As the guards pulled him through the blackness of captivity Zern reflected on himself. He remembered his cowardice when he breathed in the air thick with the heavy scent of Dolmari, his weakness when he was cast out of hardship and uselessness three years ago when he began down this awful path. Why did life had to throw him into its most miserable jaws at his birth, why had it made him squeal and choke on the poison that was Dolmari; clogging his lungs, burning his throat and slowing his heart all the while forcing his muscles into overdrive.
Why did he have to work like a monster while those who revelled in his suffering remained full to the stomach like a stuffed pig? Those filth ate like kings all the while those they took as slaves rotted away. Generations of being told they were 'serving a greater cause,' a common goal of 'prosperity,' was effective by the time of its end it had ensnared and bewitched most of those who slaved away around him. He wouldn't forget the day he escaped from those pits flooded with Dolmari, never.
He opened his eyes to blackness once again. It wasn't the first time he was covered in an inescapable darkness, nor would he presume it to be the last.
The guards around him whispered in hush tones in a language he had no comprehension of. He cursed to himself, but didn't know why, he hadn't found any other reason to live, not after it had been stripped away from him on a pyre of flame. Although he could make out one of the voices, the voice of a screaming Wenor, he'd been punched, lashed and beaten but was never beaten into obedience. Determination, it was one thing he'd come to learn of Wenor, the man would not stand down, even if it cost him everything in the process.
The man screamed and screamed, there was no end to his howling which the entire Raja's palace would hear. There was a huff, a pause and more screaming, it would happen periodically as a guard attempted to quiet him down but would quickly lead to only more shouting from the man.
The hushed tones of the guards became more urgent as Zern finally made out something apart from the shouting of Wenor and the whispers of the guards. Rumbling. It wasn't just the groans of the walls either, he could feel the ground shaking occasionally.
Could it be? Zern wondered to himself as he heard boots passing quickly around him. Could they have pushed this far.
His dragging across the ground quicked as the voice of a new guard came and went talking to his captors. His legs were torn, he could feel his knees burn from being dragged across rock, carpet and wood, they wept he could feel it, he would leave a mark on this palace no matter what/
The guards paused for a moment and Wenor was thrown against a wall; which he recognised by the cold dull feeling of sculpted stone against the back of his knees. They talked amongst themselves for several minutes before falling entirely silent as they waited for something. A few minutes later a few more figures came whispered amongst themselves before thumping against their own armour.
The entire time the screams of Wenor echoed through the hallways.
Scream.
Punch.
Scream.
Punch.
Scream.
Punch.
Groan.
Scream.
The cycle repeated itself, except now it was softer. He heard boots and the sounds of feet dragging across the floor leading away.
Punch.
The scream was softer, then softer again. It softened until it became but a distant whisper in the silent stone summer sidehalls, then it became nothing.
The news voices talked amongst themselves for a moment in an ever more anxious and quickened tone. The conversation began civilly before spiralling; calm became stressed, paced became chaotic, and measured talk became aggressive shouting. Anger stirred, someone was thrown against the wall judging by the thud that echoed in the halls and a punch just after judging by the clang that followed. None of it made sense till Zern made out a single word from a strained voice, 'hotorai'.
Hobgoblins, he thought, knew the word's meaning, or its implication. He'd heard the term thrown around periodically by guards in times before the arena. It was a derogatory term for something that had been rolling down like a building avalanche from atop the jade peaked mountains for the near north. The stratocratic regime which had been on the advance seemingly without slowly down, but instead only advancing at an increasingly steady pace. One hundred years ago, the first signs of an organised regime in the depths of the jade mountains appeared, eighty years ago, they sent emissaries declaring themselves the Hierarchy, sixty years ago they began farming on the surface, forty years ago began raids against the demon emperor Fao Yuak, twenty years ago the demon emperor of the north west fell to disciplined armies of the Hierarchy, and today it seemed that the demon emperor's greatest rivals were too to fall to the horrific march of the Hierarchy.
The rumbling made sense now. What was happening wasn't an execution as he'd so much as suspected previously, but a desperate escape. The great city of Zortar was to fall today, its beautiful walls reduced to rubble by the throwing of rock only to slam against stone. Today the great stone walls of Zytor the unbecoming would not wash aways it enemies like water against rock, today the very ground was to tremble before the march of hundred thousand spears and shields, that had claimed to kill their own gods.
