make me!" A few seconds passed in silence after my last words, and then my father came down slowly. His boots touched the sand a few feet from me, and then he was just standing there, close, saying nothing. Nobody did, really. Even the troll had gone quiet, and so did the crowd.

The only sound left in the whole place was my own breathing and the strain of the spell I was still holding.

"Howl," said my father. That was all. My name, and then nothing, and I understood he was giving me the space to lower my eyes and take it back. I waited for whatever came after. The elders were up there somewhere in the dark of the high seats, and I knew how this house dealt with things that stepped out of the shape it had cut for them. There would be a correction. There was always a correction.

But standing there with the weight of the troll dragging, waiting for my father to decide my fate, I kept looking at the troll, and the longer I looked, the more I couldn't get away from a single ugly thought. The troll was me. Not in size or shape, but we were similar in all the ways that mattered today.

They had taken it out of wherever it belonged and shut it in the dark, starving everything out of it but the fear, and then they had set it in front of a crowd and called it a prize, and asked what was inside it that they could use. I had been raised three floors up in a sealed wing with my meals weighed out for me and my hours counted, kept away from my own mother, and siblings. Forbidden the people I shared blood with, as though whatever I carried might rub off on them. What had the troll done to earn any of it?

It had been born the wrong shape. That was the whole of its crime. And me? I stood there and I could not find it. I turned it over and there was nothing, no thing I had done, no choice I had made, only the accident of what I'd been born as, and for that they had built me a cage with soft walls and told me it was duty. My father's warmth was nothing like Nana's. I saw it now, standing in the sand, in a way I had not been able to see it across a table an hour ago.

Nana had laughed with me when I was foolish and brought me books she'd have been dismissed for and sat through my nonsense without once telling me I was taking too long. My father's warmth had a price on it, and the price was that I do what I was told, but the moment I hadn't, it had gone out of his face like a lamp. I was done backing down. Let them forbid me the world for the rest of my life if that was what they wanted. I'd argue it this time.

I had the words now, all of them, lined up and ready, and I opened my mouth to start, only to be stopped in my tracks by a strange and unexpected action. My father smiled at me.

"Let the troll down, son." he said with a surprising warmth. … I'd braced for a punishment that didn't come. All the arguing I'd stacked up ready to throw at him had nowhere to go now, and being confused knocked the fight out of me in a way his anger never could have. So I let the troll down. It came to the sand slowly, as I set it as gently as the spell would let me, and when I released it the great grey body just settled where it landed. It didn't lunge or run.

All the thrashing had gone out of it as it lay there on its side in the churned sand with its ribs heaving, panting, spent, adn watching nothing. My father closed the distance and put his hand on my head.

"There's nothing wrong with you that a few years won't mend." He said gently, ruffling my hair.

"You're young. At your age the blood runs ahead of the sense, and you feel a thing so hugely you're certain no one's ever felt it before you. Every one of us up in those seats stood where you're standing. We all had our impulses and we outgrew them. So will you." I did not agree with that, but I didn't say anything.

"The troll is yours," he went on.

"It was a gift, and a gift belongs to the one it's given to, to do with as he sees fit. If you want it to live—" he glanced at the heaving grey shape in the sand, unbothered, as though it were furniture "—then it lives. I'll not force your hand on that." His hand came off my head and settled on my shoulder.

"But you'll take the blood, Howl. That much isn't yours to refuse. The marrow you may leave in it if your stomach won't stand for it today, and we'll neither of us pretend I'm not disappointed. The blood, though, you'll drink." My father cast a spell and moved one finger toward the troll, and a line opened across its shoulder, making it scream and jerk in the sand as the skin parted while dark blood welled up along the cut and began to run. I moved toward it.

"Father—" The hand on my shoulder closed hard.

"Do not push me further, son," he said quietly, right against my ear.

"Meet me in the middle, will you?" I shut my mouth. He was angry. I could feel it now through his hand, a pressure that had been there the whole time under the warm voice, and I understood all at once that the troll's life was not as settled as he'd made it sound. One more word from me and the next cut would not be shallow. So I stopped. I pulled my breathing down the way Saoren had shown me, the small meditation, the one that empties the top of your mind so nothing spills, and I stood still.

My father lifted the blood. It rose out of the wound in a ribbon and gathered in the air in front of us, until it had pooled into a shallow bowl of itself with nothing holding it but him. He drew it toward me and brought it to my face.

"Open your mouth and drink." I gulped. Then I obeyed. He tipped it in, and the taste of it filled my mouth. It was warm, thick and salty, so salty it made my jaw ache, and my whole body wanted it out, but I swallowed anyway.

"Good," my father said. Ding! You have successfully completed your Quest! Select your first Boon. (Rank S) [Impenetrable Skin] [Healing Factor] Note: This selection cannot be undone.