“Are you ready to begin?” I asked Reddin, my grip on my sword growing tighter. “I tire of your dramatic buildup.”
“I’ve never been more ready in my life.” Reddin smirked before he ran at me with full speed, his sword aimed directly at my chest.
Instinctively, I ducked away from him, rolling toward my right. But as I moved, I realized that my motion had been impeded, only able to move a few inches out of his path instead of fully toward the other side.
Trick sand.
Had Reddin somehow mastered it? I couldn’t understand how he was able to freely move against its grains, not without sinking down into the ground.
I wasn’t granted much time to think about my brother’s advantages, not when he was coming at me again with his sword. Unable to move out of his path, I was forced to slam my sword against his own, the clash of blades ringing in my ears. We continued like that, hitting our blades against one another’s, each hit more powerful than the one before.
“Are you going easy on me?” Reddin snarled as he brought his sword down onto mine again.
“Do not pretend as if you’ve given me that option,” I replied before I swung upward with my shoulder, successfully knocking Reddin’s sword away from my own.
It didn’t take him long to swing for me again, the tip of his blade slicing down my shoulder, drawing blood with the wound. I only took a moment to wince at the pain, knowing that I’d be given no time to recover, no time to really think through my next move, not if I wanted to survive the arena.
But even as I pulled away from Reddin, repositioning myself against the sand, I felt him strike me again, this time his sword aimed at the stitches on my hand. And as my sword fell onto the ground below, Reddin’s twisted crowd erupted into a cheer, their chants so loud they threatened to drown out my every thought.
And Reddin basked in the glory, a smirk appearing on his face as his newfound family cheered his name.
“Reddin the Greatest! Reddin the Greatest! Reddin the Greatest!”
“Do you hear that, brother?” Reddin turned his attention back toward me. “That is the last sound you are ever going to hear, people rightfully cheering my name.”
I didn’t respond to Reddin’s taunt, my mind sifting through a million possibilities, a million different ways to force him onto his knees. And I watched as Reddin’s eyes glanced down to my sword, as if he was waiting on me to pick the weapon up from the ground.
But I knew that if I moved for the sword, it was going to be a sure death.
Instead, I lunged toward Reddin, hoping the move was going to take him by surprise. And it seemed like the move did the trick, Reddin’s eyes going wide as I knocked his sword down to the ground, too, his blade clashing against mine on the sand.
And then my hands were around his neck. I was gripping as hard as I could, putting the sound of the crowd as far out of my mind as possible, pushing away thoughts that threatened to trickle across my brain, memories of Reddin at the breakfast table, memories of our first training session together, his eyes bright with excitement.
But a few seconds after my palms were tightly wound around his neck, I felt something burning against my skin. And the longer I tried to hold onto him, the more the burn seemed to seep beneath my fingertips, the heat of it completely unbearable as it spread across my hands.
I moved my palms away from his neck then as I balled my hands into tight fists, soon delivering blow after blow to his eyes, his jaw, his nose. My fingers still burned from whatever he’d laced his neck with, but I was able to fight past the pain, at least enough to crush his features with my knuckles, at least enough to watch him bleed underneath me.
On an alternate blow, my hand slipped against the blood on his skin, losing my balance over him for only a split second. But in a battle, I knew that a split second was all that Reddin was going to need to gain the upper hand, and he hastily took full advantage of my blunder. I soon felt his hands on my shoulders, forcing my frame over his head, throwing me onto my back right above where he’d been lying.
And then he’d grabbed his sword, wasting no time as he swung the weapon down at my head. I managed to roll away from his every blow, carefully timing my movement with his strikes, knowing that it was only a matter of time before he landed a fatal blow against my skin.
“But what if he wanted to let you live?”
Aldvirion’s words suddenly popped into my mind as I rolled away from another one of Reddin’s strikes.
“What if that was his intent? Not to kill you, but to wound you. To force you to admit weakness to the screaming crowd. Maybe even to yourself.”
To force you to admit weakness.
I inwardly cursed, trying to measure where Reddin’s next blow might land, quickly calculating in my mind the force of it; the speed of it, too.
And then, just as Reddin brought his sword down at me again, I made sure that I was directly in its path. I screamed in pain, the sword slipping right into my abdomen, just as I’d intended, but the aftermath still forced me to cry out all the same.
And as Reddin took his moment to gloat to the crowd, just as I’d hoped that he would, I hastily rose away from the ground, breaking the hilt off his sword, revealing the other end of the blade. With my fingers bloody from the effort of taking off the weapon’s hilt, shards now embedded in my skin, I grabbed for my brother, pulling him toward the blade.
And I watched as the opposite end of the blade slid into his abdomen, too.
Reddin’s eyes went wide as he stared down at the sword between us, his mind seeming like it was trying to calculate its way out of the fatal situation. But I’d already done the math for the both of us, taking into account that I’d always been a few inches taller than Reddin, the height difference meaning that while the blow to my abdomen may have given me a chance at life if I didn’t bleed out onto the sand, for Reddin, the blow was undeniably the last one he’d ever suffer.
“I’m sorry, brother.” I murmured the apology, my voice shaking as I spoke. “I’m sorry.”
“…It was always going to end this way, wasn’t it?” Reddin smiled over at me as his mouth started to fill with blood, the liquid soon dripping down his lips and onto the sand below. “Thank you…brother. For finally giving me…a chance. I hope I…I hope I was a worthwhile opponent for you.”
“You were always a worthwhile opponent for me, Reddin,” I murmured again as I watched the life leaving my brother’s eyes. “You were…you are the only warrior I have ever feared.”
“I’ll see you where the moons meets the sun…” Reddin’s voice was low. “I will wait for you until the stars…until the stars…”
“Until the stars fall into our hands like precious jewels,” I finished what Reddin was attempting to say, a proverb that’d been spoken over our father and mother while they were being buried in the ground. And as Reddin’s body slumped away from the blade, his back hitting against the sand, I felt my own frame starting to give out, too, the blood seeping from my injury beginning to stain the fabric of my clothes.
Oh.
I was going to die, too, wasn’t I?
The feeling hit me as I rested against the faux arena sand.
If Reddin happened to have any kind of medical expert in his made-up world, they’d hate me too much to want to help me. In fact, I’d probably be better off if no one who served Reddin came near me, at all, their intent probably to torture me until I died of the pain.