Fog rolled down the quiet streets bringing with it a chill to the salty night air. For Eleazar, waiting in a dung heap alley for the third evening in a row, the gloom was a welcome sign. The covering brume came off the bay like a blessing, almost as if the gods themselves wanted to offer their aide in helping him stab the fat bastard that had cost him everything.

Even if the gods had taken a sudden interest in Eleazar’s vengeance, he found himself inconsolably bored. Premeditated murder turned out to be a surprisingly dull enterprise. After he’d discovered that the infamous drunk Sargent Dowde of the Winder City Watch was behind his misfortune, he’d followed the man every night for a grueling week. And make no mistake, if Eleazar hadn’t already hated the man, a week of following him to bars around town while he pissed on every corner like a stray dog and needled others for free drinks with his city given authority, cemented the sentiment.

Once Eleazar established Dowde’s typical “patrol” route, he set up an ambush close to the man’s dockside home.

Having run the streets for the better part of a decade, Eleazar knew that folks walking home at night had their guard up the most on the way home, and upon first entering the darkness of their own house. He laid in wait in that natural sweet spot in-between the two. His attack would occur when Dowde had all his inebriated focus on opening his own front door. It didn’t hurt that it was poetic to kill the monster right in front of the safety of his own home either.

Eleazar wasn’t sure if all his precaution was necessary, given the uncaring swagger that the watch Sergeant seemed to stumble about the streets with. But for Lilion’s sake he chose not to take any unnecessary risks. The cost of failure was too high. And besides, Dowde was a man grown, while Eleazar was but a wiry youth in the middle of his adolescence. Surprise would be his only real advantage.

However, almost as if to spite Eleazar’s careful preparations, Sgt. Dowde being the swine he was, had skipped coming home two nights in a row. This break in routine occurring only after he’d meticulously decided where and how he’d gut the man. Eleazar decided that Dowde would be a pain in the ass until the bitter end.

The long hours of boredom had the paradoxical effect of fraying Eleazar’s nerves raw. Apart from jumping at every shadow, alley cat, and asshole that passed his nook, he had nothing to do but dwell on his misfortune. When thinking such things was the last thing he wanted to do. Was she still alive? Where did they take her? Would he ever see her again? It was an endless and traumatic parade of desperate, unanswerable inquiry.

Yet, despite the agony of the ruminations, he knew he’d spend a thousand such nights hiding on excrement-soaked cobblestones if it gave him the chance for his revenge.

Unfortunately, time wasn’t a luxury Eleazar could afford. Lilion had disappeared three weeks past, and it had taken him far too long to discover what happened to her—even if he’d already had his suspicions. Once he’d stepped upon the path of rescuing her, there would be no coming back. That was why her dear uncle Dowde needed to die first. Eleazar knew he couldn’t live with a world that gave Dowde no punishment.

Although, Dowde’s unreliability ended up not being an altogether bad thing for Eleazar. A small advantage of having to wait was his need for vengeance had waned from a near overwhelming rage to a much more manageable cold hatred. He had long ago learned that surety came from having control, whether that be of the situation or of self, and he was a growling dog now if no longer a rabid one.

A whistling noise broke Eleazar out of another of his burgeoning torturous self-reflections. It was a fat sloshy whistle. The whistle you might think a walrus would make if it were so inclined. A part of Eleazar idly wondered just how he could determine the weight of a person by their whistle, but he quashed the stray thought down. He had to focus because he knew it was Dowde. Gods below knew he’d already had enough of Dowde’s sloppy whistling for one lifetime.

Slowly, so as not to attract unwanted attention, Eleazar silently reached down and stuck his crusty dagger into a nearby puddle of refuse for a fresh coating. The thought of Dowde suffering a week before dying from a horrid infection gave him no small amount of glee. After he coated the weapon liberally in chamber pot excrement, Eleazar moved to hide in a deep pool of darkness cast by the flickering street torches.

