Eldric Chronicles: The Bonded

Book One

"A harsh answer stirs up strife and anger, but kindness will turn away wrath." — Fourth Chapter, Verse Eleven, The Ancient Book of Light

Prologue: An Ultimatum Between Life and Death

Space.

Throughout the ages, men and women of curious and restless minds have called it the final frontier — that vast, silent expanse beyond the sky, stretching into a darkness so deep it becomes its own kind of eternity. To look upon it is to feel both impossibly small and impossibly full at once, as though the universe itself is pressing a secret against your chest that it refuses to name.

Yet space is not merely emptiness. It breathes. It connects. And deep within its boundless dark, there exists a threshold that most eyes will never find — the Fury Realm Gate, a shimmering wound in reality where the heavens and the abyss press against each other like palms meeting in silent prayer. It links the radiant halls of Angels and Deities to the shadow-drowned kingdom of fallen heroes and Demon-Gods, and between those extremes, it allows all manner of things to cross.

For our story, there are only two forces that matter at this threshold.

The first is Udiya — God of Creation and Life, whose light gave shape to all living things. The second is Mordred — God of Darkness and Death, the enemy of everything that breathes and hopes. These two forces have clashed since before memory, and in recent years, Mordred's disciples have grown bold. They crawl across the universe like a slow and patient rot, seeding corruption into hearts that once held warmth. They seek to resurrect their Lord. And they are not without success.

This is not a story about gods.

It is a story about people — about a hatred so old and so deeply buried that it has become indistinguishable from instinct, and about what it costs to love someone anyway. It is about a young man who was given every right to close his heart to the world and chose, again and again, to keep it open. It is about what racism does to the people who carry it and the people who survive it. It is about learning — slowly, painfully, sometimes joyfully — that kindness is not weakness. That it is, in fact, the most ferocious thing in existence.

But before any of that, it begins here.

The planet of Arkynor.

Historians have long called it a mirror world — a reflection of the human home planet, Earth, built from the same fundamental clay but shaped by entirely different hands. Where Earth turned inward with time, growing proud and fractious, Arkynor was formed as a counterbalance. Udiya, the God of Creation, had not given up on his first children when the Great Deception changed them. Instead, he had answered that change with intention — crafting the Arkynoreans and the Eldarians as guardians for the human race, protectors against evil in all of its forms.

It was, as these things often go, a thankless role.

The Arkynoreans were ostracized by the very people they were created to shield. Mistrusted. Feared. Sometimes hunted. The darkness that had crept into human hearts had also, inevitably, found its way into the hearts of some Arkynoreans in turn — but the wound that truly broke something between the races came later, from a single incident so ugly that the mention of it still caused jaws to tighten and hands to curl into fists. That story belongs to another time.

For now, Arkynor was alive and beautiful.

Despite everything — despite the wars that had scarred its plains and roughened its climate — the planet remained breathtaking. Rolling green pastures stretched to horizons edged with violet mountains. Rivers ran aquamarine through valleys so lush they seemed to glow in the amber light of Arkynor's twin suns. Forests grew dense and ancient, full of sounds and scents that no traveler from another world would ever quite find the words for. It had been a long time since human feet had touched Arkynor's soil. The Arkynorean rulers had made certain of that. The last great war between the races had been nearly fifty years ago now, and in the silence that followed, a fragile peace had taken root.

Not fragile enough to break. Not yet.

Arkynor was divided into six kingdoms, each governed by one of its peoples — the sturdy, craftsman-hearted Dwarves of Argonath; the Sylphs and dark-blooded Elves of Odarinath; the Gnomes and Dryads of Avalon's wide plains; the brooding, mountain-ringed country of Caldern; the distant kingdom of Dagghorlad in the east, called by some the Dragon's Fang, for reasons no one remembered anymore; and at the center of it all, the largest and most powerful of them: the Kingdom of Albanar.