The arguing between the guards finally stopped as a commanding voice over took their conversation, and quietened them. This commanding voice continued to talk for a few more moments before Zern and from what he could tell the rest of the prisoners–bar Wenor–were picked up again and dragged back along the hallways.
The long darkness continued for a while longer all the while the rumbling and screaming became louder and louder. The room would shake when a boulder from a catapult would slam against the tops of a spiraled watchtower near to them. Screams would follow that of soldiers and civilians unfortunate to get caught in the chaos of the battle, although from what he'd heard in the pits the Hobgoblins were not brutal butchers or unrelenting rapists, they treated their conquered people well. To be caught in any siege he preferred to be caught in this one.
The cold silence of puffing guards was finally broken as he felt the cool breeze of wind and smoke on his knees. He was free, for once it felt like he was free, he didn't have an oppressive roof over his head or a wall around him, or at least that he could see, the bliss of not being able to see was perhaps something that he should've considered long ago.
He gasped as a few minutes later the bag around his head was removed and he squinted his eyes. He breathed in and smelt the smoke of an empire in ruin, he could see the silhouettes of buildings aflame and civilians desperately trying to put such fires out.
His eyes readjusted and the smoky skies came into focus. Black, grey and blue smoke clogged the beautiful opal sky of the east. The men around him now stood out, he was surrounded by the other two survivors of the arena, a small collection of guards and a few other bagged figures. He looked around, chains holding together his hands and feet, they were in the courtyard of the Raja's palace, pillars had fallen over in the siege and it had become quickly abandoned by the servants which he presumed would usually be oozing from the place.
The guard who had removed his bag was relatively tall and muscular, and he had a–
"We're being transported with the emperor?!?" Zern squealed.
The guard turned around and slammed his hand across Zern's mouth. Zern cursed under the mans grasp. He wanted to curse the man more but the guard instead began to speak.
"If you want to live," an advisor dressed up in soldier's robes translated, "then I'd advise you to stop talking halfwit."
Zern eyes the man but nodded, it was all he could do. He leaned back and sat quietly as the guards loaded up a series of crates trying to cover up the back of the tarp wagon. He sat quietly as another set of soldiers climbed in as they finally closed as much of the back of the wagon as they could. The inside of the wagon was cramped well over capacity and dim, from what he could tell he'd been shoved into a cart containing several advisors and members of the royal one hundred, the best hundred soldiers especially assigned to the Raja's protection.
Why am I here, Zern wondered to himself. Why had he been the last thing the Raja attended to before fleeing a falling empire, was it poetry that the last thing the greatest of the Rajas bar the Great Raja himself, was to address a peasant and grant them wishes? Maybe… maybe he could construct a tale of it some day like Elecen had once said he'd do.
The rumbling continued in the background and Zern couldn't sit in silence any longer, he turned to the advisor who spoke his own language.
"Why did you wait till the end to try and kill us?"
The advisor looked at him as if puzzled by the question. "We needed to distract the people as long as possible and if possible boost their support. We figured by sending out the great beast of the Raja himself and slaying our greatest of untouchable thorns, those–the peasants–might perhaps be more willing to fight with vigor." The advisor paused for a moment. "But we were mistaken, and ended up losing a possibly valuable asset, we'd hoped it would bolster the conscription rates, raise morale and more, but you ended up killing it. It was then we knew that Zyneria had fallen, and by prophecy it would fall."
"Prophecy," Zern said almost stunned, "you're judging the downfall of your empire on a prophecy?"
The advisor shook his head, his enormous almost priest-like hat hitting the top of the cramped wagon. "I don't think you understand, this is a prophecy from Hamash himself. All that was said from his prophetic mouth has become true, and it was foretold that when the great beast of a raja would die then so too would his Raj soon after."
Zern rolled his eyes at the advisor's ramblings as the man continued to go into the intricacies of the prophecy. Prophecies, what good were they when they were all just the words of men throwing darts in the night, each one was just as likely as the last, no one could predict the future and no one should predict it. Only calamity could come from trying to predict something so sacred as the future.
