Page 1 of The First Trial
Prologue
Evander
Metal 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 focused more on their strategies than technical skills. They may have surpassed the physical prowess needed to progress to this class, but there 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 carefully 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, I bit my tongue and let 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. ‘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 offence, 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 their ranks when the time came, instead, I was dismissed from our warrior ranks and imprisoned in our capital’s academy. 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 born 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 they were even clever enough to capture one of those monstersstill breathing. An impossible task that even I had never managed to achieve.
‘It seems your…obsessionhas 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, scrunching his face like he was scenting something foul.
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 was 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 had been ongoing for centuries, and there was no more 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 monarchies 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 could conceive of no other way.