Albanar's military was unmatched among the six kingdoms. In another age, under a lesser ruler, it might have become an empire built on conquest. It did not. The High King chose diplomacy over dominance — treaty over threat — and as a result, what existed between the six kingdoms was less a political alliance than a brotherhood. Disputes were settled first through words. Violence was a last resort, arrived at reluctantly and ended swiftly. It was an imperfect peace, but it was peace, and the people of Albanar wore it with quiet pride.

It is to Albanar's capital city that we travel now — to the royal seat of Xenia, that gleaming jewel nestled among green hills — and to its palace, where on a warm afternoon in the palace's grassy courtyard, a young prince was being thoroughly beaten by his father.

The crack of wooden training swords rang out across the courtyard like a sharp, regular heartbeat.

Odyn Albanar was eight years old. He was tall for his age — unusually so — with dark skin like smooth polished stone, a pair of pointed ears that marked him unmistakably as Elven kin, and eyes the color of living flame: deep, molten orange, burning with an intensity that seemed almost too large for a child's face. His hair was a shade of blue so dark it bordered on black, swept back beneath a worn army green headband that sat just below the silver circlet of the royal family. He wore a light blue shirt under a dark green jacket, black trousers tucked into steel-gray boots, and a pair of silver fingerless gloves — practical, unadorned, suited for work rather than ceremony. Strapped to his back in a blue-and-gold sheath was his sword, though at the moment it was the practice blade in his hand that mattered.

The man across from him was High King Berethon.

Berethon stood nearly seven feet tall by human reckoning, broad-shouldered and unhurried, his presence carrying that particular gravity that belongs only to people who have long since stopped needing to prove anything. He had the same dark skin as his son, the same blue hair — though his fell to his shoulders and was matched by a neatly kept goatee — and the same orange eyes, though where Odyn's burned with the restless energy of youth, Berethon's held something steadier, a deeper heat, like coals rather than flame. He wore royal blues and gold, and he moved through their sparring session with the effortless economy of a man who had been fighting for longer than Odyn had been alive.

Which was precisely the problem.

Odyn charged again.

There was a rush of movement, a sharp crack, and then Odyn was on the ground, staring up at the pale sky, the breath knocked out of him for what felt like the hundredth time that afternoon. The grass was cool against his back. Several cuts and scrapes smarted on his arms and face. His knuckles were raw inside the gloves.

He sat up.

He stood.

He raised the practice blade.

Come on, he told himself, jaw set. Again.

Berethon watched his son with a look somewhere between admiration and amusement. The boy had never once asked him to stop. Not once, in all the years they had trained together, had Odyn Albanar done anything other than stand back up. "Have you had enough yet, son?" he asked, resting one hand on his hip.

"Not a chance, Father." The words came through gritted teeth, strained but steady, undercut only slightly by the wince Odyn couldn't quite suppress as a cut on his forearm made itself known. "I can keep going."

Berethon smiled. He lowered his training blade.

"Perhaps," he said. "But I believe we're done for today."

Odyn blinked. He lowered his own sword partway, confusion flickering across his face. "I don't understand. Why? I can keep—"

"Come here."

It was not a command in the strict sense. Berethon said it gently, the way he said most things to his children, and he knelt down to meet his son's eyes — an act that always struck observers as quietly remarkable, this enormous king folding himself to a child's height without ceremony or self-consciousness. He placed one broad hand on Odyn's shoulder.

"I need you to understand something. Can you do that for me?"

Odyn nodded, once, curtly. He would listen. He always listened.

"You are remarkably dedicated," Berethon said. "I am proud of you for that — genuinely. But a body that is never allowed to rest is a body that will eventually fail you at the worst possible moment. Durability is not the same as endurance. And you can't protect anyone if you've worn yourself into the ground before the real fight begins." He let the words settle. "You wouldn't want that. Would you?"

