Part One

The Shattered One Prophecy

The Shattered Blade assembles,

The shattered boy is its knight.

The shattered girl is his rock,

The shattered dragon is his might!

The king who sits upon his kingdom,

Raises the throne.

The faceless men rise,

Their faceless king calls!

The storm heralds his coming,

Our deaths are his door,

The cage breaks on his coming,

And shatter, does the floor!

Rise all, stand tall,

Or all things will fall.

The faceless men rise…

Do NOT heed the call!

or all things will fall.

Chapter One

Kiggi

I didn’t want to wake up. I felt like it seemed early as the sun's light wasn’t even peaking through the open window, and didn’t want to face the day.

But Mom was pushing, and I knew I couldn't hide any longer.

“Kiggi, get up! Get up or the Dragons will get you!” Mom teased.

“I’m awake, I’m awake,” I told her.

“Get up, you have chores to do.”

She left and I got up and got dressed. Then I walked downstairs, glancing out the window to see that the sun was just peaking over the horizon, meaning it was about time that I weeded the garden. And so it was that as Gaven, our hired hand, started his shift, I weaved through the well-stocked storage room, full of different foods and the various types of liquor and alcohols we served, and exited the tavern at the back. We were backed up to the woods near the edge of town, but we were on the main road allowing us to be the first place travelers saw when they entered the small town of Lonelyton, in Tallis, the Crown of Alrax.

Lonelyton was an unremarkable village near the southeastern border of Tallis, and it still is. It’s cut off from the rest of Tallis from the north by the Dragon Claw Mountain Range and from Adria to the south by the Great Forest. It is, and was, the kind of town where everyone knew of or was acquainted with everyone else, and it didn’t like anything that brought discomfort or messed with the flow. It was a town that never seemed to change.

I was weeding the garden and I was not paying much attention to anything in particular. Just listening to the morning song of the birds and the dripping of water from the leaky water pump. As the sun rose, it became easier to see what I was doing. My other family members were getting the tavern ready for the morning, as the townspeople and weary travelers and merchants, the first of whom I could already hear coming into the tavern, would want to feed themselves and the old Lonely Inn was the only inn or tavern in the sleepy little town

Everything was so still, it seemed that I was the only one awake in the whole town. As if the town had not yet shaken the bonds of their mattresses and blankets, as the sun still climbed over the horizon.

Suddenly, I heard something running in the woods. I stopped and focused on the sound of this moving creature. It was two-legged by the sound of it, but that didn't satisfy me. It could still have been a thief, or even a small ogre or minotar.

I drew my knife, the weapon I was to use until Dad decided that I was deserving of and ready for my own sword. To deal with werewolves the small blade was tipped with silver. The edges were serrated, the better for shredding flesh, and the pommel had a heavy metal ball to break windows, although it would work well on bone as well.

I could hear the thing coming closer. And closer. It vaulted right over the nearly six-foot tall fence, and I turned… as it fell on its face.

It was not a thing but a man. He was, maybe, in his mid-twenties with unkempt hair; wild and standing in tufts. He was unshaven.

I inched up to him, cautiously so as to not startle him, after he hadn’t moved for a moment. He didn’t look particularly dangerous, with his spindly limbs and shallow breathing that I could barely hear rasping through the air. He was younger than I had originally thought, about the age of my older sister. Seventeen summers, maybe a little older. As the sun crested the wall, I rushed to his side as I realized why he’d fallen. His light brown hair was coated in blood from the large cut on the back of his head. From his back, three arrows stood proudly, happy that they had made their mark. His ribs jutted out like little hills, his belly dropping dramatically sunken into a valley. His legs were covered by a pair of tattered wool pants. He was cold to the touch and was breathing shallowly. His back was covered in mostly dry blood though his arrow wounds still bled a little and whip marks crisscrossed all over his back. Around his neck rested a raw crystal the color of storms, hung by a rope.

“What happened to you?” I asked this battered and unconscious body. “Dad!?”

“What?!” called back my father in his deep, resonant voice

“I need you in the garden!”

“Why?!”

“You gotta see this!”

Thunk, thunk, thunk, went to the floorboards as my Dad walked on them.

“Alright, what is -,” I could see when he saw the bloodied and battered boy before me as his eyes sprang open and he stuttered out his next words, “Oh, oh, boy! Where’d he come from?”

“No idea Dad, but he needs help.”

“He’s alive?” He jogged over and picked him up, with what looked like relative ease as the guy was quite a bit smaller than my father. “I'll bring him to the surgeon. Just finish settin’ up the tavern, and your mother’ll work the counter ’till I get back.

Shara

The next day, the town surgeon helped bring the man to a room.

He looks so strong, I thought as my mother and I finished rewrapping his stitched-up body. Mom had applied the smelly, yellowish paste to his back, which the surgeon had said would help heal him as well as soothe this pain, as long as we also replaced the bandages whenever we reapplied the paste. He still hadn't moved much though he had accepted the beef broth we’d fed him.