The wait was finally over. After a still moment, Dowde lumbered into view, continuing along blissfully, badly whistling a tavern song. A blasé king of beer and lard.

It was almost a shock to behold the object of Eleazar’s fixating hatred standing mere feet before him. Sometimes in life the weight or maybe severity of a moment burns into your brain with unforgiving detail. Little did Eleazar realize, the image of the corpulent Sgt. Dowde whipping out his stubby, shriveled cock to piss on the corner of a building would be such a moment for him.

Eleazar gave a savage grin in the darkness as his prey unknowingly offered himself up in the strangest twist of fate. Few men would be so fucking lazy as to stop and piss on their neighbors’ house when their own home (and toilet) was a mere thirty feet away. It was unbelievably fortunate.

A loud fart ripped out of the drunk, and as if a clarion call to battle, it spurred Eleazar into movement. For a surreal moment, he felt like he was an outsider watching his body move of its own accord. His lunge from the concealment of his shadow took him further than he expected, but it did not matter. The shit coated dagger slammed to the hilt into the soft pelvic pubic hair covered area above Dowde’s dick.

Eleazar twisted the blade upward once, to aggravate the injury, before Dowde’s porcine brain caught wind of the fact that someone had stabbed him. Dowde screeched, sounding for all the world like a bear being flung into the sea by a catapult, then struck Eleazar across the face with a vicious backhand. The speed of the blow was blurringly fast, giving Eleazar no chance to react. Dowde moved far quicker than any man his size had a right to.

Dowde’s blow took the wiry youth in one sickening crunch, breaking his nose and busting his lips. The impact of the strike sent the boy hurling into the fog. Eleazar nearly lost consciousness then, but the clatter of his dagger following an agonized scream from Dowde, yanked him alert.

“What have you done!” Dowde roared, still sounding shit-faced from his night of drinking.

Eleazar rose unsteadily to his feet like an undead corpse rising in the dark. He could have escaped right then. But Eleazar was unmasked. He wanted Dowde to know who had killed him. Blood ran down his face in a stream, coating his still open smile red. Eleazar stepped out of the fog and into the streetlight.

“You!” Dowde screamed, recognition dawning on his face. The two knew each other through Lilion. Dowde desperately tried to stem his own flow of blood with pressure from one of his meaty hands. With the other hand, he held his cudgel pointed at his attacker while he slumped against the wall of the house he’d just pissed on.

Despite the wound, Dowde held the weapon steady. The analytical part of Eleazar’s mind warned him. Dowde might be a garbage human being, but he was still a practiced head-buster. Dowde’s backhand told him a story: If he had tried to take Dowde on in open combat, he would have lost. There was little doubt in Eleazar’s mind that the man had caught many a criminal by surprise with his speed. It was a good thing he’d waited in ambush.

Man, and boy stared at each other for a time, both breathing heavy into the late-night air.

Eleazar had long thought about what he’d say to Dowde when he’d finally arrived at this moment. He’d given more than a few imaginary speeches full of violence and fire in the dark attic he lived in. But all that rehearsal did not rise to the occasion. None of it came to him.

“For Lilion,” Eleazar quietly stated, answering the unasked question.

As the words of the bloodied boy descended, Dowde’s face grew hard. He let go of his nasty crotch wound, lifted the night watch whistle around his neck and gave it a hard blow. Dowde couldn’t chase Eleazar down, even when he wasn’t bleeding profusely from his nether region. But his men could.

Eleazar had nothing more to say. He gave Dowde a final leer before disappearing into the night fog. Whistles and the sounds of boots hitting pavement trailed after him.

⍏

Eleazar’s dodgy flight from the watch was a shadowy blur in his memory. He was certain that Dowde had given him a concussion; however, a pre-planned route and the instinct developed from a lifetime of running from the law was enough to overcome shaky legs and some spotty thinking. The difficult part was staying awake once he reached his destination.

