AWAKENING

Your Exclusive Sneak Peek Into AWAKENING

Chapter 1

Incipit

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Arcturi was terrified. This was the closest he’d ever been to Barzad, the capital city of Mozgov. Mozgov wasn’t a safe place for anyone but Mozgovians these days, the capital least of all.

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He had an important errand to run for his mother’s shop; the apothecary needed as much targale thistle as he could carry in his pack to fill an important order of skin-clearing potions. Every order was important right now, he thought. The apothecary was struggling, and they couldn’t afford to turn away any orders, even those that included rare ingredients.

The only place this particular thistle grew within reach of Arcturi’s home in the village of Tutum brought him close to the walls of Barzad, a castle town. It looked like a weed to most people, and picking it wouldn’t have been an issue, except that Mozgov was at war with Arcturi’s people.

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No, he thought, war was far too generous a word. This was a massacre, a humiliation. Arcturi’s people, the Zarmians, weren’t fighters. They were farmers, mostly, and tradespeople. They were no match for the better-trained and more aggressive Mozgovians. Like most Zarmians, Arcturi’s darker skin and dark eyes stuck out like a sore thumb in comparison to the fair skin of the occupants of Mozgov, making him easy to identify as an outsider. He also stood out due to his size. Arcturi was the tallest person in his village, and having seen 20 summers and put on a good amount of muscle over the past few years, he was one of the largest. Even with that advantage, he would likely be of average height when compared to the generally bigger and broader Mozgovians.

His village was one of the last unoccupied villages in all of what had been Zarmia. And that occupation was inevitable. He and his people were in danger of being completely wiped from Terra, and probably from history.

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Luck was with him today, though, and after two and a half days’ walk, he had found a large patch of the thistle in a meadow, more than enough to make the potion, with a few sheaves left over to spare. And the meadow was slightly enclosed by trees, so he had a little bit of cover in case anyone happened to be watching. As ideal a situation as he could hope for, given the circumstances. So why was the sweat running down his face and dampening his worn and threadbare cloth overshirt?

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It very well could have been the fear, that visceral had become a part of Arcturi’s life. Even if he didn’t feel like he was in imminent danger, the fear was always there. There really was nowhere safe for a Zarmian anymore. The queen and the Mozgovians had seen to that. The thought made him shake with rage. They had done nothing, nothing to deserve this! At the same time, he also felt helpless. What could he do, what could his people do, against a well-funded, well-run and seemingly inevitable war machine?

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Mozgovian soldiers had been rounding up Zarmians for months; if they didn’t just kill them for sport, they were carried away for the back-breaking work required to feed the queen’s insatiable thirst for power. She wouldn’t stop until all of Terra had bent its knee.

The Zarmians were no threat to Mozgov. They had little wealth, and no natural resources to speak of that couldn’t be found elsewhere. And even when they wanted to, they didn’t have the warriors, tools or abilities to fight back. To Arcturi, the taking or killing of his people and the raiding and burning of Zarmian villages seemed almost like a training exercise; little more than something to do to keep Mozgovian soldiers entertained. That was what angered him most; it was mindless, senseless enslavement and slaughter.

Shivering, he looked around him, alert for a Mozgovian patrol. He hadn’t seen one for more than a day, and their routes generally kept them much closer into Barzad. They must have a campaign underway, he thought. Otherwise, this area would likely be a hive of activity. He knew all too well what happened to Zarmians who strayed too close to the city. Jag, a friend and someone Arcturi had grown up with, had been running a similar errand, his to gather a particular kind of heartwood from the area. He’d been caught by a patrol, tortured and decapitated. In town, they said his head was still rotting on a pike outside Barzad’s gates.

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Arcturi shivered again, and redoubled his efforts, hurriedly picking the last of the thistles and wrapping them. As he did so, he realized that it was something more than his terror that was making him sweat so profusely. This was something else.

He sat down a moment to take a deep breath. Time to diagnose the issue. He could be hungry; Arcturi was always hungry, as the money from the apothecary barely brought in enough to pay for the humble hovel where we lived with his mother and cousin Ermina. But it wasn’t that; he was used to going without enough food.

