I exist in the present moment. Sometimes, I recallnotionsof the past, snippets ofmore. Another time. But I try not to let them in. There’s no place for them.
Males. Females. We’re all the same here. In the training rings, we fight who we’re told to fight. We’re kept apart at nightthough. There are no ‘bulls’, and no blocks. The females aren’t rutted or released. Only fighting happens in this place, only fighters exist here.
Like me.
The woman in front of me strikes out, catching me in the mouth. Her jagged nails, sharpened in the paddock on rough stones last night no doubt, cut me and my own teeth split my lip as well. Her feral eyes flare and I grin wide at her with my bloody teeth, spitting in her direction.
Uncertainty appears in her eyes. And malice.
She steps back, her foot landing on a sharp stone that I’m sure cuts into her flesh, but the pain doesn’t register on her face. The humans here are a different breed. Fate’s stings in retaliation for my hurts are mostly ignored…if they’re even noticed at all.
I don’t know how long it’s been. I recall the years I spent in The Barrack, but I don’t really remember how or when I came here. When my thoughts sometimes turn to long roads and tall horses late at night while the others slumber, my recollections are hazy at best.
The memories are jumbled and subdued, but I get an odd sense of comfort, of safety. Three faces. Sometimes there’s a wisp of a name, but it’s gone almost as soon as it comes. A smile here, or a head bent toward mine in camaraderie there. I hear laughs and low, calming conversation in my dreams. But when I wake, that’s all they are. Just fancies of something so intangible that I think I must have made it up.
But sometimes it all feels so real. It confuses me and— My opponent slashes at me again, catching me off-guard.
Survive.
My thoughts had strayed to those three faces again, I realize. Unfocused my mind. It’s toying with death, doing that here, even when I’m not in the training pits.
In the present once more, my eyes follow the woman circling me. She’s around my age, I suspect. Hair long and scraggly. Eyes bright and clear, and yet devoid of kindness or mercy. She’ll kill me in this practice fight if she can. And no one will care.
When it happens, the overseers shrug and say the human wasn’t strong enough for the pits. The body is thrown down one of the deep shafts from when this place was a mine. Sometimes their gnawed bones reappear in the passages that lead back to where we’re stowed at night in the paddock, torn off the corpse by the creatures that live in the darker caverns and later discarded.
We see them sometimes. Large and savage things. Like rodents with square snouts and rows of flat, crushing teeth.
A constant reminder that the humans here live in the midden of rats. That’s all we are.
All I am.
Refuse. Garbage.
Even more so here than at The Barrack, perhaps.
I never thought there were places worse than that dying, barren outpost of misery where I spent so many years, but I was wrong.
There are no healers here. Food is merely thrown amongst us like we’re farmyard beasts. We fight each other for whatever we can grab, and the weaker are henpecked by the stronger.
Some are killed just trying to keep hold of a bone with a few strips of meat upon it. No one stops us. I learned to scrap for my dinner quickly, or I didn’t eat.
At least our water is abundant, coming directly from a river that runs through the center of the nighttime paddock. There’s more than enough to fill an empty stomach, and it’s clean.
We’re locked in at night, males on one side of the wide, deep stream, and females on the other. A few scraggly goblins and trolls open the gates in the morning and lead whoever survivedthe night to train in the pits for the day. Overseers, mostly orcs, appear fromup, the higher levels of the pits, soon after. We listen to the orders they yell. We do as we’re told. Anyone who doesn’t is hurled down the shafts.
The best have promise. They’re takenup. They do not return.
Up means the masters have decided they can turn a profit from them.
The best fighters live up. They win or they die. They fight in the arenas of the First Circle. They’re given food. Pleasurable company. Entertainment, I hear.
More than one human down here at the bottom of the pits will do whatever it takes to get taken up.
I should, too. I know that. Elevation means survival. Survival is the most important. And wasn’t that all I did in The Barrack for years anyway?
And yet…
The woman darts forward and I evade her, giving her another dark grin that doesn’t reach my eyes.
