The Huntsman of Adamos (Quartet)- draft

CH EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION

Yurieth and Abrieth said farewell, and Yurieth went with Meteriel to the front lines. While Abrieth stayed back with the defense forces, to fight alongside and re-train those who came from the Academies. Regulus and the other seven guardians were determined to change the tide of the war and push the Xelusians off their world by century’s end, a mere forty-three years in the future.

The battle lines were across the continent. Everything on this side still belonged to the Aetherians but on the other, the forces of Xelusia held the land. Every resource was being stripped and sent back to their world. The industrialized sections spewed black smoke into the air at an alarming rate, creating soot falling like snow in the winter and as acid rain in the summer. Yurieth almost couldn’t contain his horror.

“Your aura betrays you, young huntsman. If you are going to learn to travel as a ghost, you must contain everything you feel and everything you are. Not even the wind nor shadows should know you pass them by,” his mentor explained.

Yurieth took a deep breath and cleared his mind, remembering the exercises where he had been shut in a dark room and Meteriel had refused to let him leave until he had become as empty as the room. Every day for weeks, he had tried and failed, then he had an epiphany, instead of trying to think about being nothing or static or wind or meditating on other ambient sounds, he actually just didn’t think, he simply was. Every sound when through him like he was empty air, he didn’t think about them, he just existed with them. Meteriel had sent Axion to get him and the Master Huntsman had not known which room to look in. The next step in Yurieth’s training was to learn the fighting style and assassin’s stealth which was different from a Huntsman’s. He absorbed the knowledge with a speed that surprised them all.

“Very good, Yurieth. Just remember, you cannot let anything you see affect you. We are going to a place many huntsmen have failed to return from because they let their emotions overcome them and were discovered.”

“Is it really that bad, Master Meteriel?” Yurieth asked in a calm voice that was the opposite of his inner turmoil. The stories he had heard made the far side of the battle lines sound like a place of horrors.

“It is so much worse than you have heard in the gossip. Tell me if you need to come back and we will,” Metariel promised.

Yurieth shook his head, “No, Master Meteriel. I know my duty.”

“Very well, we will cross a little before dusk, when the light is hazy.”

Yurieth wanted to vomit as he hid in a room filled with the desecrated dead of Aetheria . He wanted to weep and shout profanities and most of all, he wanted to murder every Xelusian he saw in the streets below. Forcing himself to look beyond the broken window, he saw his prey, a Xelusian Assassin of the Blood Brotherhood meeting with Meteriel. The murderer of the innocent looked directly at Yurieth’s window and then past it as he held the feelings in his soul silent. Drawing his bow, he poured every ounce of his hatred into the strength of the shot, then he saw what Meteriel couldn’t. Two more assassins creeping up on his mentor from the far side of the build, so he moved quickly for a better line of sight. Adding a second and then a third arrow, and adjusting his aim, he loosed the shafts, then repeated the shot before turning back to see Meteriel kill the one on the roof. Four assassins of the Brotherhood lay dead, as Yurieth retrieved his arrows.

“You have done well, Journeyman Yurieth. Tell me how did you know about the three on the other side?” Meteriel asked as they tossed the bodies into an incinerator not far away.

“I felt them. I felt them like the vibration of wrongness from a rabid animal, and then I saw them,” Yurieth answered honestly.

“Interesting,” Meteriel hummed as they slipped from shadow to shadow. As dusk painted the sky, they crossed back into Aetherian territory and flew back to the defense forces base camp.

Meteriel told him to go get some sleep, they would meet with the high command in the morning, but instead Yurieth sought out his brother. He needed to talk about what he saw during the three days they were deep in Xelusian occupied lands: the abuse of children and elders, the violation of young women and men, the murdered masses whose blood was taken for the Berserker warriors and Blood Mages. It was all so horrible and Yurieth had vowed to end it anyway he could. Over three million Aetherians were trapped in the Occupied lands, and every day there were fewer and fewer.

He caught sight Meteriel ducking into the building that held the highest command ranks and followed, wondering why his mentor had lied about meeting with the high command on the marrow. Once on the roof, Yurieth closed his eyes and felt for his mentor’s tainted soul then followed it. He dropped down and let himself in a window. Coming to a room on the fifteenth floor, he simply listened.

“But I don’t know how he did it.” Meteriel insisted.

“Surely you must have some idea, some inkling?” It was the guardian of the house of Xerxes, the Royal family’s guardian.

“He may not know, Xanthes.” Regulus spoke up. “Lord Yurieth’s powers are unlike any other Huntsman I have encountered. If Master Assassin Meteriel says what Yurieth did today was impossible then I believe him.”

“This is insanity, having an Assassin of the Blood Brotherhood training our Huntsmen...” Guardian Voltais of the House Vulca protested.

Master Huntsman Axion spoke next, “Voltais, there is almost no difference between Assassin Magic and Huntsman Magic, it is only the choice of the wielder’s heart than makes it different.”

“Is it possible that this young Huntsman has some sort of hybrid magic? His mother is a Priestess Oracle, is she not?” A female asked. Yurieth’s shock almost gave him away. He did not know women were allowed onto the battlefields.

