Book of Trirealm. Master Of Elements [BL]

CHAPTER 1. Master of Elements meets a Golden Deity

Tens knew many fairy tales, but this one was his favorite. Since childhood, the boy had believed that he was the descendant of the Great Master Anil and the future Master of Elements. He didn't hesitate to tell everyone in Black Mines about it.

At first, other demons didn't take him seriously, thinking he was fooling around. All children make up their own games and amusements, nothing special about it. But Tens was thirteen quarts old already, and he kept saying that when he got a little older, he would go looking for the Crystal Sword.

* A quart equals four normal years and is used as a measure of age similar to that of a human. That is, Tens is fifty-two normal years old at the beginning of the story, but if a human were to look at him, they would take him for a teenager, which he is. Demons grow four times slower than humans. (Author's note).

Eventually, people around him came to think of the boy as a little touched in the head and stopped arguing with him. It was clear as day that he, a small, worthless son of a pathetic wretched servant girl and a simple stonemason, would spend his life working in the mines, not becoming a legend.

The boy's parents had met only a few times before they had realized they had grown terribly tired of each other. And during one of those few dates they had conceived a child.

When his mother had given birth to Tens, she'd sold him almost immediately to the mines owner, so that the boy could grow up and learn his trade with other apprentices. Eventually, he would either follow in his father's footsteps by becoming a stonemason, or, if his talents allowed, he would mine black underhill marble, which paid much better. Then he would get out of debt bondage faster.

Black Mines was a small town at the foot of Akruk in the Black Heights mountain system in the northwest of the Dark Kingdom's Great Continent. All the local demons knew each other. Who was the son of whom was also known to everyone. It was no secret to Tens who his parents were.

But it just so happened that among dark demons, especially those of the poorer kind, it was not customary to look after their children or live as a family. If a couple grew close enough to share household, it was considered an exception rather than a rule.

Tens took it for granted and never resented his parents for selling him. He always showed them respect. They sometimes treated their son to meatballs in memory of their brief past together. He liked the meatballs. As he did the tales.

That evening he stayed in the workers' village and, stroking the back of a small, palm-sized, fluffy sparkla that had silver fur and a long tail, sat on the ground with the other children who had come to warm themselves by the fire and listen to Aunt Lala. She told such good stories!

Tens was older than others. The storyteller was surrounded mostly by smaller kids. Boys his age hadn't come here in a long time, busy with their own thing: getting drunk, fighting, and trying to grope local girls. Or each other, for that matter. Tens joined them sometimes, but he often came here as well. After all, here he was told about his future.

Though the boy knew every single word of every tale about Anil, the Master of Elements, by heart, he would listen mesmerized as if for the first time. And while listening he always had a kind of simple, blissful smile on his lips that made other children want to beat his weirdness out of him. He didn't mind.

It used to bother Tens a little that he did not at all resemble the Master of Elements from the fairy tales. Anil was described as a tall, stately demon in snow-white robes, with a beautiful pale face, black eyes, and long, raven-black hair tied back with a silver ribbon.

Tens did not fit that description in the slightest, being a weedy, green-eyed boy of small stature. He'd recently cut his brown hair on a bet, and now short, uneven ends were sticking out in all directions. His ears, like those of all Morae* demons, were pointed upward, and he, like all unredeemed laborers, had to wear an earring in the left one. Tens'ss face was grayish with no beautiful pallor to it. As to snow-white robes, and even more so a silver ribbon, he would never earn money enough to buy them.