South Blue – 1479.12.09
Unnamed Island, The Slaver's Market
5:40 - Abandoned Shed(Eastern Sector)
The sky was still dark when Roku's day began.
He awoke to the smell of blood, sweat, and rotting wood. His bed was the cold stone floor of an abandoned shed, the roof barely holding together after years of neglect. Rats scurried along the beams, fighting over the last scraps of food he didn't have the energy to steal. It was another morning in a hell that never changed. At fourteen, Roku was all sharp angles and survival instinct. His black hair hung long and unkempt to the middle of his back, unwashed and tangled from months without proper care. Striking blue eyes—the only vibrant thing about him—peered out from a face smeared with dried mud and arena dust. His skin, naturally fair, had taken on a sickly pallor from years without adequate sunlight or nutrition. His tattered clothes hung loosely on his thin frame: a ragged gray top with more holes than fabric, black pants worn through at the knees, and no shoes—calluses on his feet serving as the only protection against the rough ground. Despite his lanky physique, lean muscles moved beneath his skin—not a bulk of power, but the wiry strength of someone who had learned to fight to survive.
Outside the shed, he could hear the distant clangs of chains and murmurs of traders setting up stalls. It was market day – the worst day of the week. The sounds were a constant reminder: this was a place where lives were bought and sold. The Eastern sector, where he was, held the slave cells and camps, as well as the mines. But the trading happened in the North and South, by the ports, where ships carried the enslaved off the island. Some would not even make it to the end of the day. The island's hierarchy was an invisible chain around everyone's neck, and if you weren't at the top, you were just another link in it.
At the very top of this hierarchy sat three men, monsters wrapped in human skin. Lucien, Dagon, and Salazar. They weren't just rulers. They were the law. The island was theirs, and we were just a part of their game.
Lucien "The Puppeteer" Vael commanded all trade and movement with a whispered authority. A former Marine, according to rumors, he never needed to give direct orders—his influence was silent but absolute. Lucien controlled the shipments, the markets, the trade routes. If you wanted to buy, sell, or smuggle something, it had to go through him first. No one saw him fight. No one saw him do anything, really. Those who spoke against him simply vanished before sunrise, their possessions distributed to the loyal.
Beside him stood Dagon Grimm, "The Tyrant of the Pits," a hulking mountain of scar tissue and cruelty who ruled through pure strength. If Lucien was the mind, Dagon was the fist. He ran the fighting pits, the labor camps, the dock workers. He liked things simple:If you were strong, you lived. If you were weak, you died. It was that easy. He was rumored to have killed a Sea King with his bare hands, and while that might be myth, the bodies he left in his wake were undeniable facts.
The third Salazar "The Plague" Voss, The worst of the three, in my opinion. Salazar didn't care about money. He didn't care about power. He cared about experiments. Always gloved, always smelling of chemicals, his soft doctor's voice hid his true butcher's intent. Those deemed too sick, old, or broken were given to his "care," and none ever returned.
Next in the hierarchy are the warlord enforcers. The trio's authority can be felt throughout the island via the enforcers. Lucien's Agents moved like shadows, operating black markets and information networks with deadly efficiency. You never saw them, but they saw everything. Dagon's Pit Lords, massive men with broken faces and missing teeth, oversaw labor with sadistic enthusiasm. Salazar's Handlers, silent men in thick protective gear, collected "specimens" in the dead of night.
At the island's foundation lay the slaves—fighters thrown into pits until death claimed us, workers used until our bodies failed, and the "lost" delivered to Salazar's laboratories. We had no names, only numbers, our humanity stripped away with methodical efficiency.
Even beneath this lowest rung existed the strays—orphans or elderly deemed too young, weak, or unprofitable to sell YET. These forgotten children haunted alleys, abandoned shacks, and jungle outskirts, stealing to survive and battling each other for scraps. Their mortality rate was staggering, with most failing to reach adolescence. Roku used to number among these invisible ones. Having no memory of where he was born. No family, no past, just this island, this prison, where the unwanted are sent to be used and discarded.
But now I'm part of the few 'fortunate' children who remain alive on the island, seen as too weak and scrawny to yield valuable profit in the labor camps. Instead thrown into the fighting pits for entertainment and pleasure of the visiting aristocrats, nobles, and the like.
Living on the island I had learned every hiding place as a stray, memorized guard rotations, and developed an instinct for danger that kept me alive while others perished. But this precarious existence can't last forever. Sooner or later, everyone on this island faces the same choice: submit to the hierarchy or die resisting it. I've seen both options play out hundreds of times, and neither offers anything resembling hope—just different paths to the same crushing end.