The Ark of Humanity

The Escaped Scroll

  Between Sangfoul and Baneal

  In the depths beneath the sea

  Darkness and oceanic starlight shimmered around him as Evanshade pursued the youth he had been sent after through the ocean depths. His heart pulsed strongly in his chest and his thick tailfin beat heavily behind him. Where are you, boy? Then, with a glance, he saw movement on the dark horizon.

  “Halt! Surrender and you will not be harmed!” he called out. It was a lie, but would the lie produce his prey? No, the boy continued away from him in the distance. With a pump of his tailfin Evanshade burst forward, hugging close to the ocean floor as fish swam up, curling around his body in startled fear. Now that the youth was in his sight he would close on him quickly.

  He didn’t want to kill, but this boy carried secrets, secrets he had stolen from Sangfoul. They told of things that were soon to come and Evanshade could not let those secrets get out, not if he treasured his own life and wanted to keep it. He was a leader in Sanfoul’s forces and the dark lord would never let him survive if this information escaped.

  Water curled around him.

  With another pulse from his fin he neared the boy, lifting his trident upward and driving it down into the legged boy’s back, crushing his body to the sand below and pinning him there. Crack! The sound of the boy’s spine breaking beneath his trident’s force echoed through the depths.

  “Ach…c…c…” The youth’s body convulsed as globules of blood spewed forth from where the trident pierced him.

  Evanshade felt bile rising in his throat but swallowed it down. “It is how things must be,” he told the dying boy as the youth’s fingers scratched at the ocean floor below him. “And there is much more to come, not for you, but for the others. I cannot stop it. I am trapped in this as much as your people and the people of Meridia are destined for their fates.”

  He drew a dagger from a whale-leather sheath on his side and drove it through the youth’s back and into his heart, taking what remained of life from him. Then he withdrew the dagger and brought it to the dead boy’s finger, pressing down against it and severing it from his hand. This will prove your death, he thought. How many lives are traded for me to live? How many lives am I worth?

  Evanshade tucked the bloody finger in a pouch at his side, sheathed the dagger and, while holding the dead body firm under his fin’s weight, hefted his trident out of its back.

  With a turn and a pulse of his fin Evanshade disappeared in the starlit darkness of the ocean once more.

  *

  From beneath the boy’s body a small kelp scroll was carried out by the currents, moving onward in a journey its messenger would never make.

  Later the boy’s father, a leader of Baneal, would discover it and then his son. He would cry tears into the water as blood permeated around him.

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