The Dagger's Wrath (BOOK 1)

Chapter Thirteen

A/N: Mwahahahahaha.

Devario Farighan, the Longruin Tunnels, the Assassin's Chambers, the Darklands Kingdom

The gates to the Longruin Tunnels were already open when the assassin arrived at them. Of rusty metal the entrance was made, its hinges plunged into the right side of the curved wall. Grit and gore covered the gates, dark reds and bright pinks spread across the rust and metal, the fading light and brightening dark. There was a faint stench of death and mystery, like someone had already been here. It was clearly obvious, since the gate seemed to have been left open—but Devario Farighan I could not have known for sure. He was a prince. He wasn't supposed to know things. He was supposed to observe them from over the shoulder of a king, a king who was judgemental, rude and selfish, yet family-oriented and absolutely mad, in a good way, which Devario rather found interesting in a king, for he was only a prince and a prince knew none apart for what the king had information on.

The tunnel was in the shape of a deformed square, with cracks and holes where he knew rats and mice live. A villager had even informed the king of a stray cat that was running around in the Longruin Tunnels until a child had told the woman it was not a stray cat, and was his pet. He had not thought that there would be any sort of animals lurking in the shadows of the tunnels, but it seemed there used to be, and there could be now, and he could be afraid but he wasn't—he wouldn't be afraid of animals, of rats and mice and stray cats. It would be a nightmare to be afraid, and a dream to be calm.

Devario, as an assassin, had once been in the Fraiin Gardens when he had heard people speaking of the chambers in the castle of the Darklands Island, and something about the Lightlands Island... but he had listened to nothing of that. Some women, anyways, since he was on vacation and didn't seem to think to notice of anyone's business had he no shame or consideration for others, had spoken out loud saying of their past adventures in the roads of the Treason Throne Hall. He believed this was one of those common Halls that held so-called thrones and so-called "highlords" or so they believed. They didn't seem like highlords to Devario, since they did not have banners—but he did remember one highlord of the newly bannered House, "Juraister," and something about him perked up a certain something in him. He was of the House Juraister, his full name being Lord Frant Gravein-Juraister, since he was wed to a maiden of the age of thirty. He looked around fifty, but was probably on the edges of forty, or thirty-five, or nearer to the maiden's mark.

Lord Frant Juraister's maiden wife's name was Janet Gravein, named after another one of the newly bannered house that had died down and then sparked together with life, saying in their mind their words they repeated throughout battle—their battle cry of the Gravein Company: "Marching through the battlefield is like a field of mud; messy and ready and reddish with a hint of sunlight!" Forgetting the words of the Gravein Company would, more or less, end in an execution, which, frankly, Devario did not think of to be the best possibility he would like to come across.

In the actuality of the fact, he did not seem to enjoy any of the human sacrificial regions of the Darklands Island, like the Singing Cobras that had a religion called the God of Brutality and Wisdom, Jhaiu. The Singing Cobras, a tribe that had been going on for at least ten thousand years or so (in the region of that), used torture and pain, yet calmness while doing so, to kill their people in order to bring luck to their area: The Lit Mountains of Jhaiu, a rocky field of mountains and forests that climb over each other like the dancing fools of the Darklands Palace. He only remembered this because it seemed just like something that he could always come back and refer things to, compare things to—like something that you know will always be important even when you think it might just be the most irrelevant of things to come across, when it comes up, you're the happiest person in the world of Questeria. Devario, a prince of all things, felt this way all the time whenever he kept in mind of the Singing Cobras and their ways of living, and unfortunately very shortly after birth, death.