"Rhoskow?"

The voice sounded distant, muted as if spoken through a woollen cowl. Slowly, the fog lifted from his mind and the pale torchlight of the Dungeon penetrated his consciousness. Rhoskow blinked the tears from his burning eyes and the image of a figure swam into view.

“Hi Sayura,” he croaked. It had sounded as feeble as he felt. “How long have I been out?”

“Not long. The first half of the programme is still in progress.”

Rhoskow lay on a trestle bench that stood along the wall. His colleague, a stoic Ceratan shield maiden, sat squatting next to him. As she bandaged a nasty gash in his upper arm with a scrap of cloth, they listened to the sounds coming in from the Arena above.

It was full house today. Many hundreds of voices chanted and shouted as the audience urged their champion on, hoping to turn a profit from their wagers. The war drums whipped the combatants into a frenzy, adding to the gravity of these staged animal fights, where the venator locked in mortal combat with anything ferocious enough to please the spectators. A deep, guttural roar rose above the beat, followed by the clangour of steel on steel, or bone. The wet splatter of intestines spilling from torn flesh signalled the end of the match. Whether the venator had been victorious or the beast opposing him was anyone’s guess.

“That’s all I can do,” Sayura estimated. She rose up and looked him over. “It’s going to leave another fantastic scar.” Rhoskow cracked a cynical grin. “Guess I’ve got another tale to tell in the pub tonight.” He pulled himself into an upright position by the strength of willpower alone. His head swam with pain as it washed up in waves all throughout his battered body. The venator looked down at his bared legs. A make-shift splint of an empty iron-plated scabbard was pressed against it, held in place with what struck him as his own undershirt. The bloodstains on it had not fully dried yet. Rhoskow sighed and let himself slump against the wall. “Now to paint the story so,” he began, “that my pathetic defeat seems a heroic tale of steel and blood, my sword versus the Torbax as it charged me with open maw, saliva dripping from its foot long fangs.”

“You could add another two feet to the fangs,” suggested Sayura. “Torbaxes are savage predators. Ill-tempered at best. Just don’t mention this was just a calf and the beast’s jaws could easily have been twice as big.” The warrior dame’s sarcasm did not escape Rhoskow. Although the Torbax he had been paired up against had not truly been a calf, it had not been the strongest of the quadruped hunters he had ever met in the ring either. Not even stronger than those he had encountered in the wild while ranging the plains of Gartagon as a hunter, in the days before his admission to the gladiatorial games of the Arena. Torbaxes, native to his homeland of Taran-Ceroth, were bovine monstrosities. Predacious battering rams, he called them. These predators live in small herds of three to ten individuals, wherein one alpha male takes the role of leader and defender of the herd. The Ceratan forage the wilds for a variety of small mammals and birds, a selection that often overlaps the Torbax’ menu. Their ranging parties sometimes cross paths when chance, or misfortune, caused them to target the same prey. It is not unusual for the Ceratan to bite the dust against the sabre-toothed and muscled, overtly clawed predators. Rhoskow believed he got his first real scar when he met one such alpha Torbax, way back in the day.

He turned his head on his shoulders. Sayura sat on the flag stone floor, silently tending to her broad sword. Over their heads, the roaring of the spectators promised the demise of yet another of the combatants. From the gullies that led from the Arena down into the battleground’s chthonic wings the fighters called the Dungeon, came a steady sanguine flow that painted the walls deep red. The iron tang of blood mixed with the foul odours of sweat and urine that clung to the walls like flies to dung.

“What are they shoving up your plate today?” Rhoskow asked Sayura’s back. Her chainmail head guard flowed and tinkled softly as she turned to look over her shoulder. “A Rangaur,” she answered, “or perhaps even an Aurox. Depends on what they could manage to haul back here.”

“Rotten luck,” grinned Rhoskow. The blood in his mouth had crept between every of the cracks between his teeth. “My advice is to watch for the fangs.” He nodded vaguely to the side where his tail hung limp like a broken bough. Several of the scutes that covered it had shattered between the jaws of the beast. Sayura shrugged.

