Disciple of Vengeance by CC Rasmussen (phonics readers .txt) 📕

today. What was facing it again? He grinned. The horseman in the lead angled his spear down to pierce Janis’s face. He brought his hand up and took a defensive posture, one leg swinging behind him. It came to him naturally. Where had he learned that?

The mercenary was within five paces when the hunger welled up inside him like psychic spew, fueled by his deep rage. He perceived just how to direct it, the knowledge present in his mind the same as how to walk or swim. If he moved his fingers like so, positioned his hands, he could translate his mind’s energy into kinetic form, direct it out in an arc.

The mercenary’s upper body slid apart like minced cattle. Blood misted into the air, then gushed over the crumpling horse, its body blown outward as if the man had eaten a firebomb. Time slowed down. Terror spread across the other horsemen’s faces as they closed the distance with doom. Something inside him reached out and consumed the man’s essence before it passed through the Veil to the Shimmer. Janis’s strength grew. The mercenary's body dissolved as Janis breathed in the deconstructed material and felt his wounds tighten as they healed. He was confused, disgusted, and overcome with titillating glee that more was to come.

“Mage!” one of them screamed.

Janis widened his grin.

He finished the other horseman with a few more flicks of his wrist. Their blood and viscera hung suspended in the air as he breathed it in. Their essences became sickly sweet energy inside him that swept his disgust away. The footmen tried to flee. He found he could see them from the Shimmer, projecting his mind out into that great expanse and peering through the Veil as if into a fishbowl. Janis reached out and, using the energy consumed from their brothers-in-arms, manipulated the surrounding space to crush them. He reached for their essences as they crossed the Veil and plucked them into himself like taking pastries from a baker’s shelves. Their bodies dissolved like the others had as the force within him broke them down.

“What have you done?” their leader said with hushed terror. His horse neighed as he fought to control it.

Janis couldn’t talk. His memory was a sludgy pastiche of emotions, images, and perceptions. He remembered the presence in the Shimmer, the promise of power, and the need for vengeance. He’d made a deal. Experienced a hunger he’d only dimly appreciated before, something deep within himself that he’d never named, but which now demanded to be sated. This man in front of him was the perfect food, and Janis’s burning need for vengeance was the perfect motivation.

“More,” Janis muttered through gritted teeth, his lips peeling back in a twisted smile.

The lead mercenary didn’t reply. In the dim light, he seemed one with his horse, his spear held aloft in the air, banners fluttering off his back. The energy bolt caught Janis in his stomach. His nostrils filled with the stench of burning flesh and the acrid aftertaste of super-heated air. He regained consciousness with a view of the sky from his back, his ruined clothes burned to ash. He rolled to the side with a wince; the pain permeating out of his chest.

“Still alive?” the mercenary said. Janis couldn't believe it himself. His opponent had one of the ancient weapons of the Suzerainty.

He pushed himself up and looked down at his chest, expecting to see a mass of charred blood and bone. What he saw was no less disturbing. A pulsating black blob, exposed to the world through flecked holes in his skin, including one large one below his heart. Fleshy pink tentacles poked out from around it, stretching across his skin before submerging back underneath it all along his chest. He fought the urge to touch it.

“Whatever cheap Lethi you’ve sold yourself to for a few more seconds of life will share your fate,” the mercenary said. “Your House is fallen. I looted this Trajan weapon from your old treasury and liberated your brothers into the Shimmer. Now it’s time you followed them!”

Memories flashed: his brother Gar’Sha, sliced in the back by a traitorous guard; Aron vomiting up his guts from poisoned food; his mother prostrate on a table as she bled out, his father beaten with bats. Janis’s rage returned, overcoming the grief that engulfed him. Take him…

The mercenary lifted the spear; no, not a spear, a short-range bolt thrower. Janis tapped into the slain mercenary’s souls to bend the gravity in front of him, channeling the symbiote’s power directly. His opponent fired another bolt of energy, the glowing orb super-heating the air as it screamed towards him. He redirected it into the lip of the crater. It struck with the force of a dozen catapults, hurling mud and viscera into the air. The man’s horse reeled to Janis’s right, the mercenary crying out as it flung him to the corpse-riddled ground. He was on his feet in seconds, hand unsheathing his sword. Janis strode toward him.

The man yelled, “Die, demon!” Janis flung out telekinetic knives, flinging flecks of decaying blood and bile into the air as he missed and sliced up the corpses instead. The mercenary got halfway between them, flung a dagger; Janis dodged. The man leaped into the air, sword above his head, eyes crazed with the lust for victory, throat still bellowing his war cry.

Janis realized at least a dozen ways to dodge the attack. Only one appealed to him.

He waved his hand up, channeling air into a compressed packet that the mercenary’s momentum carried him straight into. The explosion blew out his legs with such impact that only his upper torso landed on the ground with a squishy plunk.