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Gods, but he was tired. Maybe a swift-moving sickness? That was just what he needed. Whatever it was, it wasn’t getting any better while he was sitting down. He put the final sheaf of thistles in his pack and set out toward the grove of trees he’d used for cover on the way to the meadow.

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Without warning, a searing pain split his skull, accompanied by a blinding light behind his eyelids. He forced his eyes open, but the light remained; it felt like staring into a sun from just a few feet away. He dimly registered falling to his knees, and thought he might have become sick. He opened his mouth to cry out, but found he couldn’t hear the sound of his voice over the pounding in his ears. And then, silence.

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When he woke in a heap on the hard ground, he pushed himself up to his hands and knees and took stock of his condition. It was clear from the stink coming off his shirt and pants that he had, in fact, been sick. All told, though, he felt remarkably better. No more sweating, light or pain, and his energy levels were, if anything, higher than before he’d suffered whatever it was he’d suffered. Interrupting his reveries, he heard the clank of leather on metal and a soft, menacing laugh.

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He slowly looked up, and stared into the closed visor of the helmet of a Mozgovian soldier. There were five of them, all mounted, and as he looked left and right, he realized they had him surrounded. This couldn’t be happening, he thought, not now.

He closed his eyes again, hoping he was in the midst of some terrible fever dream. When he opened them again, they were still there. Damn. The soldiers were silent; the only sounds were the stamping and snorting of their massive mounts and the jangling of the bridles.

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After a moment, Arcturi said, “Please sires, I am only here to gather ingredients for a concoction. Let me pass and I will be on my way.”

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The nearest soldier leaned down casually and cuffed Arcturi across the face with his metal glove, drawing blood from Arcturi’s cheek and throwing him backwards to the ground. The soldiers laughed, and the one who had hit Arcturi, said, “Quiet, scum.”

Arcturi could tell now that this one was the leader. His armor looked nicer and cleaner than that of the others, his horse was a bit larger, and instead of the stubbier short swords the others held in their hands, he had a massive broadsword sheathed behind his back.

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Arcturi struggled to get to his feet, and the leader let him, clearly enjoying playing with his food before he ate it. He drew the sword slowly, wielding it easily in one hand to show his strength. He angled the blade into the sunlight streaming into the meadow so that it blinded Arcturi, who reflexively threw an arm across his case. The soldiers laughed again.

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The leader said, “You are trespassing here, Zarmian. Those weeds you’ve picked, pathetic as they are, are ours.” And with a flick of his wrist, he sliced through the strap on Arcturi’s threadbare cloth bag. It fell in the dust, spilling its contents.

“Please,” said Arcturi again, close to tears.

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“…and the penalty for trespassing, “said the leader, as if he hadn’t heard Arcturi’s plea, “…is death.” The soldiers laughed for a third time. Whatever the price for trespassing actually was, it didn’t matter now. This was a war zone, and the soldiers made their own rules.

Arcturi silently cursed himself for falling sick at the worst possible time. He was shaking with fear, but he was surprised to learn that it wasn’t death he was afraid of; it was not being able to be there for his mother and his cousin, who relied on him so much. His father had died only a year after Arcturi had been born, and he had been forced into becoming a man far sooner than he should have been. He didn’t know what his mother and cousin would do to survive without him in this harsh world, and that thought filled him with sadness.

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“Kneel,” said the leader.

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“I’d prefer to stand,” said Arcturi. This small act of defiance may not matter in the grand scheme of things, but at least the soldiers didn’t laugh this time. “Make it quick,” he said, surprised again by his boldness.

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“Very well,” said the leader, inclining his head in a gesture of respect. He pulled his sword back for a swing that would take Arcturi’s head from his shoulders.

Just as the sword reached its zenith, it seemed to stop there. At the same time, Arcturi’s world was suddenly bathed in a warm, golden light. It was as if the sun itself was with them in the clearing. It was breathtakingly beautiful, and Arcturi thought that he must have died, and was getting to experience some kind of strange afterlife.

As he was taking in the now golden scene, he realized in that same moment that all of his senses were on fire. The smells of the soldiers’ sweat, the horses’ musk, the deadfall, the tiny berries filled his nostrils in a bouquet so powerful his eyes widened in amazement. And his eyes! He could make out every minute detail of everything in the clearing; the detail was almost indescribable. What was this that he was experiencing?