“The three species seem similar at first glance,” she said as she continued the polishing of her sword, “but with Rangaurs it’s the antlers you got to look out for. The things are nearly trice as wide as their heads and the prongs are thick as branches.” Sayura lay down her sword to show her hands. She held them, spread fingered, together at the wrists. “With a rack like this, and the tips sharp as lances, they can easily impale their enemies. At the same time, those antlers cover their most vulnerable spots. It’s damn near impossible to get any weapon near enough to get a hit in. It’s like they grow armour from their skulls as well a weapon, covering them with a living harness. Good for camouflage, too, those prongs,” she added. “They blend in nicely with the copse and trees in the Valènorian forests. Just too bad if you mistake them for one such tree.” She briefly lifted the plated sleeve that covered her right arm. There was an impressive dent in her flesh where the broken bone had healed at an angle. “I tried to chop a Rangaur female’s antlers for firewood. It was my first year with the Free Company and I’d never been to Valènor before,” she clarified when she saw Rhoskow’s simpering glance. “Good thing it was female and didn’t reach as tall as my face or it would have been my skull.”

“That anecdote will get you a round or two in in the pub, I’m sure,” saged Rhoskow. He leant his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He found that the ring master had wasted no time bringing in the next pair of combatants up in the Arena. The heavy footfalls of something that could be a Therodon shook the Dungeon’s ceiling. Bits of dust and sand came loose and covered the floor in a thin layer of dull greys. Down the adjacent hallway, iron-shod feet came running past the antechamber. The beast must have already made short work of its first opponent. The life of a venator is a short one, Rhoskow mused. Perhaps I should try on the boots of a gladiator instead. Crossing swords with a fellow man in fair battle sounds tempting. At least, compared to the lawless struggles against cornered monsters that have not the smallest shred of dignity or sense of honour.

Rhoskow watched a little while as Sayura brushed her blade with an oil dipped cloth. “What was that other breed again,” he wondered. “The one from Arca, that freezing hell.”

“Aurox,” replied Sayura immediately. “They’re enormous. With their wavy white fur reaching all the way down to their feet, you’d mistake them for hills in the snow. Until you see their horns, of course.” She let out a short laugh. “They’ve got two or more horns sprouting from their skulls to either side of their heads, but they all have one single horn jutting up from their forehead. That horn is sharper than my blade and with it, they cleave their opponents right in half.” Sayura mimed a long horn growing from her forehead and made one vigorous, brusque nod with her head, illustrating the Aurox’ deadly move. “I don’t think, however, they’ll set us up against one of those. Although their attacks are as lethal as a Torbax’ bite, the Aurox are the most passive of the three. It’s hardly worth the effort to travel all the way to Arca to get one and starve and torture it until it’s mad enough to please the audience.” Sayura got up and balanced her weapon in her hand. The blade flashed and hummed a single, clear tone as she swung it down. Satisfied, she slid it into its sheath with a single smooth motion. “Besides,” she added, “Aurox are most useful as livestock. I hear the Arcarians prepare an Aurox steak you’d die for.”

Rhoskow laughed, then winced as a sharp pain shot down every part of his body like lightning. Sayura sat down to his left and allowed him to lean a hand on her shoulder. Stinging cuts in his side were steadily weeping blood. Overhead boomed a throaty roar, an infernal sound that carried both a primal fury and mortal fear.

“That’s a Therodon up there, right?” Rhoskow evaluated when he found back his voice. Sayura looked up to the ceiling, as if expecting to see through the grey stone. “By the sound of it, yeah,” she said. The two venators kept silent for a moment. A violent sizzling was heard as the theropod belched up its innards as a final defensive move. Therodon stand on two firm legs and are capable of reaching running speeds of up to forty miles per hour, even across the black-sand deserts of their native Taran-Ceroth. It is for this reason that many Ceratan catch and tame them, to use as draft animals and mounts; a practice not approved of by everyone. As Therodon are composed of coagulating lava and their ‘skins’ of the cooled, black crust, many Karag Moran devotees view the beasts as sacred. Some even call the Therodon ‘manifestations of the Axiom of Lava’ and worship them, but whether you are a Karag Moran zealot or not, witnessing the beast bringing up its hellishly hot innards as a last resort, is a sad sight indeed. Boasting an innate tolerance to heat, Ceratan usually have little trouble dealing with the infernal temperatures of their bodies. A crash, followed by the crumbling of broken stone accompanied a pitiful screech as the Therodon was slain and its first opponent avenged. The bloodthirst of the audience was quenched. A thunderous horn blasted over the crowd’s deafening cheers.

“End of the first half,” announced Sayura. “I’m up.” She gave Rhoskow’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze and rose to her feet. The shield maiden wore the fighter’s attitude like a crown, proud and determined. Rhoskow looked at her red-cloaked back.

“Thraga’brandari,” he cited the phrase of fortune. The strongest is victorious. “Don’t leave the grounds with your pride in a cast, ring rat.” The shield maiden smiled darkly.

“As long as it’s not a coffin, it will make for a good story in the pub tonight.”