He will be fine, I told myself, as I descended the stairs into the latenight chaos.

This was the most lively that the Tavern got, except for on festival days when many of the people of the village came to party. I wheved throught the loud, active tavern to the Bar where father was putting on a show for the five other men at the bar, juggling five mugs in his giant hands. One by one he took one mug, deftly filled it with one hand while keeping the others still in the air, and passed one drink to each man as they cheered.

“Any table orders Father?” I asked.

“Yes, here!” Father said, handing me a paper. “Gavin just brought this order in, but he is already pretty swamped as Kiggi seems to have disappeared!”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh Kiggi.”

“Burnin’ boy’ll be the end of me,” Father told me. “Now get to it!”

I got cought up in a whirlwind of delivering, making, and taking orders as people cam and went and the traffic slowed, at which time Kiggi suddenly showed up again. Dad gave him a bit of a chewing out, and sent him to help me and Gavin in the Dinning aria. There was a few people who got a little loopy on their alcohol, and some got mad when they reached the store cut-off, three drinks, but no one made any problems that night.

Except, ofcourse, for Axril Magillinan.

“What do you mean you cant sell me any more?” Mr Magillinan, as he insisted he be addressed as, yelled. “Its not like I am drunk or nothin’.”

“You are definatly drunk,” I told the stocky man. “You can get anything else you might like, like hoe cooked food or some water, but we will not give you more alcohol.”

“Didn’t the deal I made with your Pa remove my limit?” he asked, smoothing back his thick, grey-tinged, wavy hair and scratching his chin through a thick beard.

“No, it raised your limit,” I reminded him.

“You-you,” Mr Magilinan stammered. “Get me your Dad, kid!”

He did this every time he came in. which was every night. So, my father was already on his way over.

“Axril,” Father said.

“Lear,” Mr Magilinan said. They were the only two people I had ever heard use either mans first name, except my mom who called Father by his first name.

Kiggi, my brother, had told me what he thought had created animosity between Mr Magilinan and our Father. He said that our Father and Mr Magillinan had known eachother for a long time, since childhood. We thought they had been friends, which didn’t seem so far fetched to me as Mr Magillinan lived in the house just across the road from the tavern, where he grew up, and Father had also grown up here in the tavern. But at some point, their friendship had broken down.

The thing was, Mr. Magillinan loved alcohol and this tavern was the only taven in the town, and since Mr. Magillinan was a hunter by trade, he sold fresh game to the tavern for a discount if Father gave him slack on the alcohol limit. Father had alowed Mr. Magillinan to stretch the three drinks maximum to a five drinks maximum in exchange for a discount on fresh meats, especially venison, which was Fathers favorate.

This deal had been going for years now, but no matter how many times it happened, Mr Magillinan always seemed to foget he had a drink limit at all.

“Kid’s tellin’ me you wont sell me any more booze,” Mr Magillinan said, sitting back.

“Yes,” Father said, sighing. “You reached the drink limit.”

“But what of our deal?” Mr. Magillinan asked.

“The deal raised the limit,” Father said. “It doesn’t eliminate the limit. Other wise, I know you would drink yourself strait into the ground.”

“Always thinkin’ you need to protect me,” Mr Magillinan grumbled. “Just let me do what I want, alright? And I’ll let you do what you want.”

“What I wan’t to do,” Dad said, “is cut you off here at five drinks.”

“Bah!” Mr Magillinan grunted. “To the Fires with your ‘cut-offs’, just get me a drink I’ve had a pretty bad day today.”

“You say that every day,” Father told him.

“And everyday was pretty bad.”

“You say that too.”

“Because its true.”

“I still wont get you a drink.”

Mr. Magillinan was suddenly gripped with rage, gerking up from his chair and charging to tackle Father, who stepped to the side of the drunkenmans wobbly charge, grabbed Mr Magillinan, and lifted the man off the ground, the drunk Mr Magilinans feet dangling a half a food above the ground.

“Let me go you dumb oaf!” Mr Magillinan yelled.

Father tossed Mr Magillinan gently out the front door and into the street, but in spite of the soft toss Mr Magilinan still stumbled and fell to his hands and knees. He wobbled to his feet, shook his fist at Father, and meandered bach into his house.

“Why does he not like you?” I asked Father.

“That is a story for another day,” Father told me. But I could tell that he was sad.

~~

“Kiggi!” Mom called out. “It's time for your tests!”

I was sitting in front of the bookshelf in the back of the tavern where Mother did our schooling, usually for an hour after the night rush at around nine-c’clock. On the wall, next to the bookshelf, was a piece of paper pinned to the wall, with me and Kiggi’s name written on it. Kiggi, as usual, was inexplicably late.

Kiggi came rushing down the stairs. “Sorry, Mom!” he sat next to me, cross-legged on the floor.

