Chapter 35: 35 Backstories 2

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35: Backstories 2 35: Backstories 2 Where every day that ended with the death of all its inhabitants was a victory.

Where losing didn’t mean losing a battle, but losing everything.

In that environment, Astaroth tempered himself.

Not as metal is tempered in a forge.

As stone is tempered against other stones.

By friction.

Hardness against hardness.

Until the edges became blades.

He perfected his hand-to-hand combat skills as naturally as others learn to speak.

There was no enemy who didn’t fear his fist.

No warrior could match him in physical strength.

By twenty, he had already become the figure the tribe turned to in difficult situations.

Not its leader, who was still his father.

But the figure the leader turned to when situations were too difficult even for him.

When Zaroth arrived in the Burning Mountains, Astaroth was thirty.

He bore the scars of twenty years of battle.

Zaroth was a young emperor then.

But his power was already absolute.

He arrived with an army of legions that seemed infinite.

A force the Burning Mountains had never seen in their history.

Astaroth immediately stood out.

The tribe looked to him as the one who would find a solution.

As he always had.

And Astaroth believed he had found it.

He believed that joining forces with Zaroth would lead to something better for his people.

Not subjugation.

An alliance of equals.

It was the first illusion of his life.

And the first illusions, when shattered, leave the deepest wounds.

Wounds that never heal.

That transform.

That become fuel for something that burns longer than any fire in the Burning Mountains.

The alliance he thought he was forging lasted less than a year.

In that year, Astaroth slowly, too slowly, understood the Emperor’s true nature.

Zaroth desired no alliances.

Zaroth desired the total subjugation of all that existed.

In Zaroth’s vision, there was no room for equals.

There was room for those who obeyed and for those who were eliminated.

The orders came one winter morning.

The tribe was to be relocated.

Or eliminated, if they did not cooperate.

Astaroth found himself facing the commander of the legions with that order in his hand.

At that moment, he felt something snap inside him.

With a sound that was not physical.

But it was as real as any sound he had ever heard.

He resisted.

With the clarity of one who has understood what is happening and has chosen a side.

Zaroth’s reaction was immediate.

Astaroth was captured that very night.

The tribe was dispersed within three days.

Those who failed to escape were employed as laborers in the mines.

Astaroth spent six months chained.

In a place beneath the mines.

A hole in the rock big enough to stand in.

Small enough that nothing else could be done.

And in that hole, in the darkness, with the chains marking his wrists, he understood.

Not with his mind.

With something deeper than his mind.

He understood that there would be no return to the person he had been before.

That the person he had been before belonged to a world that no longer existed.

That what remained was not anger.

It was something more precise.

It was the exact form anger takes when it has a specific target.

Iskra had grown up with the sound of the wind as her first language.

Not the gentle wind that moves leaves in common woods.

The wind of Storm Mountain.

That didn’t ask permission.

That didn’t slow down because something was in the way.

That changed direction dozens of times a minute, like a living being changing its mind.

Because the Storm Mountain wind was, in a way that had no scientific explanation but was real, a living being.

Or something so similar that it made no difference.

Iskra had understood it before she even found the words to express it.

As a child, before she could walk properly, she followed the wind with her eyes, the way children do with things that hypnotize them.

Her parents looked at her without understanding what they were seeing.

They saw a little girl who seemed to be in dialogue with the air.

They saw clearly.

The Storm Mountain wind had taught her to stand before her parents did.

She had learned to walk by following the currents.

Not by resisting them.

Not by fighting them.

But by finding the direction she needed in each current.

Her formal training came later.

The Order of the Keepers of Natural Magic had recognized something in her they didn’t often see.

Not just the ability to manipulate the wind.

The connection with it.

Like a musician who doesn’t learn to play an instrument, but is born already in tune with the music that instrument produces.

They were years of study, practice, learning ancient techniques.

But they were years in which the wind was always present.

As a companion.

As a guide.

Like the most powerful voice The night Zaroth’s legions surrounded Storm Mountain, Iskra was out.

On the side of the mountain exposed to the strongest wind.

The place everyone avoided.

The place she preferred.

The wind hid her.

Not deliberately.

Not because the wind had a conscience that chose to protect her.

But because Iskra was similar enough to the wind, in tune enough with it, to become invisible to the legions who didn’t know how to search for something that wouldn’t stay still long enough to be found.

She returned at dawn.

She found what remained of the order.

The teachers she had known since childhood.

The companions she had studied with.

The place that had been her second home after Storm Mountain itself.

No screams.

No tears.

Something quieter and more permanent.

The wind continued.

It blew exactly as before.

As if nothing had happened.

As if the wind didn’t know or care what had happened.

Iskra stood in the wind that hadn’t stopped and understood.

The wind wasn’t faithful.

The wind wasn’t cruel.

The wind was simply what it was.

And what it was was something that could be used.

In both directions.

From that day on, Iskra had used what the wind had taught her differently than before.

Not to protect the balance.

To break what was wrong.

And the most wrong thing she knew had a name.

Zaroth.

A name that now beat in her chest with the same rhythm the wind beat in her veins.