The orange-eyed boy was quiet for a moment. Then, slowly, the tension in his shoulders released. He exhaled. "I understand, Father. I'll rest."

Berethon ruffled his son's hair, earning a slight, undisguised look of embarrassment from the boy — the universal expression of an eight-year-old who considers himself far too serious for such treatment — and then stepped back.

Before he walked away, Odyn turned and bowed. He pressed a flattened fist against an open palm at his chest, the traditional gesture of Elven respect between student and teacher. "Thank you for the lesson, Father. As always."

Berethon watched his eldest son head off to wash up, and he stood there for a moment after the boy had gone, simply watching. There was a particular kind of pride that had no adequate words — a full, aching thing that lived somewhere behind the ribs and didn't ask for expression. He felt it now.

That boy, he thought, is going to be extraordinary.

The capital city of Xenia lived up to its reputation on an afternoon like this one.

Its streets were clean and wide, lined with buildings of pale stone and dark timber that caught the late sun and glowed faintly amber. Stalls of weavers, herbalists, and armorers crowded cheerfully together along the main thoroughfares. Children ran between market carts. Elven women in layered robes moved with that characteristic unhurried grace that always made human visitors stop and stare.

And through all of it, holding her older brother's hand with the fierce, unselfconscious grip of a child who has no intention of letting go, came Sarai Albanar.

She was five years old, small for her age, with deep crimson hair that fell in soft, wayward curls around a face that people tended to instinctively describe as sweet — round-cheeked and bright-eyed, lit with the specific incandescence of a child who has not yet learned to dim herself around other people. She had the same dark skin and pointed ears as her brother, and the same burning orange eyes, though in her they danced more than they burned. She wore a simple pale dress and sandals, and she skipped alongside Odyn with a cheerful, bouncing energy that made passing mothers smile reflexively.

"You did take forever," she announced, looking up at him with a tone that suggested she was being very generous about it.

"I know," Odyn said, looking down at her. He had knelt to her eye level when they met, his expression earnest. "Did you wait long?"

Sarai's nose scrunched. "A little bit." Then she beamed. "But it's okay because big brother's here now."

It was not, Odyn thought as he straightened and let his sister drag him forward, the worst thing he'd ever been told.

Their mother watched them go — High Queen Hyatan, standing at the edge of the market with a small, private smile. She was the kind of beautiful that was less about features than about presence — composed, warm, carrying herself with the unhurried confidence of a woman who had spent years growing into her own authority. She watched her children until they disappeared around the curve of the street, and then she turned to her own affairs, content.

Later, when the streets had given way to the forest's green-shadowed quiet, Odyn found a clearing and began doing what he always did when he had his sister to himself.

He trained her.

Sarai had her own ideas about "playing," but she had inherited enough of her family's instinct to understand, at five years old, that what Odyn was teaching her mattered. She wobbled on her practice stance. She swung her small fists at the padded targets on his hands with more enthusiasm than precision. She laughed when she lost her balance and tumbled sideways into the grass, and she got back up still laughing.

"Shift your feet a little more to the right," Odyn told her, patient. "Widen the base — like this. You'll get more power in your swing."

Sarai adjusted her footing with the focused seriousness of someone performing a very important ceremony, then looked up at him for confirmation.

"Better?"

"Better," he agreed, and the way his face shifted — some small softness moving through the seriousness — was a thing that would have surprised people who only knew him from a distance.

They broke after an hour to rest in the shade of an old tree, its bark smooth and silver, its canopy making lacework of the fading afternoon light. Odyn used the time to continue his sister's lessons in reading and in Ancient Elvish, that old and bone-deep language that carried their people's history in its syllables the way a river carries sediment — quietly, steadily, shaping everything it touches. He wanted Sarai to grow up knowing who she was. He wanted her to be able to hold a conversation in the tongue of their ancestors, to read the old texts when she was older, to understand the long story of which she was a small and vital part.

