Ashes of the Dawn Tribe

  Book One: The Slave Pits of Carthas

  [Progression Fantasy]

  PROLOGUE

  The torch closest to the pit circle has been burning crooked for three days. It leans toward the sand like it wants to fall. Nobody fixes it. Nothing in Carthas gets fixed. Things just burn until they don't.

  Kael knows this because he has been watching it from the holding cage every night since they dragged him down here.

  Tonight the torch is still burning.

  Tonight, so is he.

  The gate opens and the noise hits him like a wall.

  Not cheering. Not yet. The crowd in the upper gallery doesn't cheer for pit rats. They talk over their wine, glance down between bets, flick coins at the sand the way children throw bread to pigeons. The sound is a low, rolling drone. Hundreds of voices that don't care about him. The sound of a world that has already decided he is nothing.

  Kael steps into the circle.

  The sand is dark. Not its natural color. It has been soaked and dried and soaked again so many times that the grains are stained the color of rust. Old blood. Layers of it. The smell hits second: iron and ash and something underneath that is worse. Something sweet and rotting that he will never get out of his nose for as long as he lives.

  Which might not be long.

  His opponent is already in the circle. Bigger. Older. A man with a shaved head and scars across both forearms, the kind earned from blocking blades with bare skin. His hands are wrapped in stained linen. His feet are planted. He has done this before.

  Kael has not.

  Kael is sixteen. Maybe seventeen. He stopped counting when they took the sky away. He is lean in the way that hunger makes you lean, not training. His knuckles are scabbed from hitting the walls of the holding cage when the dark got too heavy and he needed to feel something that was his choice. His feet are bare. The sand is cold.

  Someone above drops a clay cup. It shatters on the stone lip of the gallery. That is the only signal.

  The man comes forward.

  The first punch catches Kael above the left eye.

  He doesn't see it. He feels the world tilt. Feels the wet crack of skin splitting against bone. Feels his knees try to go and locks them, locks everything, because the cage taught him one thing: if you go down in Carthas, you do not get up.

  The sand is under his feet. He can feel each grain through his skin. He can feel his heartbeat in his teeth.

  Move.

  He moves.

  The second punch grazes his shoulder. He turned just enough. Not skill. Instinct. The desperate geometry of a body that does not want to die.

  The man is fast for his size. He circles left, cuts the angle, throws a straight right that Kael ducks under by a margin so thin he feels the air part above his scalp. The crowd noise shifts. A few heads turn. Not because they care about the boy. Because the boy was supposed to be on the ground by now.

  Kael's breath comes in short, shallow pulls. Dust and torch smoke. His lungs burn.

  He throws a punch. It lands on the man's ribs and it is like hitting a side of dried meat. The man doesn't flinch. Kael's hand screams.

  Another one. Same spot. Harder.

  Nothing.

  The man smiles. It is not cruel. It is bored. He has broken new fighters before. This is work to him.

  He grabs Kael's wrist.

  The grip is a vice. Kael feels the bones in his forearm grind together. The man pulls him forward, off balance, and drives a knee into his stomach. The air leaves. All of it. Kael folds.

  The sand is close. He can see each dark grain. The old blood that makes them heavy.

  Don't go down.

  His free hand finds the man's knee. Not a technique. Not strategy. His fingers dig into the soft place behind the kneecap the way an animal digs into anything it can reach. He twists.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The man grunts. His grip loosens for one second.

  One second is enough.

  Kael rips his wrist free and throws his forehead into the man's face.

  The sound is wet. Bone on cartilage. The man's nose breaks.

  Kael doesn't hear it. He is somewhere past hearing now. There is only the circle. Only the sand. Only the thing in his chest that says: still alive, still alive, still alive.

  The man stumbles back. Blood sheets down his chin. His eyes go wide. Not with pain. With surprise. The pit rat just broke his nose.

  Kael doesn't let him reset.

  He closes the distance. Sloppy. Reckless. His fists are not weapons. They are blunt instruments made of desperation and bone. He hits the man's body, his arms, his guard. Most of the punches land wrong. He can feel his knuckles tearing open against linen and scar tissue.

  It doesn't matter.

  He hits him again. Again. Again.

  Each impact jars through his wrist, his elbow, his shoulder. His hands are wet. He doesn't know if it is his blood or the man's. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters except this: he is still standing and the man is stepping backward and the sand is dark beneath both of them.

  The man catches him with an elbow. Kael's vision whites out for half a second. He tastes copper. Something is wrong with his lip.