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In that moment, a small fly buzzed in front of his vision. As he followed it, he realized it was drifting by at a fragment of its normal speed, and he could see the beats of its wings one after the other. He looked up and realized that the leader’s sword was now in its downswing; it too was moving at a snail’s pace. He could see the biceps of the leader flexing with the power of the swing. He realized then that whatever was causing the golden light had also slowed down the entire world.

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The sword was still coming, and reeling as he was from what was happening, a voice in the back of Arcturi’s head shouted, “Move!” He snapped back into reality and took two quick steps to get out of the range of the sword. The movements felt normal to Arcturi, but in the context of the scene, they were like lightning; the sword had only moved a fraction in the same amount of time.

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Arcturi knew that he must use this advantage while he had it. He stepped forward and pulled a wooden cudgel from a sheath on the leaders’ horse. Pulling himself up in the leader’s left stirrup, he bashed the leader in the side of the helmet with all of his strength.

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Jumping down, he looked up and realized that the other soldiers had begun making movements toward their weapons. The soldier furthest to his right was leaning slowly down to draw his sword, sheathed near the front of this horse. Arcturi came around the horse’s right flank at a dead run, landing a brutal uppercut with the cudgel under the soldier’s chin. The next soldier to the left didn’t fare much better; he only had his hand on the hilt of his sword before Arcturi crumpled the left side of his helmet with a swing of the cudgel.

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That left the last two guards, both of whom were on the other side of the clearing. The first of the guards was midway through a dismount from his horse; Arcturi grabbed him by his belt and threw him bodily toward the trunk of a large tree. He looked toward the final soldier, and was surprised to see that he had raised a bow and was pulling back an arrow to fire at Arcturi. He must have had the bow at the ready during Arcturi’s confrontation with the leader.

As Arcturi turned toward him, the soldier loosed the arrow. It flew through the air so slowly that Arcturi simply stepped around it, watching in fascination as the feathers rippled in the air. A powerful swing of the cudgel turned the soldier’s head to the side, with a slow-motion spray of blood spurting from the mouth of the helmet.

And then, as quickly as it had begun, the golden light disappeared. The world sped up, and Arcturi heard the sickening crunch of helmets and heads snapping, and bodies hitting the ground. The arrow embedded itself harmlessly in a tree across the clearing, and as Arcturi looked back, all of the soldiers were down, unmoving.

It took a moment for the gravity of the situation to sink in. He’d knocked unconscious, and maybe killed, five members of the Mozgovian military. Bile rose in his throat, and he fell to his knees and retched. Arcturi abhorred violence; this was the first time in his life he’d even raised a hand against another human being. Now, he was a wanted man.

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Miles away, a small figure staggered, and with a sharp cry of surprise, fell sideways against a table, sprawling across it and nearly falling to the floor. Another small figure ran to their side, catching the figure before they hit the ground, and asking, in a concerned tone, “What is it? What happened?”

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The first figure said, shakily, “I…I don’t know for sure. But I think it must have been magic. And the source…it felt…so powerful.”

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“Here, sit.” The second figure had pulled up a chair. “I trust your senses, I do, but it…can’t be. Can it?”

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The first figure looked up, eyes sharp. “It couldn’t have been anything else. It felt the same the last time…the last time he used his power. He looked up. “It’s not a sensation one soon forgets.”

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So confident was the tone that the second figure simply nodded in resignation. “No, no I suppose not. So what do we do?”

The first figure lurched to their feet, steadying themselves against the second figure. Neither spoke for a moment. Then the first figure said, “Whoever it was that used this power, they will either be some new kind of terror, or they will be in grave, grave danger. For a reason I can’t explain, I think…I know it’s the latter. We must do what we can to help.”

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The second figure said, “But how? We don’t know anything about them, and your senses are strong. It could have happened halfway across Terra for all we know. How could we possibly help?”

“Something tells me that this person will be coming to us,” said the first. “Don’t ask me how. I just know.”

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The second figure muttered something under its breath. The first, smiling for the first time, said, “Your dissent is noted. Why don’t you get the spare bedroom in order, just in case?”

As he walked down the hall, the second figure said, “Where are you going?”

Without turning, the first said, “To prepare for the arrival; there is much to do.”

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