"Alarion."

The boy woke with a start, his hands coming defensively before blurry eyes recognized Sierra's blue-lit face. "Wha…. how long was I?"

"A few hours. I let you sleep slightly more than I got to, since we had to wait out your timers." She smiled slightly. "Check your status. If your penalties have not worn off, I can let you sleep a little longer."

Alarion scoffed. Calling it sleep was overly generous. He wasn't sure if Sierra had a skill or just significant practice, but he'd been unable to replicate her sudden slumber. He'd shifted and tossed, unable to get comfortable upon the stairs for nearly an hour before he'd drifted off into a fitful slumber. If anything, he felt more exhausted than when he'd started, but thankfully, the system wasn't willing to hit him with another penalty for an uncomfortable nap.

"The potion sickness penalty has been reduced to slight now, only 1%. It will be gone entirely in about twenty minutes." He glanced down the imposing staircase. "We might as well just go. See what is at the bottom and wait if we have to."

"You are probably right." She grimaced at the sight of so many steps. "Get yourself ready, and we will go?"

"Mm," he agreed in his usual taciturn fashion. Five minutes later, he had finished walking off the weariness of his nap, collected his things, and was ready to go.

Which was when the true struggle began.

Ten minutes into their descent, with no end in sight, Alarion was glad they had not bothered to wait out the last of his penalty. At twenty minutes, he could no longer see their entrance when he looked back, but felt no closer to the bottom. By thirty minutes, his legs burned, and he could no longer stand it.

"This isn't magic, is it?"

"What?" Sierra asked.

"The stairs." He pointed ahead, as though she could somehow miss his meaning. "When Elena first put me in the Void Arena, I could run in any direction, without ever getting anywhere."

"Ah," Sierra replied, catching his meaning at last. "It could be. There are certainly illusion spells and spatial magic that could have that effect. But to what end? We were already trapped in the chamber above, trapping us in a staircase feels redundant. Besides, we passed the top half of that fiend quite a while back. At least that far must be real."

Alarion considered her words. Then, satisfied, he changed the subject. "I leveled very fast."

"Congratulations?"

"That isn't-" He scowled as he realized how conceited his choice of words had made him look. "I was asking more if that is normal. It took weeks to gain the class, and less than an hour to level it multiple times."

"Completely normal," she reassured him. "Getting the class is far and away the most time-consuming part for the early part of the first rank. For those less blessed than you are, it can take years or even decades to gain the class in the first place, but considerably less time to reach the pinnacle of rank I."

"Really?" Alarion asked, his voice skeptical.

"Indeed. I reached both my classes shortly before my induction at fourteen. I am near my summoner cap, and not far behind with my combat class. And that is with a less… extreme training regime than yours."

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"How so?"

She laughed slightly. "It is not Vitrian custom to throw our trainees to the fiends alone, even with someone to guard them. While on subjugation duty, I was part of an organized team, expected to take on only a few fiends at a time. Safe and steady progress as opposed to rapid and dangerous."

"Safe sounds nice," he said, lapsing back into quiet now that his questions were exhausted.

They walked for several more minutes, for hundreds more steps, until Sierra broached a thought of her own.

"Tell me about yourself."

"Hmm?"

"I read what Mistress Elena wrote to the Governor about you, but there was almost nothing in the file about you as a person," she explained. "Where were you born? Where did you grow up? That sort of thing."

Alarion eyed her cautiously. Her question seemed sincere, even banal, but somehow it bothered him. Yet despite those misgivings, he eventually shrugged and answered.

"I was born in Imuria. On a little plot of land, a few miles away from a larger city. Redburn, maybe. I cannot remember the name. We grew fruit on trees. It was a… I am not sure of the Vitrian word."

"An orchard?"

"That sounds right," he nodded firmly, delighted she found the word he'd been searching for as another came to him. "Apples, that was it—small little sour apples. My sisters once tied me to a fence and threw them at me until I cried. I was very young when we left."

"The war?"

"My father came home on leave, and… " The memory sent a shiver down his spine, but Alarion quickly let it go. The Vitrians invaded, and nothing was ever the same."

"The Imurians declared that war when they-" Sierra stopped herself as Alarion's face showed a total lack of offense or even interest at her pushback. "Sorry. Go on."

"There wasn't much more," he shrugged. "We went south along with a lot of others. It took us a long time to find anywhere to stay—no family left in Ashad. No gods either, my mother used to say. The new house was small, and Dad wasn't with us anymore. I cried a lot. Got in trouble."

"What happened?"

Alarion gave her a look. "You did. Another war."

This time, Sierra had the good sense to say nothing.

"My mother couldn't pay for even the small house. Not while feeding us. She sold everything we had left. My father's tools. Her books. She tried to find work, but no one wanted us there. Eventually, she sold me."

"I am sorry."

He shook his head. "Don't be. It was my idea."

Sierra gave him an incredulous look.

"She couldn't keep both of us. But with the money, she could buy passage and documents for the Principalities." His expression was dark as his mind wandered through old memories. "I couldn't protect my sister, Aina. But I could protect my mom. And Atra. It was a good trade."

Sierra bristled. "Alarion. You can not-"

"I lived better with that first family anyway," he continued without pause. "They could afford to feed me. Kept me from starving through a bad winter. It only got bad when they sold me again. Times got bad for them, too."

Sierra frowned in confusion. "Wait. I thought they found you with your family?"

Alarion gave her a quizzical glance. "Why do you think that?"

"There were-" Sierra's uncertainty deepened as she studied his face. "Mistress Elena's report said that you were found with four graves. In the Old City."

"Those weren't my family," he explained. "I ran away after the third time I was sold. That had always been the plan. To go to the Principalities and find my family when I got older. But I wasn't old enough, or strong enough. I couldn't take care of myself. Eventually, someone took me in, then sold me again. That family abandoned us when the fiends came, and I ended up with a small caravan to the Old City."

"There was a family, a mother and two daughters. They took pity on me. I think because I looked like someone they'd lost. I know I liked them because they reminded me of my family." Alarion fidgeted as he spoke, picking at the nails of one hand. "When we got to the Old City, there was an argument about payment and papers to get into Ashad-Vitri. A fight broke out and we tried to escape. We hid in a house, in the basement."

There were no tears in Alarion's eyes as he walked, nor any pain in his tone. If not for the slight set of his jaw, he might as well have been talking about the weather.

"The man was making demands. He struck one of them, and I attacked him. When the fight was over, they were all dead. Everyone but me."

"You buried them? All of them?"

"He was just as desperate as we were," Alarion answered honestly. "And he was dead. It wasn't a person anymore—just a body. Mother told me that nothing good ever comes from disrespecting the dead. I tried to burn him, but I couldn't make a big enough fire. So I buried him with the others."

"And after that?"

The boy shrugged. "I wouldn't have survived trying to leave the Old City, and the Vitrians wouldn't let me into Ashad-Vitri. I didn't know what to do."

"So you just stayed there?"

Alarion turned toward her with a frown.

"Where else was I supposed to go?"

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.