“No, Amazoni Calisto, he has Huntsman’s magic and some warrior magic. A wielder can be an Oracle-Healer or a warrior type, not both. Oracles are never warriors,” Axion explained. “Though Master Huntsmen in some rare cases possess a type of healing magic, it is more to sustain a wounded comrade until they can heal or be healed rather than actually heal them.”

Meteriel added, “In truth, we do not know what Yurieth is truly meant to be, but our concern is that his emotional temperament will make him vulnerable to the Darkness, because it makes him weak. It is why we have refrained from teaching him the most powerful arts of our talents.”

Yurieth slipped away, jumping from the open window to the street below, and retreated rapidly from the command building. Back in his own quarters, he did not to weep for the horrors he had seen, but because of his mentors’ lack of faith in him. They were just like his father, saying encouraging words to his face, but without the conviction to tell him the truth of their concerns or teach him completely. He had just begun to believe in himself and trust that his mentors believed in his destiny, to hear their doubts and their conviction that he would fall into Darkness, hurt him deeply.

He felt his mentors returning and forced his body into a sleep like state. Doing the oracle meditations he had learned as a child from his mother, he seemed deeply asleep when Meteriel and Axion walked by his room and paused for a moment before continuing on. But in his mind, he folded his pain in upon itself and made a box to keep it in. If his mentors wanted him to be emotionless, he would be. He would turn his pain and outrage into cold action. He would prove them wrong and make them proud, and in adjunct, his father. He would show them just how wrong they were about the uses of Huntsmen’s magic. He would evolve and recreate the role of Huntsmen in war.

Yurieth walked through the streets of a city on Xelusia, the Amazoni Warrioress Calisto walked between he and Meteriel. Children begged for scraps while women of every age offered themselves to passersby with vulgar, tawdry shouts. Yurieth was glad they were finally leaving this forsaken planet after ten years of wandering and spying.

Suddenly, there were shouts, and everyone fled from the streets. The Assassin, the Huntsman, and the Amazoni ducked into an alley and went up the side of a building. Men dressed in black got out of a transport and kicked in a door, dragging the screaming children and terrified women out into the street and throwing them into a windowless container.

Yurieth clenched his fist, and Calisto rested her hand on his glove. “You cannot stop them. If they aren’t harvested this day then it will simply be another day. This is why we need the Aetherian King to send your warriors here. We have to overthrow King Apollyon and his consort, the Dark Queen B’blonia.”

“I will find a way,” Yurieth promised.

Meteriel laughed cruelly, “Don’t make promises for your King, Huntsman. You know Xerxes is perfectly content to let the war reduce the excess common-housed population. This war could go on for a millennium or more at this rate and neither of our kings would even notice.”

Yurieth looked at the street below and strode to the center of the building, he loosed a single, explosive tipped arrow into the power conduits several city streets away. The explosion echoed through the city like thunder, a sound not heard since the rains had stopped falling decades earlier. Most of the warriors working the harvest went to see what the commotion was leaving only a few behind. Yurieth dropped to the street, he effortlessly killed the two that stood guard and opened the container, to those inside he simply spoke one Xelusian word.

“Run.”

The prisoners fled in terror of the Assassin dressed in the colors of the Blood Brotherhood. A woman ran out of another building screeching at the fleeing ones to stop.

She began to beat on Yurieth’s chest, “You’ve killed us all. You should have let them be taken for resettlement.”

With a flick of his wrist, he broke her neck and dropped her on the pavement. Looking around, he pulled off his mask, revealing the truth of what his was. His golden hair and silver eyes were not those of a Xelusian and everyone staring at him knew it.

“I am a Huntsman of Aetheria , and we will be coming soon to free you.” He announced in their language. “There is no resettlement. Those taken to never return are killed for their blood and their flesh is given back to you as food. I suggest you all flee this district unless you want to be bled and eaten.”

He pulled his headgear back on and climbed the vertical face of a building and disappeared over the ledge just before the warriors came back. This time the crowds didn’t get into the containers without resistance. A riot broke out and the harvesters were killed. It spread from one district to another until the whole of the outlying city was aflame with violence. After they fled to the spaceport and prepared to board a craft for the three-day trip to Aetheria, Calisto held back.

“I’m not going with you.” Her dark brown eyes were sad but determined.

Yurieth looked at her shocked, but Metariel just shrugged and slipped away.

“You have to, the Amazonis are under sentence of death if they are captured. You’ll be killed, if they find you,” Yurieth insisted.

Calisto shook her head, refusing. “I have family here in hiding in the Amazo mountains. We were once warriors and yet we do nothing for our fellow citizens. You did more today than we have in centuries. It is time we stood up and fought for the Light again on our own world, so those in exile on Aetheria can return home.” She pulled down his mask and pressed a kiss to his lips. “Goodbye Yurieth, thank you... for everything.” In a moment, she had vanished through the blowing smoke and wind-borne sands like a mirage

Settling into the stowaway compartments on the transport, Metariel shook his head in disappointment. “Your altruism and heroic ideals are like a disease, Huntsman.”

“Perhaps,” Yurieth answered, settling into his hammock. “But my father always said, evil thrives where the good stand silent.”

His mentor snorted. “Ten years on this forsaken world and you still believe there is good here?”

Yurieth sighed and closed his eyes. “It only takes one, Master Assassin. It only takes one to start a revolution.”