Game of Souls (The Quintessence Cycle Book 1)

Chapter 2

                                                                                Men are Monsters

Peoples’ souls were being torn out in the plaza below Keedar Giorin. Not literally, but if it was possible to remove a person’s essence, the results might resemble what he witnessed. Cries and wails echoed up to his position on the rooftop as a mother lost a child. That child would soon forget her face. Keedar could picture the mother’s expression: eyes vacant as if she died that instant, as if her soul had been removed. She fell to the ground sobbing.

 Other folk awaited their turn on the mostly broken cobblestones near the woman. For many, when the soldiers took their children, their expressions would match hers. Desperation clung to them like a dark cloak. They pleaded, tears streaming down their cheeks, unheard prayers slipping from their lips.

A scant few were hopeful. Hopeful their child wouldn’t be chosen. Or that their child would be.

Gloved fists clenched, Keedar closed his eyes and sucked in a long, slow breath of the Smear’s foul air. The image of that mother and the others like her would be imprinted in his mind for some time. It would bring nightmares to join those he already suffered. Nightmares of his father dead on the ground, golden scales appearing on his skin as Keedar stood over him with silver scales sprouting from his own arm and face. No, that would never happen. It was only a dream. When he gazed down on the square once more, he was calmer, but not by much.

In respect to people like this mother, he wore his worst rags. The clothing smelled of the folk who once owned them, mingled with his mustiness and sweat. A patchwork quilt of memories. A recollection of those souls lost since the day his mother gave her life so he wouldn’t share their fate. Ever since he could sneak out onto Kasandar’s streets on his own, he’d gathered the cast off clothing, the discarded pain, mementos too agonizing for parents to keep.

Under a midday sun whose warmth didn’t seem to grace them, people huddled in a mass below him and farther up the lane, many in garb similar to his own, awaiting their turn with an examiner. For today was the Day of Accolades. The Smear’s residents presented the king his due. Glorious King Jemare who made certain the Kasinian Empire thrived. And with it, so did its people.

Except those in the Smear.

The thought of the king, of the folk in the Smear suffering, made Keedar grind his jaw. People might laud the king for the advances in society, for the thriving lives of the middle and upper class, but this … this in square, the Smear itself, was the true canvas on which King Jemare and the monarchs before him should be judged. Their work was drawn in blood and misery.

These people gave of themselves but received little in return. Once, every two years, by order of a royal decree several hundred years old, they surrendered more. If one were to be so bold as to ask the nobility, they would reply that the gift the Smear’s residents got for their sacrifice was one of life, as meager as it was.

This was a tribute of souls, of babes, of those too young to protest, to offer resistance, to understand their plight. In the citadel of Kasandar, ancient custom was like the rising and setting of the sun: inevitable, a routine on which the city thrived much like the rest of the Empire.

Keedar dreamed of the day things would be different. If his people were truly descendants of the fabled Dracodar with silver or golden scales, power to have once ruled the known world, when would they stand up for themselves? When would this oppression end? He’d heard nobles tell stories as if the Dracodar were monsters that came in the night to enslave, murder, eat the dead, and steal children. The only people he had ever witnessed do anything of the sort were the nobility themselves.