The warrior and the heroine

For a young man, it must be known, the unoccupied mind was a concert of unproductive thoughts. Since time immemorial, therefore, youth had to be employed in three things. Diligent learning, constitutive labor, and struggle. Even the least amount of those activities endeavored to benefit the soul.

Those deliberations, however, who did escape careful elicitation, for it was not possible to always entertain the good and noble as it is in the nature of all things to be dual, revolved around the same number of things. Gaudiness, fame, indulgence, and the sexes. Only time and prosperous philosophy could save a man from the life of the exterior.

For such a man, bear he ambition and drive, marriage proposed two salvations. For one, he could amplify his position at court. He could marry the daughter of a nobleman and improve his wealth with a, preferably, heavy dowry and the prospect of his political ambitions altogether. The secondary profit, which was just as important as the primary, were the alleviation of his lower instincts, as they tended to drive untested youth into rash decisions and ill-tempered manners (ironic it was for them, who discovered matrimony through those means). Therefore, marriage afforded the male mind, to a certain degree, the blessing of serenity and calculation.

So since the dawn of civilization, a married man represented stability–a reflection of the inner wealth one carried.

Varion shared many commonalities with such a man, and just as many discrepancies.

He was the son of no one, an animal, an outcast. A biped, but still no better than a packing mule to most. There was no prospect of marrying into wealth or marrying at all. Some would say that with wealth off the table and survival at the spearhead of his thoughts, Varion was free to love.

But he couldn’t wed, for he was a metic, an outsider who had chanced upon the path of betterment through mere coincidence. As they lived in most perilous times with wars waging across their borders, where a cunning king was swallowing territory after territory in order to satisfy his family’s greed, the recruits the supreme warriors of his home nation received from the noble families no longer sufficed.

So it came in his seventh year during the annual process which they called the collection that Varion was harvested. The energetic seizing of young boys and girls had opened those ranks to him that could upheave his position.

For the Inaeids were no common infantrymen and women.

He was to become a warrior of the elite order named in honor to the Goddess of Victorious Battle Inaea. Once approved, he would receive property, which would afford him more than he needed, citizenship, servants, and the right to refine his oratory in the singed palaces of freedom and liberty.

One of the few warriors he would be that were educated in the arcane arts–as far as human nature permitted a penetration of these opaque and vague secrets. Magic was of no interest to the human state. They taught its theory out of paramount necessity.

For the rest of the world was not governed, like the Ashlands, by a senate composed mostly of highborn males and heroines and an assembly which consisted of regular citizens (metics excluded) that elected the Strategoi, the leaders of the army and the state. The world outside the Ashlands was ruled by mages.

Thence, human independence had to be earned with preparation, sweat, and in extreme cases blood. It was to be achieved, as all goals, through various means, so the careful tactician must know magic as well as strategy, how to employ it in times of war and how to counter it via the means of human aptness.

Varion aspired to contribute to independence, and, despite the mayhem of the current events, he was of overconfident nature. He couldn’t be of any other disposition, as a marvelous feat of Providence and Fortune had lately arrived in his life.

Varion had not only the chance to acquire citizenship, but he was also to enter the higher tiers. For Varion, a natural friend to logic and the philosophy of game, had been garmented with the attention of a most distinguished individual.

He looked at that individual with that skillful eye of young lovers that renders even flaws of the appearance amiable, not that the respective individual had any. Even without the sight of the heart, Ariella was a lovely creature. She wore her bright red hair in a plait across her shoulder. The topmost buttons of her white linen shirt were open, and a brown leather jacket closed around her slender arms. Her skin-tight leather pants approved of her lean figure, but they discomfited the young warrior.

They fitted well, he thought. Where he was the raging tip of the flame, she was its calm center. While he dreamt of plagues, she was disillusion.

Leaning against a cypress tree on the border of the old forest, Ariella signaled him with her usual calm demeanor. She was a mute. “Are you prepared?”

“As well as I ever will be,” was his answer.

Ariella pinched him with her eyes. She seemed to ascertain that his brusque reply had nothing to do with his pending trial. “And after?”

“After? You mean…”

She asserted, “After you succeed and are free!”

He squeezed her shoulder and laughed. Whereas before he was brooding, he was now openly displaying his thoughts. She returned the gesture. “I don’t plan on being free. At least, free enough to keep my promises. Has your father signed the contract?”

“He wants you to be a citizen first.”

“I understand,” he spoke from the throat laden with emotion.

She made a sign with her fingers which was similar to a consolation. Then she added, “You know my father. Even though we no longer live in barbarian tribes, where man deploys woman as an asset, he will always think of me as his treasure. I am his only child, after all.”

“I don’t blame you. Your father is careful.”

“Once you scale that wretched forest, though, we shall meet again.” Ariella glared and stressed the next part. “Remember, stay off–as far off the Sharp Cliffs as you can.”

She iterated that part repeatedly, for Ariella had gone through the same ordeal three years ago. People never ventured the depth of the old sylvans of the Ancient Lands anymore, as they were the last resort of many a magical being. The Forest of Trials was no different and it was said that there even lived a wretched creature on its eastern border adjacent to the Sharp Cliffs that even a mage durst not to disturb.

