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Evander

M etal clashed, the sound reverberating throughout the training stadium followed by the brief illumination of sweat and strain as sparks flew. I watched on, studying the battling students’ forms and taking note of their moves. This was an advanced class so I was focusing more on their strategies than technical skill. They may have surpassed the physical prowess needed to progress to this class, but they was always more to learn and improve upon.

While the pairs were focused on their sparring they didn’t see the procession of white-robed officials enter the stadium. I ignored them in favour of performing my duties as the instructor. Whatever the unwelcome visitors needed, they could wait.

Training continued until the last victory was called, which was well after the sun dipped below the stadium walls. The sconces were lit by the time I called it and allowed everyone to leave for the evening, but I remained by the weapons racks, oiling up the blade of one of the practice daggers as I waited for the last of them to trickle out.

When the gate shut us away from the prying eyes of our future warriors, that was when the council finally approached.

‘Evander,’ the tall, slim man in the front greeted me. His face was a familiar one, though it had been a long time since I had seen it.

‘Uncle,’ I greeted back with a respectful nod. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘We’ve caught one of the Infected,’ he said, not bothering with pleasantries and heading straight for the shock factor.

My hands froze in their task before I wiped the dagger dry and put it back in its sheath. ‘What?’

‘It’s still alive.’

I inhaled sharply at that news. Only one live Infected had ever been captured, and that was well before my time. ‘How?’

‘That is irrelevant,’ he stated blandly, waving off my question. I gritted my teeth to prevent the nasty words that tried to escape, but I calmed myself with the knowledge that my curiosity would be sated eventually, if not immediately. If we’d learned how to capture them, that information would be passed around to instructors such as myself to teach the next generation of warriors.

But my uncle’s refusal to impart that information himself was telling enough. Something else had happened that had brought him and his merry band of followers to me.

I didn’t prompt him to continue, instead biting my tongue and letting the silence speak for me. We’d danced this dance many times before, and I wasn’t about to give in. Not to him.

With a small, almost imperceptible twitch of his eye he finally relented, the only indication he allowed of his annoyance with me. ‘It spoke.’

My eyebrows darted to the top of my head, the reaction impossible to contain. Infected never spoke. Their minds were too far gone to use basic civility. The fact that this one had communicated in any way beyond their typical, haunting screeches proved that it was either newly turned or the infection was evolving.

I prayed to the Great Goddess that it wasn’t the latter.

‘What did it say?’ I asked with great trepidation.

‘It said, ‘It is coming.’ ’

I frowned at that, my forehead aching slightly at its unusual activity, used to the smooth lines of stoicism over the emotional reactions I couldn’t seem to contain. ‘What is coming?’

My uncle’s lips, the same shape as my own, the same shape I’d received from my father – his brother – and their father before them, pursed in distaste. ‘That is why we have come to you, Nephew. We do not know.’

Comprehension dawned and I sighed in resignation. ‘You want my knowledge on The Darkness,’ I surmised.

The male standing behind my uncle stepped forward, answering in his place and I was grateful to be addressing a different member of the council for this conversation. Researching The Darkness was a punishable offense, and the only reason I had remained out of the pits of the palace’s dungeons was due to my connection to the council. Where once I had been set to join when the time came, I was instead dismissed from our warrior ranks and imprisoned in our capital’s academy instead. Here, I was to remain until the end of my sentence, my punishment to teach generation after generation of wannabe warriors and turn them into something worthwhile.

I didn’t bother to tell them that while I missed executing my borne purpose of decimating the Infected population, I was grateful to be teaching these fresh-faced innocents how to survive. Under my tutelage, our warriors were less prone to death on the battlefield, and it seemed were even clever enough to capture one of those monsters still breathing . An impossible task even I had never managed to achieve.

‘It seems your… obsession has its use after all, Nephew,’ my uncle sneered, and it took every ounce of my willpower not to sneer right back. My nose twitched with the effort as he continued to look at me with clear derision, crinkling his nose like he was scenting something disgusting.

Right back at you, you pathetic, power hungry bastard.

My eyes connected with his, an almost exact replica of my own except for the thin lines digging into the corners of his. They were a little deeper than I remembered, an indication of the stress he must have been under. It didn’t come as a shock that these past few years had taken their toll. The Infected population had increased significantly, dangerously , while our numbers were depleting at a rapid rate.

This war was one that had been fought for centuries, but there was no denying that we were losing. More of us we contracting whatever disease it was that caused us to turn into black-veined, cannibalistic monsters, and we were no closer to finding a cure. I didn’t even think there was one until I’d started researching the Old Texts. The very reason for my expulsion from the front lines.

Reading the Old Texts was expressly forbidden for the sole reason that reading from them had caused our plight in the first place. It contained a dark magic that was inadvertently released by the monarchy all those centuries ago. It was the reason the courts were abolished, the monarchies removed from power and replaced by the council, and why I was facing punishment for cracking open their spines, but I hadn’t seen any other choice. It was those tomes that had unleashed this plague, and it was those tomes that would fix it. I just knew it.