Janis stood naked and smothered in blood. He regained control of his breathing. It was a technique he'd learned years before. When? He remembered total silence, lurking in a single place for days, waiting for the perfect opening. Yes, he’d been an assassin once. For how long? On whose behalf? Why couldn’t he remember? The mercenary’s suffering screams jolted him back to the present. Janis shoved the man’s torso with his foot so that he faced the sky, then looked down on the contorted face as the life drained from it. Blood bubbled from the man’s throat. He glared at Janis with a mixture of hate and fear that Janis had seen countless times before on faces he no longer remembered.

“You…” the man said, continuing with some nonsense. His words too smothered with blood to be comprehensible. “Don’t know…”

The rage remained within him, competing with a profound sadness. An empathy he couldn’t afford to feel. “I know I’ve liberated you from your arrogance.”

The mercenary’s lips caricatured a smile. More blood seeped out of their thin crevice. “I know... who betrayed you…” he managed.

“Orinax,” Janis replied.

The man coughed. “Closer.”

Janis bent down and grabbed his throat. “Tell me, and I’ll let you join the Shimmer instead of consuming you like the rest.” The symbiote squirmed with distaste, but he ignored it. He was in charge. Exhaustion crept in. The initial magic had used his own body for energy, the Shimmer requiring a price for every change in reality. It had cost him.

The infuriating smile lingered. Janis could sense the man’s consciousness fading away. “Remember me when you find out,” the man said.

“You’re already forgotten.” Janis grabbed his face and felt his mind reel back as the symbiote inhaled his essence into itself.

As quickly as it enlivened him, it faded. His limbs felt shackled to the earth. His legs wobbled as if filled with water. Pain coursed through him as the alien creature spread itself throughout his body, tightening its hold on his bones as it spread within him down his arms and legs. It was growing deeper into him, body and soul. Every time he performed magic without its help, it grew stronger, puncturing deeper into the unseen parts of his mind. What would that mean? He fell and rejoined the corpses on the ground, his mind reeling.

What had he given life to?

*****

JANIS RACED UNDER trees that blot out the suns, his little feet sprinting across ground cover so thick he never touched dirt, roping servants and others into hide and seek games, climbing trees. He was in his family’s garden. He knew it the way people know things in dreams. The small shrines to gods of the Yabboleth; the minor paths that carved through dense foliage; small hills that peered out over the minarets and lean-toes of J’Soon. He and Renea would go to the pond sometimes and command minor Lethi to flick poy fish out into the air.

“When I grow up, I’m going to make Lethi build me an ocean,” he said. “With fish bigger than the house.” Renea looked skeptical. “You don’t believe me?”

“How many fish?”

“So many. Infinite fish.”

She laughed. “That’s way too many. You’ll never command a strong enough Lethi for that.”

“Anything’s possible for a wizard. You’ll see.”

Janis flicked his finger up and a poy the size of a house cat catapulted out from the water, spun in a sweaty spiral, and collapsed back in. When he looked back at Renea, she regarded him with sadness.

“What’s wrong, Re?”

She gave a lackluster smile. “This isn’t exactly how it was,” Re says to him. “But it’s close.” Her violet eyes always looked big, peering out from the pitch-black hair that formed a bubble around her face. She looked wistful, appraising him with a mind too sharp for any five-year-old to have. “Youth always seems so much simpler, doesn’t it?” She lowered her hands and stopped plucking fish from the water, looking at her reflection in it instead. “If only magic worked the way we thought it did.”

Memories cascaded through his mind: Renea a few years older, lying in repose, sweaty and pale, her face scrunched in pain as she faced untold horrors in the Shimmer to bend greater Lethi to her will; the days of mental training memorizing the Apothegms, honing her mind to survive the chaos of the Shimmer as Orinax struck her arm with a metal rod. “No,” he’d yell. “Repeat after me.” The waking dream of swallowing the sorgin zorrotz drugs daily.

“I didn’t know,” he whispered.

Her eyebrows arched like crescent moons. “You did,” she said. “That’s why you turned it down.” She kicked a pebble at her feet. It slid into the water and plunged into the dark. “I wish I could really talk to you like we used to. But you’re a figure in a dream. As with all things in Urias, redemption only begins with death.”

He looked around the pond, settling on a massive oak that rose to the right, its thick branches stretching over the pond. “I remember this,” he said, “but I don’t know why.”

“You’re lost to the Shimmer. Soon, there will be nothing of you left.” She sighed. A tear struck down her cheek. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop it.”

“I was dead,” he replied. He touched her shoulder. “But I’m not anymore.” He smiled.

She read his youthful face. “I’ve come back. I’m going to help you.”

“You’re telling the truth.” She looked up into the purple sky, smirked, and wiped a tear away. “I can’t believe it.”

“Me neither.”

“How?”

“I… I don’t know. I made a pact with something.”

Concern. “Janis, you’re not strong enough. You can’t be-”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m