Page 4 of Bonded By Savages

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Damian

Thick black bars separate me and my battle-brother from the Arena of Blood. I have watched men earn their brands in this arena. I have watched triads who earned their black tattoos get the chance at their Mate, leaping into the unknown of the Orb-Gate to find their Mate.

I have watched the enemies of Obsidian cut down. The black sands thirst for blood. Tarak stands to my left. His aura used to be quick and calculating. Now it matches mine, a fiery ember as we imagine falling through the rift of reality. That’s the one thing that scares me.

To my right is nothing.

Raython stood there for hundreds of years, joining me in wild battle. Now he’s gone. He had no fear in his life, no fear until the very end. Put him in front of an enemy and he’d charge into battle. The way he went…

I push the old grief out of my mind. Our Mate suffers. She is thin as a wisp. Malnourished. Held prisoner by a cruel Toad Lord.

No man may keep her but I.

I’ll put my Orb-Blade through his warty chest. I’ll rip him in half, and all his guards, too.

We were on the lush planet Talag 6, dropped off by the Aurelian Empire warshipHurricanewhen the Bond-Thrum rippled over every man on the fields. Our eyes opened to our Mate. We felt her as real as the metal bars in front of me. It was like a wave of energy, letting us see our Mate, and even more precious, letting us feel her aura, her being, for a split second that felt like it lasted for eternity.

This wave of energy radiated from a violent ritual from the Priests. They spilled blood, in a temple far away, and that blood let us feel her.

The Priests gave me a taste of my Mate. For that, I’d kill.

To protect my Mate, I would do more than just kill. I would trade my life for hers…

But she was too far away.

My General called us back onto the warship. He spoke of a cursed, damned ritual. He told us that the Priests drove a knife into a holy, Bonded woman, and from her lifeblood, they allowed us to sense our Mate. He told us that we would lose more than just our honor if we abandoned the Aurelian Empire to search for her.

Our General told us that any man who deserted would be placed on the Kill List and cut down. He told us there was an order of fresh-made Bond-Disrupter rings being brought to us, that we must put on, to cut us from any further contact with our Mate. That we needed to be strong. Work together. Keep all humanity safe, and not just the few lucky enough to be able to sire our sons. He spoke of glory, and honor, and duty.

None of those things matter when your Mate is starving to death under a disgusting creature.

We had one chance to get her back. Join the Fanatics, as we called them, Aurelians so vile we cursed them, Aurelians so honorless we delighted in cutting them down at any chance we got. I’d driven my Orb-Blade through the branded chest of Obsidian’s followers on more than one occasion.

I told my General of our Mate’s plight. I begged him to give me command of Reavers to go into the Toad Empire to find her. I told him I’d risk Orb-Shifting and the pull of the void. He looked at me with empty grey eyes and shook his head.

He told me that even if we survived the coin-flip of the Orb-Shifting without being ripped to shreds in that dark place between reality, that we would have no chance of finding her. The Toad Kingdom has many thousands of planets, and while we saw our Mate clearer than the bars in front of us, we only had a vague sense of her direction. It would take a thousand Orb-Shifts and a thousand years to find her, and each time, we could be ripped to shreds by the void.

That stopped us. Not the fear of the void, or of miscalculating and ending up in the middle of a black hole.

It was the impossibility of finding her. The endless planets, each one with billions of people, and one of them our Mate. If you gave us one chance in a hundred, we would have taken it in a heartbeat.

The vision haunted us each day, as it haunted our fellow warriors. The morale of the crew turned distant as each triad was driven mad by the thought of their Fated Mate, out there. Before the Bondthrum, she was an abstraction. Now each of us felt her being to the core.

It lead my battle-brother Raython to madness. He became reckless. He threw himself into Scorp nests without thought, without waiting for backup, fighting with a ferocious savagery that overwhelmed his mind, as if killing his enemies could bring her to us. The burden of knowing our Mate was living a bleak, tortured existence and we were too weak to protect her made him crave the release of death.

The whispers grew as the shipment of Bond-Disrupter rings came closer.

That the Priests weren’t just responsible for letting every one of our species feel our Mate…

That they had a way to make bring their most loyal warriors straight to her.

That they could open portals through the void, directly near our Mate, and that the most honored warriors could bring her back.

Rumors. Whispers. They infected us.

My triad was born to serve the Aurelian Empire on Colossus, not born of a woman, but of the Cryo-Bays. One Aurelian at the end of his life goes into the Cryo-Bay, and his heir is born, a direct copy of him aged roughly ten in human years, ready to enter the academy to forge his life as a warrior.

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