The Legends of Ithan Book 1: Ghosts & Fire

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In Ithan, in a bleak and desert city called Galdon, the legend of a hero was born. Not one person in all of Ithan would ever had suspected that one day they would hail a gladiatorial slave as their lands’ savior. Neither did he suspect that one day his destiny would take him to the very reaches of the world. Instead he bent to his task of labor, moving boulders from one pile to the other for the rebuilding of the Galdon Gladiatorial Arena under the hot sun and, the even more biting, taskmaster’s whip. In twenty-one days the arena was to be completed for a set of games that had no previous rival. The king himself was to be in the audience as well as many officials from the larger cities. One-hundred and fifty slaves and seventy-eight wild and untamed animals had been chosen for the week long festivities. Many of the slaves expected to die cruel and painful deaths but Sandros gave no thought to death. He had set his mind many years ago that he would not surrender to death so easily. He vowed that, though he may not die an honorable death, he would at least die as a free man. It was an impossible dream of course. No gladiatorial slave had ever been freed in all the history of Galdon, but it was the one hope that had kept him going all these long years.

            Sandros lifted his large tanned hand to wipe the stinging sweat out of his cold granite gray eyes and could remember a time when he had had a family. He could remember a beautiful dark haired woman whose laugh was like the tinkling of bells and he was certain she must have been his mother. Then sometimes he could remember a tall robust man he had surely once called father. What had ever happened to them, he could not say. Those memories seemed so distant to him that he only thought of them as ghostly images that skirted the shadows of his memories. Suddenly the taskmaster’s whip struck above his head and he came back to earth and hauled another huge boulder from the cutter’s pile to the mason’s pile. A cool light and sweetly scented Wind ruffled his long black hair as if whispering comfort to him and little did he realize that at that moment he had been chosen, Sandros the slave, for a far greater calling then moving boulders and fighting in deadly arenas. The Wind had chosen him to save Ithan from the green menace that was even now ravaging the outskirts of the land in a faraway town called Mado.