He also wanted, with the quietly ferocious protectiveness of an older sibling who has decided this is simply the way things are, for her to be able to take care of herself if anything ever happened to him.

He did not examine that thought too closely. He simply acted on it, as he always had.

When they finally rose and began making their way home through the forest's long evening shadows, Odyn fell quiet.

He heard it first — the way he always heard things first, that peculiar Elven attunement to the weight and pattern of sound that turned the world into a kind of ongoing conversation most people didn't know they were having. Footsteps. Multiple sets. Heavy and deliberate, metal catching on underbrush in that distinctive, rhythmic way that meant armor. Moving to converge on them from three directions.

He did not recognize the footsteps.

That, more than anything, was what made his stomach drop.

In his eight years of life in Xenia, Odyn had come to know the particular sound of nearly everyone who moved through these forests. Guards walked a certain way. Merchants walked another. His father's soldiers had a cadence as recognizable as a signature. These people moved with none of that familiarity — their footsteps were foreign, strange, carrying with them a quality that Odyn could only describe, inwardly, as cold. The energy that preceded them was dark in the way that a held breath is dark, compressed and intentional and pointed.

He raised his arm — a quiet, instinctive gesture — and Sarai, who had been mid-sentence about something she had seen in the market, fell silent immediately. Her small hand tightened around the back of his shirt.

"Sarai." His voice was very calm. "It's alright. Stay close to me. We're going to be fine."

She said nothing. But she pressed herself against his back and did not let go.

His hand moved to the grip of his sword.

Then they stepped out of the trees.

Human mercenaries. Twelve of them, at least, heavily armed, wearing mismatched armor that spoke of mercenary work rather than military service — pieces acquired piecemeal, functional rather than uniform. They emerged from the shadows of the forest and arranged themselves in a loose, practiced arc.

Odyn stared at them.

The realization was almost physical. Humans. Inside Elven territory. He felt it first as confusion, then as a cold, bright anger that swept through him like a sudden wind. His hands balled into fists at his sides.

What are they doing here?

One of them stepped forward. He was broad-shouldered, with a smirk carved so deeply into his face it seemed structural, like it had been there for years. He looked at the two young elves the way men who have done something like this before look at their targets — with a casual, comfortable contempt that was, perhaps, the most unsettling thing about him.

"Well, well." He glanced back at his companions, a short laugh escaping him. "Boss was right after all. We've got ourselves a genuine pair of Dark Woodland Elf brats."

Odyn stepped forward. His arm came up in front of his sister, placing himself between her and the men. "What do you want," he said. It was not quite a question.

The mercenary tilted his head, studying him with the air of a man who finds something mildly amusing. "Ooh. Feisty, aren't you, kid? Can't say I dislike it."

Behind the man, two of the younger mercenaries were already exchanging glances and drifting toward the children's flanks, the kind of lazy, confident movement that meant they were very sure about the outcome of this particular encounter.

"We could rough them up a little," one of them muttered. "Boss never said we couldn't."

From the back of the group, a sharper voice cut through: "Don't you dare! We were given explicit instructions — no harm to the elves." The owner of the voice was clearly the true leader of this group — older than the others, quieter, with black hair shot through with white and the kind of weathered, resigned face that belongs to men who have spent long years being asked to do things they find distasteful. He stepped forward, mouth set in a line. "I said stand down—"

He did not finish the sentence in time.

Two of the younger men had already moved.

They reached for Sarai.

What followed was not the lopsided and easy thing they had expected. Light erupted from Odyn's hands — not the trained, refined magic of an adult practitioner, but the raw, furious luminescence of a gifted child pushed past his threshold. It struck the reaching men like a wall and threw them backward, and in the space that bought, Odyn moved — fast, precise, making use of every hour his father had knocked him into the ground and every hour he had stood back up from it.

A knee to the midsection. A sharp elbow to the jaw. A controlled throw that sent one man sprawling and kept Odyn already moving toward the next.

