Page 120 of Fractured Souls

This was a hunter from the Lost Tribes. What was he doing so close to the edge of the Capital?

Something big and heavy was slung over one shoulder; a dark grey sack. Nythian smelled blood. Not Kordolian, but something else. His mouth watered.

“What are ya doin’ out here, Aikun?” he called over the howling wind, cupping the side of his mouth. “Empire soldiers will kill ya if they see ya here.”

The Aikun didn’t say a word. He just kept advancing, his face hard like stone, his red eyes boring into Nythian.

The warrior’s aura swept over him; threatening, powerful, and the boy in him wanted to run, but Nythian clutched his metal bar tightly, glaring at the Aikun.

Flatedge was his territory.

Finally, the Aikun stopped just a few arms lengths from where Nythian was perched. He threw the sack onto the frozen ground. A steaming pile of bloody entrails spilled out, still warm from whatever beast the Aikun had killed.

“Eat it if you want to become strong,” the warrior growled. “You’re too scrawny. I’ll be back here every seven rotations. Wait for me or don’t. Up to you, boy.”

The hunter turned around and started to walk away.

“Wait,” Nythian called after him. “Why even bother feeding a Flatedge brat like me?”

“I’ve seen you out here many times, boy. You’re the only one who comes out this far.” He laughed, a harsh, desolate sound. “You don’t look it, but maybe you’ve got Aikun blood in you. Don’t question my intentions again, boy.”

Then he turned and left, leaving Nythian with a steaming pile of guts at his feet.

Offal. Food that wasn’t even fit for a varhund.

But Nythian devoured it, because he didn’t know when his next meal would arrive, and the Aikun was right.

He wanted to become strong.

Nythian gasped as returned to the present, as he remembered what it felt like to be nothing, less than dirt beneath the boots of the Empire’s chosen citizens.

What a flashback that had been, stronger than anything he’d ever experienced before.

He was still shaking as he remembered the stoic Aikun man who’d saved his life.

The nameless hunter had been true to his word, returning every seven rotations to deliver him food, and sometimes there had been delicious things in his bag; meat from a szkazajik, or roasted lamperk from the dark seas deep beneath the Vaal’s frozen ice sheets.

And when Nythian was no longer scrawny, the hunter started to teach him how to fight, until Nythian, now tall and broad in the shoulder, actually bested the Aikun with his own attack.

By then, the hunter was starting to show his age; he wasn’t as fast as he used to be, and there were wisps of black in his hair.

After that, the hunter didn’t come anymore, even though Nythian sat on the same stone pillar and waited and waited and waited…

He never came.

Furious at this abandonment, and yet filled with a growing sense of dread, Nythian had ventured out into the Vaal, traveling further than any sane Kythian would dare to go.

That’s when he found them.

An entire Aikun hunting party, slaughtered, their dark blood splattered across the pure white ice.

And there was his hunter, crimson eyes wide and sightless, staring up at the distant stars. The Empire’s soldiers had left his head impaled on a stake: a warning to all of the Lost Tribes who would dare come to the edge of the city.

Nythian had never learned the name of this scarred, hard-faced hunter, who had been more of a father to him than the bastard who’d abandoned him.

How he wished he had.

At first he’d been angry, but now he understood why the hunter hadn’t wanted him to get too attached.

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