Chapter 1

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Layla


The sound of swords clashing echoed through the room.

I groaned as pain shot through my body.

"You're slacking off...", Xavi said in a sing-song voice. I growled through my teeth, swinging my sword back at him. He blocked my attack and the swords clashed once again.

"I'm not slacking off!", I yelled, trying to attack again.

"You know, if your back hurt-", Xavi started saying but I interrupted him with another yell.

"Nothing hurts! Go on!", I yelled at him. His only response was a swift attack at me. I blocked his sword, only inches from my body.

"Then you're slacking off.", he said, still mocking. My fuse was short, I knew that for a fact. I started swinging my sword back at him, aiming at his torso. When I noticed he wasn't going to block my attack in time, I stopped myself, pulling the sword back and almost falling from the force that was pulling me back. I was breathing heavily. I felt blood trickling down my back. My whole body hurt.

"Oh, now you're hesitating, holding back, great!", Xavi said, laughing humorlessly and by doing so, making my blood boil. He is the only one I actually let talk to me this way. I might be his boss but we grew up together, we had always worked out together and trained. He taught me how to sword fight. If he was somebody else, I wouldn't let him do so.

"If I hadn't hesitated- if I hadn't held back, you'd be laying on the floor cut in half!", I yelled at him, dropping my sword down on the floor, the sound of metal meeting the wood sounding loudly through the room. I was shaking with fury and frustration, feeling weaker than ever.

"Oh, I'd be cut in half?", he asked with a mocking smirk playing at his face, picking my sword up from the ground.

"Yeah, you-what are you doing?", I asked as the blade of my sword slid across his palm. I was about to ask why he'd done that, why make himself bleed but he showed me his palm. There was no cut, only blisters from so much training.

"You really think we'd train with sharpened swords? With your temper? You must consider me a fool!", he said, letting out a throaty laugh. I was going to say something, cuss him out, tell him he knows shit about my temper... but I was stopped by Amir and Uriah entering the room.

"Boss, you gotta take a look at this!", Uriah, our one and only spy said, holding up a piece of paper, a cutout from a newspaper.

"Shit, boss, you're bleeding.", Amir noticed, looking shocked at my bloody back.

"Yes, thank you, Amir, I had no idea.", I said sarcastically, going over to the two gentlemen. Uriah handed me the paper and I read the headline.

"Political speeches, misters Holder, Trivy, Pliver and others, proposing new ideas for a cleaner kingdom, a cleaner Erathielen!", cleaner kingdom meaning, of course, a kingdom without mages.

Mister Holder was the one responsible for an event we mages like to call 'The Great Abduction'. A couple of years ago, the monarchy, with the help of their loyal knights of course, kidnapped known mages. Their excuse? 'Mages are evil creatures, too powerful to be controlled.' Funnily enough, the monarchy used blood magic to take away all our magic. How? With Morticia's artifact.

Morticia's artifact is a magical object that was made my Morticia Dover, one of the most powerful mages in all our history. It was made to punish the mages that used their magic for something bad. By drawing blood, the artifact would just suck the magic up. It was made to be a more humane way to punish someone, but it obviously backfired. The monarchy, thanks to mister Holder's ideas, kidnapped mages, put them in dungeons and tortured them as if taking away their magic for no reason was not enough. I was among those mages.

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