The mercenaries' leader — Seth Kyocera, a samurai of considerable experience who had the profound misfortune of employing twelve men who had not spent five minutes listening to a word he said — pressed one hand over his eyes. "He has light magic," he said, mostly to himself. "I told them. I told them."

His men groaned and cursed from the ground.

There were three of them left standing, and they looked considerably less confident than they had sixty seconds ago. Their expressions had cycled through surprise, into indignation, and were now settling into something harder and uglier. "You're going to regret that," one of them said.

Odyn said nothing. His eyes were steady, his breathing controlled. He had shifted into the widest of his practice stances — the one his father called the anchor, the one you use when you intend to hold ground.

He did not see Seth move.

The mercenary leader was not careless, and he was not reckless, and he had not survived this long in his profession by being either. While his men had committed every available scrap of their attention to the blue-haired boy in front of them, Seth had moved. Quietly. Carefully. A wide arc around the edges of the fight, keeping to shadows and stillness, until he arrived exactly where the chaos of the brawl had left completely unguarded.

Behind Sarai.

There was a small, terrible sound — a quick, sharp intake of breath — and then Sarai was still, her brother's name dying in her throat, one of Seth's arms across her shoulders and a blade very close to her cheek.

Her eyes were wide and full of tears. She didn't make a sound. She was five years old and she was terrified, and she was trying very hard, in the way of brave and very young things, not to let herself cry.

Odyn stopped.

The fight drained out of him like water from a broken vessel, leaving something heavier in its place. He looked at his sister's face — at the tears trembling there, at the desperate way her eyes found his — and he made a decision. Slowly, deliberately, he sheathed his sword. He raised his hands.

"All right," he said. His voice was quiet and perfectly steady. "I'll make you a different offer."

Seth regarded him. Something moved behind the older man's eyes — not cruelty, Odyn noted. Not pleasure. Something much closer to pain. "I'm listening."

"Take me instead." Odyn walked forward, hands still raised, each step calm and measured. Around him, the standing mercenaries shifted uncertainly, off-balance by the sudden change in the situation's register. "She is five years old. She can barely speak your language. She cannot do any labor you would find useful, and she would be nothing but grief and confusion in a foreign place." He stopped a few feet from the group's leader. His orange eyes met Seth's brown ones without flinching. "Take me. I can work. I understand your language. I won't need looking after." A pause. "But let her go home to her family."

Seth was very still for a moment.

Then he released Sarai.

She stumbled forward a single step, then froze, staring at her brother. The mercenaries closed in around Odyn before she could reach him, and for a moment the world seemed to contract around that single, irreversible point — a boy, aged eight and a half, being shackled for the act of making himself a shield.

The men who had been beaten were less measured about it. Boots and fists found the dark elf boy in a disorganized but enthusiastic wave of payback, and Seth's order to stop them came a few seconds too late to prevent it and just in time to end it.

"Enough!" His voice cracked across the group like a whip. "Do you want the entire Elven Vanguard to descend on us out here?!"

The mercenaries fell back, sullen.

Odyn was still on the ground. His face was cut above one eye, blood already blurring his vision. He found his footing by increments, arms chained behind him, and when he was standing he looked across the clearing to where his sister stood rooted in place.

She had stopped trying not to cry. Tears ran freely down her small face, and her hand was stretched out toward him — reaching, as though across some distance that was already growing — and her voice, when she found it, was the most heartbroken thing he had ever heard.

"Big brother, please don't leave! Don't take my brother away!"

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he smiled — wide, deliberate, certain. The smile he had always used to tell her that things were going to be fine. That he had it handled. That she was safe.

Don't worry, sister, he thought, letting the words move from his mind toward hers the way Elves sometimes could, when the feeling was strong enough. I will be okay. I chose this to protect you. Get stronger — as strong as you possibly can. And if you're a good girl, and you keep working... I promise we'll see each other again.