He turned towards the other survivor within the wagon. He'd never cared to learn the names of others bar Wenor who everyone knew, although this one was much older then he was perhaps late thirties early forties with a long scar across his neck and burns across his face. The scar reached from the top of his shoulder all the way down to the bottom of his rib cage, while the burn on his face had wrinkled and cracked that area of his face as if it the man's own age in the point had been brought forward by forty years.
"Wenor is dead, isn't he?" Zern asked softly to the burned man.
The burned man nodded.
"We're probably going to die as well aren't we?"
The burned man nodded once again.
"I see," Zern said, slumping down into his seat.
Why did he always end up in a cage? Whether it was made of cloth, stone or metal he always ended up in cages. They would close around him in the night time when he had nothing left to give them, they would creak and crack taunting him with the possibility of a freedom that would never come and if he did ever reach it, that grasp of freedom, then it would be soon snuffed out. He'd been bought, he'd been sold but he'd always been in a cage, for too much of his life he'd been in a cage, and for some of it, that had felt natural to him, and that was what scared him the most. He didn't want to roll over and be an obedient puppet that would put him right back in those Dolmari clogged mines where he'd started.
With a few coded taps the caravan finally began moving. The sounds of screaming, burning and fighting were muffled by the cloth which surrounded the framed wagon interior. He'd never seen the fall of a city before and he hoped he never would but he could smell it and he could hear it. The sounds of metal against metal, rock against rock, water against fire and fear against resolve, each was so distinct. Metal had a beautiful clanging echo, rock had a thump followed by a breakage and rolling of smaller ones, water a sear as it wrestled with fire, and resolve was silent in the face of desperate fearful shouts. These were the sounds no man should have to hear, yet most would, life was never fair to the innocents or the downtrodden, those who had been disadvantaged most in life would suffer the worst, that he knew.
He closed his eyes and leaned back. As he did so he heard something he did not expect, a song breaking through the sounds of a falling empire, breaking city and failing courage. It was a slow and somber song, its rhythm syncopated and carefully practiced, it flowed like a swan across a lake and glided like a bat across the black night sky. The notes were soft but high, the woman–for it was a woman who sang it–was on the edge of a hollowed despair, it was a grief he'd become all too familiar with, an unbelieving grief of a mother who'd lost a part of themselves and now had to carry on without it. He wished he could learn what the woman's words meant, were they beautiful or were they ramblings?
His mind filled him with the vision of a woman cradling the corpse of her two sons, one older, who had seen just enough of the world to taste its fruits, the other younger, not old enough to understand the beauty that would await him.
Would their father be there as well?
No…he would be fighting, much like the older one had, he would die, thinking at least his children would be safe. The father would die with a smile, only to be met with the condemning face of those he'd fail. Yet the mother would face the worst of all, loneliness, unable to be broken by anything but her own death.
He let a tear fall; unable to do anything else as the cart passed and the song slowly disappeared.
He sat in silence, as he did in darkness; the glow of fire over head being the only thing illuminating the inside wagon. He pushed the smell and the sound from his mind, it was hard, he was kind, too kind but he did so.
Zern focused himself, he needed to. He was to be taken into exile.
"Where is exile?" He found himself asking the advisor.
The advisor turned towards him, his fur wrinkling as he contemplated. "Farsight Keep," he said finally after his fur's rippling had subsided, "you're to join the company of the last fortress. You're to serve them and Head Captain Farsight as dutiful men, and serve them to your last moments. You will hear this when you arrive, but should you turn your backs on them, you will receive only one thing in any kingdom east of the Scorpion's Telson, death. You have been provided a mercy, to serve in the Last Fortress against barbarity is an honor, often a fatal and boring one but an honor nonetheless."
"A dignified exile," Zern whispered to himself.
The advisor nodded. "It is the best we could offer you, but before such a dignified exile we must deliver his magnificent majesty to safety."
Great, Zern thought sarcastically to himself. Just what he wanted to be stuck with, possibly the most sought after individual the Hierarchy could be interested in right now. If the Raja was caught then it would be over for him and everyone else in these carts, they'd probably pray for execution knowing the brutality of demi–no, what was he saying, the hobgoblins had proven otherwise, they'd die with honor.
If I can escape before arriving at Farsight Keep then perhaps… perhaps. It was a thought, a dangerous thought, but one that might save him far more pain otherwise. He would need to do it quietly lest he be destroyed by his own schemes, but for now he needed to bide his time, and most importantly escape the burning city.