Pristine Future: The Guardian of None

Chapter 2: The Death of Honor

Fourteen years went by. Innumerable nights were spent loyally reading Eliksni lore and then crying myself to sleep. I had not lost my humanity. It was something I didn’t want to give up. I weeped every time they brought in a skeleton of someone from the Collapse. I now knew what that was. Dedonee told me I was the only one who lived through it at times. At this time, I did not interact with the other Fallen. Dedonee was the only one. He had become a father of sorts to me. He had that gentle air about him, like he would never think of hurting you, and really cared. I knew somewhat otherwise, however, as he was ferocious in the arena battles. He would kill anyone and everyone who opposed him in the ring.

Such was a common practice, as Fallen reproduced quickly. What would take a normal person more than twelve months happened for them in one. One such arena battle was the one Dedonee fought now. I sat on a stool stone-carved with an ornate crest on the bottom of it. I had carved it myself. It took me three years to perfect the art. The other Fallen referred to it as the human’s chair, and dared not sit in it, as if afraid to catch some disease. The fight going on now pitted my father against a burly Fallen: I think his name was Rodrugaas, but I couldn’t be sure. Rodrugaas threw a left hook along with a right handed uppercut. Dedonee dodged the left hook and held his attacker’s right hands in place with his right, and backfisting Rodrugass across the face with his left hands. The crowd screamed approval. Rodrugaas went down, but the fight was not over yet. There it was. As Rodrugass went to get back up, Dedonee sliced his signature knife across the throat of his opponent. A fitting end for scum such as he. A Vandal walking over to his table stopped in front of me. “You know what? You should fight.” he pestered.

“Really, you should.” He insisted. I got up, and he stepped aside with a huge grin on his face. He knew humans never won in the Fallen arena. To my back were some stairs leading down to the pits. I walked down them, taking note of how they were in disrepair. Probably another thing the Council would ask me to fix. A torch hung loose-fittingly on the wall, almost falling. A propped it up and continued walking. After two more flights of stairs I came to the gladiator pits. A Captain stopped me. “You aren’t supposed to be down here.” It seemed Fallen still held a grudge. They all knew who I was, yet still treated me like nothing. I pushed him into the wall angrily. “I’m fighting someone. Anyone. End of story.” The Captain backed off and I walked to the armory. A crumbling stone arch stood at the entry of the armory, probably taken from some Golden Age architecture. The Fallen didn’t understand the meaning of “preserve”, so most of the time what they brought back was broken on the way. I stepped under the arch and into the weapons room. Most of the weapons were nothing special. A simple Wire Rifle was hard to find in this room. A bigger armory nearer to the entrance held all the actual weapons. I settled for dual swords and a knife with a rope attached to it. All else was uninteresting to me. I exited the small armory and went to the room just outside the gates to the arena. All was quiet. Not many people would try their luck at the Arena Games. When it all came down to it, no one really wanted to die. I admired the sophistication of the room I was in while waiting. Nothing special, normally, but for the Fallen, it was magnificent.

The owner of these rooms had been the only one to ever bring back a relic on a Pike intact. My House had not been known for carefulness. A glass vase sat in a corner of the room, as well as a couch that I was currently sitting on. Paint decorated the walls, though not much, as most of the walls were dirt. After ten more minutes of just looking around, the gates opened, and I stepped into the arena. A ‘Dead End’ sign was stuck in the earth in the middle of the Arena, a testament to the ending of life here. Rodrugaas’s body still was on the floor of the Arena. Disgusting, but the Fallen were not exactly known for being sanitary. Everything else in the Arena was just dirt. A single mountain of it stood to my left. I walked to the center of  the room with my weapons and waited for my opponent. At the other side of the Arena, another gate opened, and out walked a Captain. The same Captain from earlier.