War God for Hire- Gladiator by David Burke (books under 200 pages .TXT) 📕

came around. He could virtually feel it all. It was his calm place. The thing he was best at in the world and what made him feel relaxed. Others stressed about it, but to him a perfect swing was a thing of beauty, so he captured that feeling in his mind.

From there it was easy to turn his thoughts inward. He hesitated only for a second before diving into that part of him that he associated with Krig. It was like a mass inside of himself that he could feel, but more spiritual than physical. As he pushed into it, he could feel how dense it was. There was so much packed into it, and Kyle couldn’t get a good sense of it.

It occurred to him to start channeling essence into it, but it didn’t seem to respond to his War Essence or Earth Essence. That, or maybe he just wasn’t doing it right. This was like he was moving around blindly, going by feel.

Then a thought occurred to him. If he was trying to connect to his mantle and his mantle was in the void, then maybe it required raw essence. Some of what Hilde had said before seemed to imply that he would need to use raw essence to travel through the void or at least to summon her.

So, he focused on the raw energy that he always felt storming within himself. It didn’t have the feeling of focus or purpose that he sensed in his War Essence, or the steady nature that he sensed in the Earth Essence. It was more like chaos and unpredictability incarnate. Still, if that was what it required, he would find a way.

Kyle stilled himself further. He let go of a plan and simply tried to react. In that reaction, he managed to create a small channel for raw essence to flow into that part of him that was Krig. It was like before. He saw an explosion of light and everything faded from his vision.

All around him was a gray emptiness. It was so empty that it could never be filled. Not like space where energy and matter existed even if in small amounts. No, there was nothing here. It was anathema to his being in a way that he didn’t understand.

Even Kyle, who barely could sense let alone understand his essence, knew that this was alien to all that he was. As an Earthborn human, he would not have been able to react. He simply would have been quashed, drained, and emptied into a bottomless void. Somehow, though, as the war god, an existence he didn’t pretend to understand, he could fight to survive in this place that drained him of energy.

Then he saw it, or sensed it at least. There was a beacon in the emptiness. A presence that called to its like kind. Kyle pushed with the channel of energy that he was tied to and travelled to that other place. He couldn’t say for sure if it was instantaneous or took eons, he only knew that he felt a sense of movement and then he was there.

Massive, hundred-foot-tall doors opened, and he stepped through into a great hall. It was formed of pristine, white stone. Gold paved the floor and crimson tapestries lined the wall. Each was embroidered with vivid scenes of battle.

As he looked from side to side of the hall, he felt an echo within each of the scenes portrayed. He knew those battles. Not in a stuffy academic sense, but in a complete sense. When he looked at them, Kyle didn’t just see well designed, artistic tapestries.

Rather he heard the sounds of battle, men’s screams, the clashing of steel on steel, and the twang of bows. He smelled the sweat of struggling bodies, the smoke of burning buildings, and in some of them a faint perfume that he couldn’t quite place. The images were visceral and raw to him and flooded him with half-memories that he couldn’t quite hold onto.

As he looked up and down the hallway, he found that it went further than he could see in each direction. A closer inspection showed him that at random intervals along the wall to his right, the one opposite the massive doors he had entered through, there were smaller doors.

Each door was different. Some were wooden, others made of silvery metal, and yet others appeared to be a black stone. That was only the ones that he could see from his current vantage. The size of the doors varied, but most were somewhere between four feet high and ten feet high and all about as wide as he was. More than that, the very section of the wall was altered around each doorway.

Some sections were cracked and decaying, unlike the rest of the walls that seemed to be in pristine condition. Others were formed of perfectly round stones mortared together, and still others appeared to be composed of a bluish vapor holding the doors in place.

The place was bizarre beyond measure. A long hallway no more than ten feet wide but at least a hundred feet high, lit by glowing balls of luminescence in the air and filled with tapestries that spoke to him and doorways which called to him. He felt an urge to investigate them all. It rose up within him as a compulsion, and he didn’t know if he could stand it.

Caught up in that feeling, Kyle rushed to the nearest door. It was a six-foot-tall door made of a burnished brass-like metal and set into a smooth stone frame. When he touched the door handle, though, he knew in an instant that it wouldn’t open.

Within his mind, he heard a voice, most unlike Hilde. It was a voice he had heard before, but still barely placed. The dark, commanding tone of that fallen warrior from the parking deck said, “You lack the necessary key to enter this room.”

Rather than lamenting or even questioning the voice, Kyle simply moved onto the next