Seth lingered at the edge of the trees, the weight of what he was doing written plainly on his face for those few seconds before he composed himself. He looked down at the small crimson-haired girl, and when he spoke it was without cruelty, but also without softness — the voice of a man who believes the truth is sometimes the only gift worth giving, even when it hurts.

"If you can understand my words, Elf girl — then listen well. You have your brother to thank for your freedom. If you do not want to lose anyone else close to you... remember how you feel right now. Remember your helplessness. Blame your own powerlessness. And do not stop until you've become someone who never has to feel this way again."

He turned away. He could not bear to hear a child crying for very long.

The mercenaries disappeared into the forest.

The last thing Sarai saw of her brother was his face between the trees — his smile, unhesitating and bright, and then the green dark closed between them and he was gone.

She was still reaching forward when the forest gave nothing back.

Lynnia Andross arrived at a run, too late and already knowing it.

She was a senior member of the Royal Elven Vanguard — silver hair with black-streaked highlights, dark skin, burning orange eyes, and Emerald-and-gold armor that caught the last light of the afternoon. She had been close enough to hear the final exchange, not close enough to intervene before the young prince had made clear he did not want to be saved. She remembered the look he had given her before the trees swallowed him — that brief, decisive shake of his head. Take care of her. Not me.

She knelt and gathered the princess into her arms.

Sarai cried for a very long time. She cried with the whole unguarded completeness of a five-year-old who does not yet know how to be small with grief, who has not yet learned to compress it into something manageable. Lynnia held her and said nothing, because there were no words adequate to the moment, and she understood that a child in that state does not need words. She needs warmth. She needs to feel that something solid still exists.

Eventually, exhausted and still softly hiccupping, Sarai cried herself to sleep against Lynnia's shoulder.

For all our sakes, Lynnia thought as she carried the sleeping princess back toward the palace, the city's distant lights beginning to appear between the trees, I pray to Udiya that you survive, Lord Odyn.

She walked a little faster.

The throne room was its own particular kind of heavy that evening.

High King Berethon stood rather than sat, which was a thing he did only when he was containing something. High Queen Hyatan sat with the composed stillness of a woman who had learned long ago that a ruler is never allowed the luxury of falling apart, even when every part of her wanted to. Their niece Khanna Andross knelt before them on the stone floor — eleven years old, dark-skinned and dark-haired, already carrying herself with the straightness of a soldier — and waited.

"Have you seen Odyn and Sarai?" Hyatan asked. "In the last hour?"

"No, your grace. I have not."

The queen's expression shifted almost imperceptibly. She folded her hands in her lap. "I see."

When Lynnia arrived with the sleeping princess, the room rearranged itself around this new reality. Berethon took in the sight of his unconscious daughter, the tear-streaked face, the way Lynnia carried her with the exaggerated care of someone holding something that might break. He said nothing. His jaw was tight.

"Where is my son?" Hyatan's voice was very even.

Lynnia had faced Elven warlords and enemy commanders and more than a handful of situations in which the wrong answer could end her career or her life, and she had been calm for all of them. She found, somewhat to her own surprise, that the queen's quiet, waiting eyes were harder to meet than most. "Lord Odyn was taken by a group of human mercenaries," she said. "He gave himself willingly, your grace. To protect the princess."

The room was quiet for a moment.

"Of course he did," Hyatan said softly. Something passed across her face — something complicated that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one, a mother recognizing her child in an action so completely, painfully characteristic that even grief couldn't entirely suppress the recognition. "That sounds exactly like him."

Khanna was on her feet in an instant, her direction set. Lynnia caught her wrist before she made it three steps.

"My lady—"

"Commander, I have to—"

"You don't even know where they are." Lynnia's voice was not unkind, but it was firm. "Think. Your cousin willingly gave himself up. If you go charging into the forest right now, without information, without a plan, you will likely make things worse and you will certainly dishonor the sacrifice he just made." She held the girl's gaze until the heat in it banked to something cooler. "Think."