Sitting in a tree near the walled Trovian district, Eleazar waited for the sun to rise.

Head injury notwithstanding, it had been a long week hunting after Dowde. To say it exhausted him would have been a great understatement. Eleazar had chewed the nasty tasting leaves on the tree and poking himself with a stick to fight off the oppression of his lethargy. Falling asleep would be catastrophic. Occasional troops of guards passing underfoot in search for him gave him a much-needed dose of adrenaline, for which he was thankful. Even with his wits scrambled, the irony had made him smile each time.

When the sun finally approached an unseen marker, the Trovian guards lifted the gate to their district. A line of adults and children that had already quietly formed in the early morning hours shuffled forward through the gate like a somber funeral procession. Eleazar understood the dour mood entirely.

After he checked to make sure that none of the city watch was in the vicinity, Eleazar scrambled down the tree as best he could. Because of his uncoordinated circumstance, it ended up being more of a controlled slide. Branches slapped him in the face and bark scraped his fingers and unclothed arms with painful scratches along the way down, but it still felt like a victory.

Eleazar reached the queue without incident and joined the group garnering only a few alarmed looks at his sorry state. Once he reached the precipice to the Trovian district, one guard gave him a concerned look. Thankfully, since Eleazar looked enough like shit on shingle, the man hadn’t recognized him as the boy that had cussed him a week prior.

In a righteous storm of fury Eleazar had demanded that the Trovians give him answers after he learned Dowde had delivered Lilion to them for a bounty. However, the Trovians were a strange bunch with their facial tattoos and bizarre physical features, and stoically refused to answer him. He’d nearly attacked the guard but a kind older man standing nearby had helped him see reason.

The truth was, no one knew what the Trovians did with the children they took. Not even the king. So what chance did an enraged street rat have at getting answers?

When the Trovians came to the city a decade ago in their black sky ships, it had taken them only a week to conquer the entire kingdom. No one had ever seen them before, or even known where they'd came from. The king had fielded an army to take challenge their might, but a single squad of their magical knights routed it. It had been a tumultuous time, but Eleazar barely remembered it. He was too young. For him, it seemed like the Trovians had always been there.

After the slaughter was over, the invaders informed the people they were now vassals of the Trovian Empire. Then, much to the surprise of everyone they laid down only two requirements for vassal hood.

The first was a healthy, but sustainable tax of food. Grains, meats, liquor and vegetables made up the bulk of what they wanted in bi monthly shipments. More than a few were unconvinced when they said they had no interest in wealth or metals. Though the Trovians allowed the king and nobility to continue to rule in a de facto manner, they removed any member of peerage that impeded the citizens’ ability to provide the victuals tax. Otherwise, the imperials never left their district in Winder City. People learned quickly that the Empire was hard but fair.

Much more controversial was the second requirement: The Trovians wanted children no older than the age of 16. Unlike the victuals, they didn't enforce the law as a tax; however, the hefty bounty they paid to families and guardians for child inductees took the kingdom like fire. Within a few years there were no longer orphanages, and families never had to suffer from having too many mouths to feed. Stories of greedy relatives and gangs stealing kids became a reality.

In those early years, Eleazar had been fortunate because his alcoholic mother had done something good (for once in her life) by shielding him. After she died, the snatcher gangs had been a constant danger for he and Lilion. Street rats like them had to stay hidden. Admittedly, some of their avoidance had been possible because of Lilion’s uncle Dowde on the watch. Well, until Dowde got greedy and sold her.

What scared folks most, was that they never saw the children again. Even after a decade of Trovian rule, not a single child had returned to the kingdom, spurring no small amount of gossip among the populace.

Eleazar internally distanced himself from the fear-mongering rumors. Whatever they did to the children wouldn’t change his course of action. The Trovians had Lilion, so they had him. He stepped forward through the gate and into the unknown, never to return to Winder City.