Well what a fun week I’ve had. Nothing like 6 days of waking up at 5:30 and sleeping under a sheet of plasticised fabric to really get you back in the mood to write something.
I know I said I wouldn’t but this chapter is going to be split up into two parts with the next coming out about mid-week. This is because 1) I have obviously had very limited time this week and I wanted to get something out and 2) because as stated before I do not want to do another epically long chapter (which this looked like it could have turned into).
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this part. On today’s menu is “backstory and explanations”, have a nice meal.
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Chapter 10 – The Shark and the Shadow: Part 1
It was chaos after the destruction of the Templar’s tower; all three generals dead, part of the castle destroyed and worst of all, King Adelaide missing in the field. Everything fell apart with high ranking officials and army captains each vying to fill the power vacuum left in the wake of the destruction. It was of course only several days later that the King’s survival was learned of and most of the bickering among the higher-ups ceased less their actions be interpreted as treason.
It was out of this turmoil that I saw Keiser for the first time in over seven years.
I was attending his trial as a watcher; one who observed that the course of justice was being dispensed in the proper manner by the court judges and the army law officers. As one of the senior captains in the Du’hadrin’s “Akorshakai”, it was my right to make my voice heard over any point I considered to be worthy of special consideration by the small army of junior law officers and scribes that made up the Eastern Basitin judicial system. I was about to speak up at Lieutenant Alabaster’s blatant lust for personal vengeance when Adelaide returned. There was quite the uproar I can tell you; the court went crazy (and not just because Keiser had drawn sword against the entire tribunal) and the wind was taken completely out of Alabaster’s sails (a good thing mind you). My memory of what exactly the King said is quite hazy, however I remember very well the consequences of her words: instead of being put back into exile, Keiser was being offered the chance of a lifetime. An official position as the first Basitin ambassador to the outside world. Quite the turnaround eh?
–From the autobiography of Arms General Marcus Kain, first published in 1975
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“He deserves to know.”
“Why? Why should I tell him anything? Bad enough that he knows who I am in the first place. Why should I tell him more? I should just kill him now and be done with all this.”
“Don’t be so stupid and naïve, you know that everything has a purpose, that everything is written. You think all of this happened by coincidence? Besides, it’s not like this came out of the blue. “He” did warn you something like this might happen after all.”
“And you know that “he” isn’t always right!”
“Whatever, you know what has to be done. Just don’t do anything overly stupid ok?”
“Get out of my head Jason!”
Silence.
“Who are you talking to?”
Hawk was looking at him inquisitively.
Keiser turned away, “Never you mind, it’s not important.”
But then he turned back, Jason’s words weighing down upon him. He had known this time would come eventually, everything over the last year had pointed towards it. Even “he” had known. And now here he stood in plain view. Exposed. His little charade was well and truly over. He looked back to Hawk who had been walking behind him in silence for the last hour now and was split, part of him wanting to get rid of the evidence and go back to his secret life and part wanting to finally throw off the cloak of lies and deceit he had been living under for so long now. He made a decision.
“James… wait.”
Hawk turned round, eyes hooded with tiredness but also tinged with a spark of excitement.
“I have… not been fair to you and I know what you must be thinking. Please believe me when I say that it was not without good reason that I left when I did. There were things that… I had to do.”
Hawk crossed his arms and looked Keith, the hero of the Basitin race, straight in the face
“Then tell me.”
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“I was born 92 years ago, in a district of the Eastern Basitin capitol less than a kilometre from the caste walls. All my young life I had dreamed of someday being an important officer in the military and having a chance to work in that same castle under the King. That was my life’s ambition. I admit I was never the strongest or the cleverest but I, like everyone else, had my dreams and I was determined to make them become a reality.
Until they were taken from me.
I was banished, exiled from my home and left to lead a life of the wanderer, never truly belonging anywhere until my dying day came and absolved me of my sins. But I had not reckoned without the intervention of one of the few friends I had had during my childhood.
Nickolai Alaric.