‘What information are you seeking, uncle?’ I asked warily. He was the one that had arrested me for my crime in the first place, so to say I was shocked that he was seeking the information I had gleaned while I still had access to the Old Texts was an understatement. But perhaps the tides were changing and their minds were opening to receive the information we needed to finally win this war.

‘Anything you can tell us, Nephew. Anything that can help us push back against us contracting the disease,’ he said gravely, but his strange wording struck a chord. Us . It was the first time he had ever even come close to acknowledging that the Infected had once been Fae just like the rest of us, that even he was at risk for contracting the disease that plagued our people.

‘Who?’ I asked him, avoiding his question.

He blinked at me, his face suddenly slack in false ignorance. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Don’t play dumb with me, Uncle. Who was it that you apparently caught? Who was it that succumbed to the infection?’ I demanded.

I could see the battle waring inside his head. He didn’t want to tell me, but he also knew I was stubborn enough to refuse him if he didn’t give me at least some of the answers I sought. He already knew that I would find out what I wanted to know on my own terms if didn’t provide the answers I demanded then and there, and that could have been disastrous for his sad little social climbing ways. We were both well aware that there was an abundance of skeletons in his closet, and I was more than willing to shine a light on them if he pushed me to it.

It was a delicate line we toed, he and I.

‘Councilwoman Morgana,’ he finally gritted out through clenched teeth, the admission obviously costing him a great deal of pride. No wonder he and the others were coming to me. One of their own had been infected. They’d just had their own mortality, their own vulnerability shoved in their faces and they didn’t like it.

Welcome to reality, you self-righteous assholes.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said, though I was anything but. Councilwoman Morgana was a bitch and homewrecker. We Fae may have been rather relaxed in our stance towards sexuality and polyamory, but when fated bonds were involved there was no tolerance for infidelity. Morgana had been in a rather tumultuous relationship with my uncle before she’d tricked my father into sleeping with her. The event that had led his twin flame, my mother , to kill herself rather than live with that betrayal. Yet, my dearest uncle had remained with the whore and flaunted their relationship in front of both Father and I as often as he could.

I held in the smile that wanted to break free from the good news. Anyone else and I might have felt a smidgen of sorrow for – or if not that, then regret – but I was going to celebrate her demise as soon as these council assholes went back to the gilded hole they’d crawled out of.

‘Well?’ he prompted when I didn’t immediately offer up the information he was seeking.

I sighed, not wanting to provide these people with information that could potentially doom us all but not seeing any way out of it. If they were finally willing to listen, then we could finally find the cure for our troubles.

‘They’re called the Unity Trials,’ I stated.

All three councillors frowned, confused. ‘What are the Unity Trials?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t really know. All I can recall is that in order to defeat the Darkness, we need to unite all the magics and work in tandem to beat it back.’

‘And what do these trials entail?’ the third councilman asked, finally partaking instead of simply observing.

‘They didn’t say. The Old Texts suggest a ritual to initiate the Trials. Beyond that, there was no more information,’ I told them.

‘And why did you not come forth with this information before, Master Evander?’ Councilman Number Three asked, his disapproval abundant.

I huffed, my annoyance at my uncle growing into something almost uncontrollable, but I held back my desire to strike against him. Mostly. ‘I did,’ I admitted. ‘Isn’t that right, Uncle? ’

Both councilmen turned to level him with accusing glares, but he merely responded with a scoff. ‘And how was I supposed to know you were telling the truth, Nephew? You had broken the law, committed a grave crime, and your ramblings were making no sense. Anything you spewed that day was written off as the ramblings of a man obsessed with the dark arts, and rightly so.’

I lifted a brow to express my disbelief, but he merely ignored me. His peers seemed mollified for the time being, my attempt to sow a seed of doubt in their great leader unsuccessful, though I hadn’t expected any other result. The council was filled with Fae that refused to think for themselves. Their opinions were my Uncle’s opinions, or they didn’t have any at all.

‘And how do we initiate these Unity Trials? ’ he asked, nudging us back on topic.

With a world-weary sigh, I told them what I could remember of the steps needed to perform the ritual. It was a simple set-up, even if it was unusual – and many considered it unnatural – to perform spells. That was something the Humans of myths had done, stealing their magic from the world around them in what they’d considered witchcraft . I didn’t know if there was any truth to those myths, but I hoped they were nothing more than stories. Yet, I couldn’t completely discount it. I was a strong believer that every story held a grain of truth, though how much truth the stories of Witches and Warlocks held I had no idea. They were depicted as barely more than magical thieves borne of no real innate power. They took and they took until nothing natural remained, moulding the world into their image and sucking up all the raw power they could find until the world around them died.

Unfortunately, we Fae weren’t any better. While stories of the round-eared Witches and Warlocks were passed down as cautionary tales, we had failed to heed those lessons which was how we had found ourselves in a centuries-long war with the product of our own failures. I just hoped that whatever these Unity Trials contained, it didn’t doom us further than we already were.