Thornblade Chronicles - Volume 1

Chapter 1

 When he first woke up, the man groaned, placing his left arm across his forehead. His body felt heavy, and his head began throbbing, as though he hadn't moved in years. His vision was blurry and filled with darkness. He reached up with his free hand but realized it was the out of reach ceiling. As the seconds passed, his vision slowly returned to normal, and he could make out more of the jagged textures of the obsidian-brick establishment. Turning his head to the right, he noticed a strange room.

Three of the four walls were made of obsidian bricks. Though, some of the bricks were slashed through. On the fourth wall, the man saw iron bars. At first, he shrugged it off, noticing more evidence of a fight in the room. A mahogany cabinet hung from the ceiling against the back wall with chunks of the cabinet door laying on the floor around it. The middle of the room had a table in two pieces, as though something heavy dropped on it.

Sitting up, the gentleman noticed a mirror on the opposite wall. Staring at it, he felt like a foreigner in his own body, hardly recognizing his own reflection. He had black hair that flowed past his shoulders and parted from the left side of his head. His eyes were silver, and he had a relatively thick beard. He scratched it while staring at his red and orange uniform. His eyes gazed at the bedsheets next. They were torn and dirty, as though they hadn't been washed in a long time.

After analyzing the room, the man focused on the iron bars. In contrast with the rest of the room, which looked like a fight had broken out, the iron bars stood firm and dent-free. At that moment, he became a prisoner. Tapping the side of the bed, the prisoner tried to remember the crime he had inflicted to deserve imprisonment. A minute passed by. Then two, and eventually five passed, but to no avail. As the minutes passed by, his nervous tapping turned into anxious punching. The man stood up and began pacing the room, trying to remember anything else.

"My name... My name is..." he muttered to himself, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples, hoping to stimulate his brain. After a few moments, he stopped and looked down at his shaking hands. "Why can I not remember my name?" the desperation in his voice increased, as did his heart rate and breath. It did not help the air already felt so thin; he felt as though he was suffocating.

Looking beyond the cell bars, the prisoner noticed the hallways were filled with cold silence, despite the fact sunlight beamed into the room through a crack in the ceiling. "Is the prison abandoned? Why would they leave me here? Who are they, even?" the panic washed over him like a tidal wave. He ran to the bars to scream for help, but as he latched onto the bars, they glowed a bright purple color and shocked him, launching the prisoner into the back wall with an "oof."

Being at eye level with the ground gave the man a new perspective on the room. The sunlight coming into the room revealed a glimmer from underneath the bed. Hurriedly, he crawled to the bed and reached under it, pulling out a sword. Its pommel was made of an onyx crystal, while the cross-guard and grip were made of gold. There were markings on the cross-guard and down the blade's center, but they seemed unnatural, similar to the walls' slashes but greater in number. Gripping the sword felt natural, as a faint memory of being a swordsman crept into his mind. He waved the blade back and forth, every slash feeling more confident than the one before it.

Looking back and forth between the bars and the sword, he formulated a plan. He readied his sword and charged at the bars. Upon impact, they glowed purple. When their original colors returned, he slashed again, feeling the blade get a little heavier. Determined to break through, he tried multiple times, with every hit weaker than the last. Within a few strikes, he felt too weak to continue. He dropped the sword and stared at his hands. He wondered how he could feel so helpless already.

Through his fingers, he saw the sword. Taking a closer look at the markings, the swordsman noticed they differed from the walls' slashes. These markings weren't as deep and resembled writing. He picked up the sword and grazed the markings with his hand. "Ensorome victra," he mumbled with a faint memory of learning the phrase.