“You would think someone who mves so quickly would at least get to where he needs to be on time,” Mom teazed. “Now, today's first test is on the Expansion War. The second test is on the legends of the Dragon Age, and how the Expansion War ended that area of darkness. Question one on the Expansion War: Which Talinian king ruled at the time of the War?”

I raised my hand.

“Kiggi,” Mom said, “do you want to give it a try?”

Kiggi winced. “Er, King Corgan?”

“No,” Mom said. “Shara?”

“King Amagoth the Invincible,” I told her. “King Corgan the Patient actually…”

“Wait, there is a question later about King Corgan,” Mom said. “But you are correct!” Mother put a tick mark under my name.

“Second question,” Mom said, “In which battle did King Amagoth the Invincible die, and how did he die?”

“Oh!” Kiggi’s hand shot up.

“Yes Kiggi?” Mom asked.

“Well, I don’t remember the name of the battle, but I remember that it was down south, and he died after he got into a fight with the evil Wizard Das-Vire, the last of the Order Silgren and ended the Order Silgren and he killed them, but then died.” Kiggi said all of that in one breath, as if someone was going to stop him and he was trying to beat the time.

“Good! A half point, for the how King Amagoth died,” Mom said, marking half of a tick under ‘Kiggi’. “Do you know when and where he died, Shara?”

“The battle of the lost city of Harinati, thirty years ago in the year 417 New World,” I said. “Also, that wasn’t the end of the Order Silgren. The Order fell many years before the Expansion War even started, if it even existed in the first place. I think they made Das-Vire up, and King Amagoth the Invincuble got bitten by a jungle serpent or some-such.”

“Which is a good discussion to have on another day, but a half point to Shara for the location and time,” Mom said, marking up my new half-point. “Who was the greatest Talinian General during the war?”

I raised my hand, and Kiggi raised him a moment after me.

“Shara?” Mom asked.

“General Jerinatan the Great.”

“Good,” Mom said. “One point to Shara.”

“I was going to say that,” Kiggi whispered.

“Oh yeah? Well, I said it first,” I said teasingly.

He stuck his tongue out at me.

“Now, which Great King signed the Treaty of Harinati to end the Expansion War?”

I raised my hand, and Kiggi shook his head. “I can’t keep the boring names straight,” he complained.

“King Coramin the Patient,” I said.

“Oh, I even said his name earlier!” Kiggi lamented.

“Correct,” Mom said, marking a point for me. “That is the end of hte Expansion War test.”

“I’m winning,” I told Kiggi, looking at my three-point lead.

“We still have the Dragon Age test,” he retorted.

“Yes,” Mom said. “We do.”

We settled for the next test.

“Of the Nine Western Dragons, which one is said to have been able to see the future, and delivered prophecies?”

I raised my hand an instant before Kiggi.

“Kiggi?”

“But I raised my hand first,” I protested.

“No,” Kiggi said, “I clearly raised my hand first.”

“I thought it was about the same time,” Mom said, “and since Kiggi is behind, he gets the difference. Kiggi?”

Kiggi smiled. “The Propet.”

“So easy,” I grumbled. “It literally was named for its power!”

“Good, Kiggi,” Mom said. “One point.”

“I’m catching up,” Kiggi said in a sing-songy voice.

“Of the Nine Western Dragons, which one was said to be the eldest?”

I raised my hand, and Kiggi timidly raised his after me.

“Shara?” Mom asked.

“The Fire Brand,” I said.

“Correct,” Mom said, marking me a point.

“What were you saying again?” I asked Kiggi.

“Oh, harty-har-har,” he said.

Mom interrupted my tezing with the next question. “Which dragon was said to be a shapeshifter, and is said to have destroyed the town of Galinatin by posing as its finacial agent?”

I raised my hand, but Kiggi had me beaten by a moment.

“Kiggi,” mom said.

“The Deceiver.”

“One point Kiggi! That was the last question, so Shara won this week's test!”

“Woho!” I said, putting my fists in the air in victory.

“Oh man,” Kiggi gronned. “You always win though.”

“That’s because I read the reading in the clean, quiet house while you are out mud wrestling with your buddies.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“Now you two go read or go outside or something,” Mom told us. “I need to get the tavern ready for the morning.”

Four?

SOME TIME AGO...

I was surrounded by the same walls that had surrounded me for so long. Their cold stones were as cruel as ever. I had no idea why I was there but I was and I could barely remember anything beyond the bricks and the pain. I used to lash out, get mad, angry–but this would only cause them to hurt me more. I hardly fought any longer.

What does the world outside look like? If they let me see... I’d be happier, but they won’t even give me a chance!

No. They don’t like it when you do that.

Hide it.

They can see it in your eyes.

Hide it.

Bury the flame.

Hide it.

Kill it.

Hide it.

They don't like it.

They see it in your eyes.

Hide it.

Hide it.

Kill it.

Bury it.

Hide it.

Hold it.