Unbeknownst to me, he had gained himself quite a considerable promotion to become Master General in just four years. How he did it I never knew. He… manipulated events to allow me to return, and when I came back he had arranged for me to become the Basitin kingdom’s first international ambassador.
My role took me far afield, from the various Keidran tribes of the west and south to even the human capitol in the east of Mekkan, all under the pretence of finally opening up Basitin society to the rest of the world. But… times changed. The world was no longer the relatively peaceful place it had been for centuries before. Skirmishes were nothing new to the Keidran and humans but a full scale war had not been waged for countless generations; occasional scuffles was as far as their hostilities got. But now the Templar were in charge. The human king assassinated and their armies taken over and merged with the almost limitless magical potential of the Templar’s own considerable forces. They were unstoppable, cutting a vast swathe through the local country side, exterminating any Keidran they found. The Templar wanted the elimination of an entire species.
Their armies could not be fought against, their armour strengthened by magic and nearly impervious to normal weapons, their very soldiers augmented my magic glyphs to become more than any normal man could be. They were totally invincible. In just a few short years the Keidran tribes had all fallen, one after the other to the Templar’s limitless grasp, their people either killed or sold into slavery for the highest bidder. There was much talk of the two Basitin kingdoms uniting and waging war in defence of the Keidran, however we soon realised that this was impossible. We had no magic, what good we could even a united Basitin army do against an enemy that was greater both in numbers and destructive capability? So, we decided to do as we had always done. We would let the world go to hell and shut ourselves away from the nightmare, hopeful that it would eventually pass and we would endure as we had always done. But that was not to be the case.
Not content with their almost total annihilation of the Keidran species, the Templar turned their eyes south towards our Island. Even then we knew that they would not stop until every last xeno was crushed beneath their iron boot. The only thing that saved us from being slaughtered just as the Keidran had was the channel between the mainland and the Basitin Isles. It was a vast stretch of water that would take almost a month for a merchant ship to cross, let alone an armoured warship of the kind employed by the human armies. This presented the humans with a problem. You see, while we Basitins are not a naturally sea-faring race, we did have quite a considerable navy that had been built up over the generations to resist just such an advance as this. The elders of long ago knew that the humans would inevitably attack one day and so they ordered its creation hundreds of years ago to ensure that the Isles remained – as they had always been – Basitin territory.
While the Templars power seemed near limitless on the ground, on the high seas it was another matter entirely. Each mage was far more powerful than any normal soldier, be he Basitin, Keidran or otherwise; however they did have one great weakness. For a mage to use his powers, he had to suck the very life essence out of the earth itself and then transfer that power into whatever he desired. If that power ran out, the mage started using his own life-force as the source of power. This limitation did not affect their armies on the ground as whole platoons of mages were used to form the relatively simple augmentation spells that empowered their soldiers to be indestructible. However, amplifying soldiers was one thing, enhancing a warship was something else entirely.
Out at sea, the Templar were cut off from their source of power and so their magic could not be used without killing the mage himself. While their ships were strengthened in the dry-docks, the amount of power required to do to a ship what they did to a soldier was astronomical and there simply weren’t the necessary supply of acolytes that could be spared to carry out the work. As a consequence, in the open water the humans were on an almost equal footing to ourselves.
This allowed us to hold them back… for a time. While we matched them in every battle we fought, their overwhelming numbers eventually forced the navy to retreat lest they be totally destroyed by the human armada. But they bought us valuable time; in fact the almost constant sea battles gave us another three years to prepare for the human’s inevitable ground assault on our home. The first since records began.
It was during this time that I came home.
Since the start of the hostilities and the closing of all diplomatic relations with the humans, I had been working with the Keidran tribes trying to negotiate deals with both their enemies and ourselves. While the King and her council refused to take any direct action against the Templar, I was able to broker an arms deal with them whereby we would send the border tribes armaments and logistical support in order to help them resist the incursion into their ancestral lands. We all knew that this would not stop the Templar but would only halt their advance; however it would buy us more time to prepare ourselves. While I’m not proud of what we did, the Keidran were a necessary delay for the human armies to beat on for a time.