  He swings anyway.

  This one connects. Not clean. Not pretty. His fist catches the hinge of the man's jaw at an angle that sends a shock up Kael's entire arm.

  The man's eyes go soft. Just for a moment. Like a candle flame when the window opens.

  He goes down.

  One knee first. Then both. Then his hands in the sand, fingers spread, blood dripping from his chin in a steady line.

  Kael stands over him. Chest heaving. Both hands split open and streaming.

  Then his scar burns.

  It is on his back, between his shoulder blades. A mark he has carried since before memory. He has never thought about it. It has never given him reason to.

  Now it flares. Not pain. Heat. A sudden, deep warmth that spreads across his spine like a palm pressed flat against his skin. Like someone reached through the dark and the stone and the years and put their hand on his back.

  He flinches. Not from the fight. From this.

  From the feeling that something just opened its eyes.

  The man on the sand pushes himself up. A pit handler steps into the circle, waves a rag. Done. Over. The man spits red into the sand and walks away without looking back. This is Carthas. You lose. You leave. There is always another fight.

  Kael stands in the circle alone.

  The gallery noise resumes. Coins change hands. Someone laughs. The crooked torch still burns.

  The scar is still warm.

  After.

  He sits against the wall of the holding cage with his back to the stone. The stone is cold but the scar is not. The warmth pulses there, faint and steady, like a second heartbeat that does not belong to him.

  His hands are wrecked. Both sets of knuckles are split to the bone in places. The left ring finger won't bend all the way. Blood has dried in the creases of his palms, dark brown lines that look like the cracks in old pottery. He stares at them. Turns his hands over. Stares at the other side.

  These hands.

  He does not know what he did out there. He does not know what he felt. He knows only that he walked into the circle as one thing and walked out as something else and the difference is a warmth between his shoulders that should not be there.

  Around him, the holding cage breathes. Other fighters sleep or pretend to sleep. Someone three cages down is crying, quietly, the way you learn to cry in Carthas. Through your teeth. Into your fist. Making as little sound as possible because sound is weakness and weakness is a door that does not stay closed.

  Kael does not cry.

  He presses his spine against the stone and feels the scar pulse. Warm. Steady. Patient. Like it has been waiting.

  He tries to think about the fight. The man's face. The blood on the sand. The elbow that nearly put him down. He tries to catalogue the damage, the way the older fighters taught him to. Check your ribs. Check your teeth. Check your eyes. Account for what you lost.

  But his mind keeps sliding back to the scar.

  It has never done this before. Fifteen years he has carried it, maybe longer, and it has been nothing. Skin. A shape on his back that he cannot see and that no one has ever explained. He asked once, when he was small. Before the pits. Before the cages.

  The woman who kept him then. The one with soil under her nails and a voice like rain on warm stone. He asked her about the mark and she put her hand on the exact spot where the scar was and held it there and said nothing.

  She smiled, though. He remembers that.

  Her hand had been warm. The same warmth. The same steady, patient heat, as if the mark itself remembered her touch and was playing it back to him now across all the distance and the dark.

  He closes his eyes.

  The crowd is gone. The torches are burning low. Tomorrow there will be another fight, or there won't, and either way the sand will still be dark and the pits will still be cold and Carthas will still grind its people to dust without noticing.

  But tonight the scar is warm.

  Tonight, something behind his bones is humming a note he cannot name. Low and quiet and old. Older than the pits. Older than the chains. Old enough that it has been sleeping and the sleep was very deep and very long and tonight, for the first time, something woke it.

  Not all the way. Not yet.

  But something shifted. Something turned over in the dark the way a dreamer turns before waking. And the warmth between his shoulders is not fading. If anything, it is spreading. Slower than breath. Deeper than blood. A heat that does not burn. A hand that does not let go.

  Kael sits in the dark with his ruined hands and his split lip and the taste of someone else's blood still on his tongue.

  And for the first time since they dragged him underground, he does not feel alone.

  He does not know what that means.

  He does not know that the mark on his back is a seal. That it was placed there by hands that loved him, in a valley that no longer exists, by a people whose name was burned from every record in the empire. He does not know that the warmth is not a memory. That it is something waking. Something vast and patient and furious, stirring in the marrow of him like embers in a fire that was supposed to be dead.

  He does not know any of this.

  But the scar knows.

  And tonight, for the first time in fifteen years, it is no longer cold.

  *Next Chapter: The Weight of Bread*