“Prisoner.”
“Can you give me more than one or few-word phrases?”
“Release him.”
“I think I have it. We’re going to rescue a friend of yours who’s being imprisoned in the Dark Fortress?”
“Not a friend. Enemy.”
Ben paused at this before jogging a little to catch up with Zai’s brisk strides.
“You want to free one of yourenemiesfrom the Dark Fortress? That seems counter intuitive. Just saying.”
“Stay or go, I don’t care.”
“I said I’d come and help and I will,” Ben reiterated. “I’d just like to know the whys and wherefores of what I’m doing.”
But Zai had fallen silent and didn’t seem as if he would speak more.
Ben sighed inwardly and kept his own council.
His instincts told him to stick with Zai. And so he would. Perhaps whoever it was they were going to rescue would provide more clues to Ben’s mission here.
He just hoped they’d both survive the encounter unscathed.
~ * ~* ~ *~ * ~* ~ *~ * ~
That night, after a brief one-eye-open rest just outside the stone walls of the Dark Fortress, Zai and Ben approached the outer gates.
“Who goes there,” one of the six Sentinels guarding the gate growled low, pointing his long spear in their direction.
Six more guards stood on the ramparts twenty feet above them with bows and arrows drawn, aimed at the most vulnerable points on their bodies—the crook of their neck where it met the shoulder, between the ribs to rip into a vital organ, back of the knees to debilitate, and between the eyes to drill directly into their brain through their skull.
It was the only way to bring down Immortals, given their rapid healing ability. And Dark soldiers were trained to never miss their targets.
“Hunters,” Zai replied.
From the intelligence he gathered since he began to plot his return to the citadel, Queen Ashlu kept the same number of Dark Hunters in her squadron even though the annual Hunts had become less bloody and violent. Since she’d risen to the throne, the Hunts yielded at most five to ten killed animal spirits per sun cycle, versus the dozens that the Blood Moon Queen had targeted before, as many as she could find.
Under Ashlu’s rule, the kills happened quickly. Before the animal spirits’ last breath, before their souls departed their flesh and their bodies dissolved into ashes or stardust depending on their base form, she would have them beheaded to preserve their animal skulls as trophies, mounted and displayed to show that the Hunt had been completed.
The Dark Ones still ruled supreme.
Whereas, under Gaia’s rule, the animals were most often tortured first, skinned while they still breathed, for it was the only way to take their hide. Then, their paws would be sawed off, their fangs ripped out at the root, and their eyes gouged out. Until, finally, they were beheaded to take the last trophy. All the while, perhaps over hours and days sometimes, they lived to endure every cut, every slice, sometimes lashed with barbed whips directly onto their exposed and bloody flesh after their hides had been removed.
And it was all public. A spectacle to humiliate the oppressed, to engender and spread terror, and to bolster the bloodlust of the oppressors to even more violent heights.
Such was the legacy of the Blood Moon Queen.
Over the last two decades of the new Queen’s rule, there had been small, gradual, but noticeable changes. She maintained all of her predecessor’s “traditions,” but it appeared to be a matter of continuity rather than sadistic inclination.
That didn’t mean Queen Ashlu was a pushover, however.
But Zai was counting on a little bit of slack in terms of the enforcement of her mother’s edicts. Like the thoroughness with which the citadel guards inspected their persons before allowing entry.
The lead Sentinel with the long spear approached with another armed soldier at his flank.
Being Dark Ones, they didn’t need torches to see by. In fact, their sight was keener in the night.