As they were pushed further and further back towards the inner territories, the higher-ups made the decision to pull me and all other Basitin working in the battle zones back to the Isles since it was clear that there was nothing more we could do to help the beleaguered tribes in what was soon to become a global war. We were on the last ship out before all friendly ports were closed. Most of them for good.
In the years since the Templar’s tower had been destroyed all of the Basitin high command had been reassembled but unfortunately was still being run by men who had never set their paws outside of the city let alone the Isles to see the world. As a consequence, the people orchestrating what was clearly becoming our fight for survival had never had any experience of the humans or their armies save what was contained within our few books on the subject. It was little better than fighting blind. However, due to the extraordinary circumstances of our predicament, an action was taken that had never even been contemplated in the darkest recesses of the history of the Basitin people.
The entirety of the high command, including the King herself, resigned their posts with immediate effect.
They realised that they could not hope to save our people with their extremely limited knowledge of the foe and so they turned to the only few Basitins who had ever had prolonged contact with the Templar and so knew at least some of their ways and thought processes.
Me as an ambassador, an old friend and former Akorshakai captain—turned spy by the name of Marcus Kain, and the late General Alabaster’s deputy, a man by the name of Seethe who had been overseeing the movement of the Templar armies and executing the supply of arms to the Keidran over the past few years. Together we became the newly appointed Master, Arms and Intelligence generals respectively with overall command falling to me solely because of my contact with the former Grand Templar Trace Legacy, who had gone into hiding when the whole debacle began. The post of “King” was dissolved to allow us to take any necessary actions without having to report to an elected official. From that moment on, the Eastern Basitins were to be ruled by emergency powers. It was a sad state of affairs really: our very existence was now reliant upon three people with a combined knowledge of humans of just over twelve years. And yet we were the best we had.
It was at this time that my story as you know it really begins…”
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Suddenly Keiser trailed off, his eyes darting from Hawks face and around the alien landscape as if searching for something.
“It’s not safe here, we must move. Quickly now!”
He leapt to his paws and grabbed his kit and rifle before setting off in the direction they had been traveling before. Hawk ran to catch up
“What is it? What do you sense?”
Keiser paused
“I’m not quite sure… something I know but… it’s elusive.”
He turned back, “I promise I shall tell you everything when this is over, but know that there are some things that even I cannot explain fully. But you shall know… eventually everyone shall know.”
He pointed to a small dot on the horizon, “do you see that, at the base of one of those pinnacles?”
Hawk shaded his eyes against the glare that seemed to originate from all around them despite the lack of any discernable stars in the sky,
“A cave?”
Keiser nodded
“Yes, we should be safe there for a time. Then I can figure a way to get us out of this mess…”
Suddenly Hawk grabbed his shoulder, “Wait! I remember what happened now, back in Sangin. Tell me… was what he said true? What has happened to my friends?!”
Keiser gently removed the hand, a look of sadness crossing his face.
“I’m sorry James. I have known Orland for… too many years. He would not lie about something like that. I’m afraid your section, my Wolfpack and probably most of Sangin… are dead.”
It was a dread blow to the young corporal. Keith, Amsel and the rest of 3 section dead? The thought was incomprehensible. But he had seen the look in Keiser’s eyes and deep down he knew what he said had been true. It was like he could feel a part of him missing and yet he had only just noticed it now.
Keiser gripped the stricken soldier’s arm
“There will be time for mourning later my friend, for now we must concentrate on ourselves and how we survive lest their sacrifices be in vain.”
He steered him forward towards the pinnacle
“I promise you that Vezax will pay for what he has done. Mark my words on that. Nothing will save him from death when we find him, of that I assure you.”
And he meant it. From that moment on the two of them – the prince and the pauper – would live for one purpose only. To bear witness to the final breath of the Brethren and Betrayer and anyone else, be they human or Basitin who stood in their way.
"Betrayal is a cancer. Let it eat your soul, not mine."