“No poppycock, aye,” he said and changed the topic to masque his growing queasiness. “Is the archon happy with the last deposit I had him undertake?”

She held both hands before her bust. Then she formed them, opening like a flower, and spread her fingers outward. Ariella was surprised. “You have tripled his investment, so I daresay he is. How did you know that the portal guild would be permitted to expand into our estates?”

“I can see the future.”

She smacked him, looking defiantly at Varion.

“Alright. I stumbled upon the contract at my examination in the Free Palace.”

“What contract?”

“The one between the King of the Ancient Lands, the grandmaster of the portal guild, and our leaders. I thought you knew of the expansion?”

“Nobody did for the longest time, that is my point. Contracts like that are written in the Beautiful Speech! Nobody but a color-eye speaks it.”

“I… don’t think I speak it and yet I recognized some of it. I was right, wasn’t I?”

“If only you had told Father of your ability! He would’ve placed thrice the amount.” She made a gesture with her head that was caring and melancholic at the same time, as though she could navigate through the depths of his mind better than he could. “You’re strange, Varion. Sometimes I think you had a second life before you came here.”

“I did have a second life…” His maid. The collection. Fragments that faded as he crunched his jaw.

“It’s not what I meant. I, like all the others, needed to learn sign language. Granted, I speak it since I can remember but I have never heard of someone just being able to understand it. And now I witness you being able to understand yet another language–the one of the harrowers. You should tell the librarians, so you may decipher their scriptures for us.”

“I can’t read the Beautiful Speech. I got lucky, that’s all.” He shrugged his shoulders. It was a trifle to him, and he was very blunt about the fact that he was grateful for aptness in language and would not question it. It had bought him her friendship. He said so and smiled benignly.

There was now a fiery brightness in her eyes that was nothing short of a claim to victory as she read the sarcasm right off his lips. Ariella showed her teeth in a mute laugh. Rising her palms at the allusion of their past, she returned, “I wouldn’t call me breaking your arm friendship.”

Varion had stolen a loaf of bread from her. “You were three years ahead of me and we were children. I’d like to see you try now!”

She grabbed his arm with both hands, but instead of twisting it or harming it in any other sense, she merely pressed it affectionately and planted a kiss on his cheek. His heart beat faster and he grinned across his entire face. Varion thought himself a lucky man.

He was lucky to have her as a companion. But after the trial he would also become her husband. It brought him into consolation with the wild brain fire that he suffered from and the sleeplessness that came with it. With her at his side, it abated.

Thus he parted from her, not just happy but full of prospect and purpose, gifts that weren’t as intense but in a sense of higher import, for they were more enduring than happiness was.

In his parting, he made a mental note and deducted the winnings of the investment from what he owed Ariella’s father. It was still a lot, for he had put up the sum for their future residence in the capital. But Varion had no lack of imagination or innovation, and he was a male of industry. There would be numerous ways for him to repay the dowry. First order was that he be a good and faithful husband to the daughter who awaited his admittance into the ranks of the Inaeids. Ariella was a much-audited heroine and a great stateswoman herself.

So Varion left for the final test, and all was well.

⚜️

Our readers must now allow us to transport them over the fence of bliss that envelopes young love in its momentary but seemingly everlasting mantella and where usually, as if magically attracted by high emotion, envy awaits the unwary soul.

As our soldier left for his final task, the trees behind the scenery wafted, blasted by the heavy wind and torn by the abhorrent emotion of the watching individual.

Maron found Ariella silent and he liked his women that way. She was strikingly beautiful, too. But most importantly, she stemmed from one of the oldest families of Ashrain. Her lineage dated back to the first human king who had dethroned the mages in the Ashlands three centuries ago. To Maron she was a priced princess, and he saw her wasted on anyone else, especially on a worthless metic.

Maron was in the prime of his life. He was a man of the law, a future senator who would prosper in the capital once he’d find his way into it. A young wife suited his prestige. Of course, there was still a major obstacle to overcome: the senate. But they would be soon conquered anyway, and then Maron would climb the ranks of the great human state even faster.

Already counting four decades, having fought many battles… battles of the word at least, he had finally accomplished excellence. He had joined the new order, becoming an agent of the expanding territory. The only ones who could defeat the king in the west were the mages of the south.

“Y-ye ready?” he lulled into the air.

Maron was also an avid glutton of potent drugs.

He undressed Ariella with his gaze. She frowned at him. Surely, she found his newly acquired cloth impressive. It was what mages wore these days. Finest cashmere, stitched with a flock of ravens across his collar, wrapped around his lean figure like waves caressing the ocean top.

Without sparing him a second glance, she moved off.

“Whore…” muttered he. “Once I enter the senate, you’ll see me for who I am. I can give you things he never will.”

To his surprise she turned around and, loudly, screaming in her own way, she placed one arm above the other, rising index and little finger on one hand while the other, the one under the elbow, repeatedly opened and closed her fist.

It was the common sign for “bullshit”.