Khanna's shoulders dropped a fraction. "I understand," she said, reluctantly. It clearly cost her.

"We lack sufficient information to act," Berethon said. He had composed himself. His voice was the deep, steady thing it always was when he was in the room as a king rather than as a father — the two roles requiring slightly different versions of the same man. "Lynnia. I want everything you can find. Who these people are. Who sent them. Where they have taken my son." His orange eyes settled on her with a quiet authority that required no decoration. "Whatever it takes."

"As you wish, my liege."

Khanna then spoke, carefully, for the second time. "Your graces. There is something else to consider. News of the heir's capture will not remain secret long. When word spreads through the populace—" She paused, choosing her words with the precision of someone older than her years. "Our people are not going to receive the news calmly. Not if they know humans were responsible."

The king considered. He nodded slowly. "You are right."

Hyatan spoke: "Take Khanna with you, Lynnia. She has sharp eyes and a sharper mind. Use them." A pause, quiet enough to hear the room breathe. "And bring my son home."

Both Elves bowed, and then they were gone.

When the throne room had emptied of everyone but the two of them, Berethon moved to his wife's side and placed his hand on her shoulder, large and warm and certain. She leaned slightly into it — a small, private motion, invisible to anyone who was not standing exactly where he was standing.

"They'll find him," he said.

"I know." Her voice was very quiet. She pressed her hand over his. "I know they will. I just—" She stopped. Drew a careful breath. "He is their brother, Berethon. Roy and Sarai and the others — they need him."

"They will have him back."

She was silent for a moment. Then she reached for the worn leather book on the table beside her, and he reached with her, and together they turned to the passage that had been read aloud in Albanar's royal household in times of hardship for as long as anyone could remember.

Be anxious for nothing, but by prayer and petition, come boldly to the throne of light. Cast your cares before Him, for He bears them for you.

Hyatan read it once, quietly. Then she closed her eyes. "He is in Udiya's hands now," she said. "That is... enough. That has to be enough." Another breath, slower this time, releasing something. "We will be strong. For our people, and for the rest of our children."

Berethon pressed his lips briefly to the crown of her head.

"Yes," he said simply. "We will."

Somewhere in the black belly of a ship moving through the dark between worlds, Odyn Albanar lay on the floor of a cargo hold and breathed.

He had been beaten. There was no more precise way to put it. His right eye was covered by a rough patch, the socket beneath it throbbing with a deep, nauseating pulse where a knife had caught him. His nose had been broken, his clothes torn, his arms and face mapped in cuts and bruises that announced themselves freshly with every movement. A high fever had come on fast — the blood loss, he thought distantly, with the calm detachment of someone who has learned to think through pain — and his chest felt thick and heavy, his breaths coming with more effort than they should have.

He noticed, at some point, that someone had cleaned and bandaged his wounds.

He noticed, at some further point, that the fever had broken.

He lay still and listened to the ship around him — the deep mechanical hum of its engines, the distant voices of men he did not know — and he thought about his sister's face. The way she had reached for him through the trees. The way she had cried.

Don't stop, he had told her. Get stronger. As strong as you can.

He hoped she would. He believed she would.

He let his eyes close.

I'll find a way, he thought, very clearly, the certainty of it settling in his chest like the last anchor point before sleep takes everything. Whatever this place is, whatever they want from me — I'll survive. And someday I'll go home.

He slept.

When he woke, the ship had stopped.

The hold's door opened onto the face of a young man perhaps close to his own age — black hair, tanned skin, brown eyes carrying an expression of unmistakable guilt and discomfort. He wore dark samurai armor over a blue haori, a purple-hilted katana at his belt. He looked at Odyn like someone who wants very much to say something useful and can't find the words.

The young man's name was Alan Kyocera.

