Anthem's Fall

Chapter Fifteen

Vengelis looked to his mother, but she merely shook her head in futile desperation. She was incapacitated with grief. Without another word Vengelis turned to leave them, but Eve reached out and took him by the wrist. She had taken the Blood Ring from their mother’s grasp. Slowly, and with a grave earnestness, she placed the gigantic family heirloom on his left hand. The Blood Ring and Vengelis’s hand looked as though they had been crafted as one.

“The Blood Ring belongs to our emperor, long may he live,” Eve said. She rose up to her toes and kissed Vengelis on the cheek, then turned to the frightened crowd and shouted as loud as she could across the subdued quiet of the bunker, “Hail, Vengelis Epsilon! Our champion rises to the call of war!”

For the slightest moment, her shout was met with dead silence. Then, at once, applause and cheering erupted from the huddled groups of families and wounded soldiers. It was surely fate. The greatest Epsilon in recent memory was crowned emperor at the very moment when his world needed him most. It was the making of a new Sejero legend. This was the prodigy who had challenged the most brutal warrior in the world to a fight to the death on his fourteenth birthday. This was the only living warrior who had never tasted defeat. Vengelis, the pride of his race, the greatest Sejero warrior in the world, a living god, was joining their fight.

Not hesitating for a moment, Vengelis pushed through the roars of encouragement toward the elevator. The Blood Ring pulsated a fiery red, and all in the room recognized that Vengelis Epsilon had been destined for this day. When he was a teenager, many had thought him arrogant and brash. Now a man grown, the valor of the old Sejero heroes stood reincarnated before their very eyes. This was no dawn upon a day of reckoning; to a lesser race perhaps, but the Primus wielded the power of the Sejero.

There would be only victory. Their strongest son, their emperor, would return their victor.