Chapter 1
The unpleasant but unmoving noise of cracking bones reaches my ears as I snap the bones of the dead creature and quickly scoop out the meat of its leg with a rusted knife. I looked down at the finished job, it was barely enough to last one meal, nope it wasn’t even enough for that, the creature I had found was a miserable excuse for a squerral, stupid small annoying blue creature was an inedible blue and furry tail. Picking up a bow, if you could call it that, it looked more a bended twig and every time I shot an arrow, it was a miracle the string I used didn’t snap.
Normally I would turn my nose up at most of the guts of this creature, but as I considered how to cook it I realised that it would either be guts or no meal. As I turn through the guts, trying to keep some standard of living, I feel something hard in one of the rounded mounds of flesh. Getting my knife out I discover a golden coin, no wonder I could have shot it so easily, it was probably doubling over in agony. Maybe if I was lucky I could find the source of the gold, even armed with a rusted knife you could scare a few pilgrims into giving you something nice. Not that I often went into villages to spend the money I had, nope most would turn the likes of me away very quickly, and the endless time I had spent in the forests would have only made things worse.
The world of humans has not been very nice to me so far. First as a baby I was abandoned. Then I was lucky enough to be taken in by bears for the first few years of my life. Then a someone decided to kill all those bears, I guess now that the bears must have taken a few a villages’ cattle to survive, scared a few children or maybe they simply made good sport for others.
When you hear about how villages took in abandoned children and they became great warriors think of me, I remember how the evils beings in metal just looked at my and then left me to die. Wandering alone, I found another village that took me in, as they did not know I had been brought up by animals and a feud with some other village had lowered their population and they needed more men. You may now wonder why I am now in a forest alone and bloodying my hands in guts of creatures that really should by no small to eat. About five years later when I had learned to talk, older kids came; they beat me up and left me on a raft of driftwood on the local river, as I lay, barely alive and beaten.
I am not sure how long passed but I was taken in by raiders, as alone and rejected as me… maybe because I was not of any village or maybe because I had no money they took me in. Here I had a good time, I was treated well and I learned how to hunt and fight, as well as learn about some of the finer things in life. If it weren’t for them maybe I would not be alive now. But as raiders they were always the bounty of some ambitious hero and one day he came in white armour and a white steed and with his so called paladins he killed every man and even the few women in the camp, until only I was left. I ran in fright, remembering again the things in metal armour that had killed the bears… and had returned to kill me.
I do not know how long I survived in the surrounding woods… I had even worse survival techniques then I have now, and I still cannot gut a creature properly. But one day I came across a wooden hut, out of pure desperation I entered and I found an old man reading a scroll. He told me he was a wizard and that I could stay as long as I wanted… well I could hardly refuse and as he was wearing none of that metal that I have learnt to fear and hate so I accepted.
There are many who claim to know the way of magic, fewer who know it still and even less who could use it. “All magic has a cost,” the wizard told me when I asked him what it meant to be a wizard or magician, mage they have many names. “Oh people think you can throw as many fireballs as you like if you have Power, but it takes more than Power to throw even the smallest one.” I asked how I could throw a fireball and he laughed. “How would you light a fire?” he asked. “There are many ways you could do it so I will show you a way that won’t kill you, either because it will take too much energy from you or because you’ll burn the house down.” So I gathered some wood as he asked and carried as much as I could back to him, outside the hut. “Now focus,” he said. “Think about what you want, the fire, think about how you would normally start a fire… the rest will either happen or it won’t happen, most magic skills are innate are waiting to be discovered, not learnt.” I tried for hours to summon the fireball, I almost cried with frustration. I thought about how the raiders set their fire, they tried to rub some energy into the sticks then the smoke would rise out of the bonfire, a little trickle of smoke at first and then the flames would appear, small at first then gorging itself on the wood until the whole camp was visible under its bright light.
Still desperately wanting the wood to set alight I turned to my master and tried to ask him for another hint. But I couldn’t move, all I could do was set me eyes on the wood. I felt myself focus on it, like it was the only thing in the universe, considering how the raiders made their fire; I felt myself put the energy into that wood. Flames burst out of the pile and I tried to whoop, yet still I put more and more energy into the fire until it was far bigger than the pile I started with bright white, bright enough to… light up a camp. Now I was realised from my spell, the fire didn’t last for long, there was not nearly enough fuel.
“Ah ha,” the wizard said. “A fire mage we have here if ever I saw one. You said you had no name boy, well we can hardly have that can we, from this day on you shall be known as Pyro; of the flames… you could have lit up my old village with that, and despite having hardly any fuel you are hardly damaged by it… magnificent.”
Now I bitterly lit the fire now, an art mastered long ago, but it was another good thing that was cruelly taken away from me. I had spent a long time with the wizard, a good few years to say the least. Maybe I should have ended up as a great mage, perhaps I could have destroyed armies of those men in metal with just a wave of my hand… yet it was not to be.
Despite the spells I have forgotten, the people I have been taken away from, whose names I knew and who have tried to give me a name, I now hate humans as a whole. That magician wasn’t a bad guy after all. He may be gone now, his hut burned and scrolls lost in the flames. But one thing of his has endured, the name he gave to me… I promised him that I would not forget it. Maybe one day I could make something out of it.
I bit down on the charred guts. I better make something out of my life one day… this creature was disgusting, the forest was miserable and I think that I may have been lucky enough to find the signs of a village in the distance… maybe I was onto something, or maybe I would just get shot down by archers before I had the chance to speak. That’s the thing about my life, despite all the evil around me pretending to be good, in reality trying to kill me, I no longer feel fear, not when I know that I could be a king in the future or be found in an allay with my throat cut…But as long as I live I will try to wreak vengeance on those men in metal even if I have to wait years for it.