He escorted Odyn up through the ship and out into open air, and there at the top of a long hill, the mercenary leader — Seth Kyocera, in dark blue armor, hair shot through with silver — stood waiting. His expression was the unhappy one of a man who has spent considerable time resenting the choices that brought him to the present moment.

"I'm sorry," Seth said, without preamble. "If there was any way out of this, I would take it."

Odyn studied him. He was quiet for a moment. "I believe you."

The older man looked surprised by that — or perhaps by the steadiness with which it was said. He put the chains on, and his movements were slower and more careful than they needed to be, as though the deliberateness itself was a form of apology. "The Shogunate is holding my family. I can't defy the order." His voice was low and tight. "The man currently in charge... he wanted an Elf. Said he'd find a use for you."

Odyn said nothing to that. He had already filed it under information to act on later, which was the category where he put most things he could not control immediately.

Seth made a sound low in his throat — something between a sigh and a curse — and nudged Odyn gently forward. "Come on, then. Up the hill."

Alan moved to Odyn's other side. He was looking at the ground.

"It doesn't matter," Odyn said, which made both of them look at him.

"You've been kinder to me than anyone else here," he said simply. "Whatever comes next, that means something. You don't need to feel sorry on my behalf. I made my choice, and I intend to see it through." He looked up as they crested the hill.

The city spread out below them in the last gold light of the afternoon — rooftops tiered and dark-slated, winding streets of stone, lanterns just beginning to wake in doorways and along canal-side walkways, towers and temples rising above it all with the unhurried dignity of things built to last.

"Welcome to Kyoto, Japan," Seth said quietly.

Odyn looked out over it.

He had never seen anything like it. The architecture was nothing like home — no pale stone walls, no green-shingled towers of Xenia, no wide sweeping courtyards surrounded by ancient trees. This city was made of different materials, built on different principles, shaped by different hands. It was strange to him in the specific and disorienting way that beautiful foreign things are strange — impossible to dismiss, impossible to translate into anything familiar.

He filed that away too.

Survive first, he thought. Understand later.

The path down was steep, and rough hands were waiting at the bottom of it.

The underground slave auction was lit by oil lamps that threw low, amber light across walls of damp stone. The smell was close and stale, an accumulation of too many people in too little space for too long. Cell doors lined the corridor, and behind them, faces — small, gaunt, large-eyed — watched without hope or particular surprise as the new arrival was brought through.

Odyn looked at them. He had never seen malnourishment before. Not like this. Not children this age, wearing it in the hollows of their cheeks and the angle of their collarbones.

His cell door slammed behind him.

He stood in the center of the small space for a moment, looking around. Stone floor. Stone walls. A barred window set too high to see through properly. The amber light from the corridor making thin stripes across the ground.

Seth and Alan lingered at the door.

"I promise we'll get you out of here," Seth said. He wasn't looking at Odyn directly. "Just hold on."

Alan tried to speak, gave up, and settled for something more honest: "You shouldn't have to go through this. I hope — someday — we can be friends."

Odyn looked at them for a moment. Something crossed his face that was not the blank composure he had maintained since the forest — something younger and less guarded, there and gone in a breath.

"Go," he said quietly. "Before you get into trouble on my account. You've already done more for me than you had to."

Seth nodded. He put his hand briefly on his son's shoulder, and the two of them turned and walked away down the corridor until the darkness took them.

And then it was only Odyn.

He stood very still in the silence.

For a long time, he simply breathed — in and out, deliberate, steady, the measured breathing his father had taught him for moments when the situation was larger than the feeling. Then, slowly, he crossed the small cell and sat down with his back against the wall. He drew his knees up to his chest. He wrapped his arms around himself.

Outside the cell, the city moved without knowing he existed.

He closed his eyes.

I'm alive, he thought. That's enough for now.

And, holding that single fact as carefully as a lamp in wind, the young Dark Elf prince slept.

End of Prologue

Next: Chapter One — Slave?!