The drills were hard, designed to carve soldiers out of doughy citizens, but Razheed was harder. The trouble was pretending he wasn't. It was a problem, deciding how far ahead he should run to make his victory seem hard-earned. Should he win by ten seconds? Twenty? Should he come out on top all the time? Would that be obvious? Leiza's baleful jade glare seemed to burn into him through every moment of training, and she always managed to find a way to turn the squad's ire against him. It was an age-old game; she would make them burn together and either break him or forge him into a champion. He kept his eyes forward and his head low, and absorbed their scorn as capably as he performed at everything else. He would not be deterred.
It was a grueling month of basic training. He felt the facade making him sedentary, complacent. Sparring made him feel like an adult among children. He began to wonder if he was getting rusty, spending his concentration holding back rather than unleashing. Still, he was doing well as a spy-- assassin, he resolutely corrected himself --but it certainly wasn't his strong suit. He thought about his strong suit. About Balrahn, the one-eyed serpent Emperor. The scene came to life in his imagination:
A night of complete uneasiness creeps through Aht Urghan. A storm rolls through from the north without warning, a bitter chill and the stale scent of dead marshlands carried over the waves from the Caedarva Mire. The thunder and the roar and the empty streets sets the Imperial Whitegate, the whole palace grounds on edge. This feeling stalks by every open door, raising the hairs on the necks of all who have not anchored their concentration to something, and many who have. The Emperor, a grey-crowned man with an aging warrior's body, sits at a table in his library. He uses his good eye to pore over history texts from the continent. He is searching for something, a fragment of a memory from centuries ago, any scrap he can find of the sunken ruins of Alzadaal. He knows Ghatsad has already read every word in the library to find it, but still, he searches.
He is flanked by two soldiers, clad in loose, azure clothing, their mouths hidden behind black veils. These are the blue mages-- the immortal spellswords of legend, the elite warriors said to be more beast than man, chimarae on two legs --and Razheed is one of them. He has been the Emperor's personal guard for almost one year by now. Earned his trust. Protected him. Killed for him, without trace of remorse or mercy. Razheed is a faceless, reticent part of the Imperial Whitegate, an extension of the Emperor's will.
The candles, the lanterns, the fireplaces, all of them in the tall, book-lined chambers of the library suddenly flicker and vanish, their light swallowed in darkness deeper than new moon's midnight. The entire palace is taken by this shroud. Frightened yells and screams echo through the grounds in the frantic few minutes it takes for Balrahn to find his lantern and relight it. Disoriented and furious, he whips around to his feet to tongue-lash his bodyguards, but they are not there in the cavernous darkness. Anger melts away to show fear. The thunder rolls through unaccompanied by lightning, the deep and terrible bellow of an enormous beast heard from inside its gaping black maw. He calls for them by their names, watching shadows slide and dart with the quivering lamplight. He moves forward, stumbles over something with one foot and nearly slips with the other in some liquid that now seeps through his silken shoes, prickling and hot against his feet. The light falls on one of them-- the elder warrior -- what is left of him. Fear distills into terror.
His eyes rake over the chilling mess. It is a distorted half-human torso, blue fabric dangling from its limbs as its monstrous face screams silently to the ceiling. Its arms are wrenched in terrible directions, impossible directions, bones protruding, too many joints. He lifts the lantern barely, trembling, and its light glints on a trail of azure blood. It ends at a book case, fifty paces into the dark. More blood drips from above, where the pair of blue-clad legs had been flung against the shelf. The terror is pure, adrenal, blind panic, and he is sprinting, twisting down ink-black corridors with the unshakable feeling that something, a monster is stalking him all the way...
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