The Trials

Chapter Six

Death was inevitable for everyone at some point or another. Mine just happened to come much faster than most. My life was in the hands of Erik, and he had just won, or so I thought.

“Sir, she is awakening,” I heard a small meek voice speak. “Would you like for me to stay?”

A strong, deep, guttural voice answered. “No, please give us a moment. I need to assess her first in case she is a danger to our people.”

A danger to his people? With curiosity, my eyes opened, and I began to sit up slowly before I was knocked back down, lying on my back once more.

“Don’t you dare think about moving. Listen to me very carefully. You are going to answer all of my questions and if I so much as think that you are lying, I will slit your throat right here and watch you bleed to death without so much as blinking. Do you understand?”

The man hovering over me was surprisingly young. I could tell from the roughness of his voice that he had been through a lot. He didn’t trust me. Good. He shouldn’t. I had no idea who he was but if he were any threat to me from making it out of this and back to my family, I wouldn’t think twice about killing him either.

I nodded my head slowly. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up, cuffing me to the edge of the bed to ensure that I didn’t make a move against him. It seemed as if we were in a tower of some sort, but I couldn’t be certain. My head was still a little foggy from almost suffocating to death along with hitting my head.

“Who…” I began but he cut me off.

“Don’t speak unless I give you permission to speak. I’ve been waiting to capture one of you for quite some time. Thanks to my second in command, he believes you are worth saving. Save me the trouble as well as him by answering my questions truthfully. Maybe, just maybe, I may be inclined to let you go unharmed.” I nodded my head, seeing no other way out of this. “What is your name?”

He wanted to start out with something simple. No doubt to test to see when I was actually lying by monitoring the way I spoke, my breathing, as well as other physical signs. “Riven,” I answered.

“Why were you sent here, Riven?”

“My leader…well, I wouldn’t exactly call him my leader at all, but he sent me along with many other women here to kill our enemy. If you are from around here, I assume that you know about the enemy who made their presence known here quite some years ago.”

He stared blankly at me. “Why does he want this man, or enemy as you call them dead?”

I shrugged. “Honestly, I can’t give you a logical answer because I despise my leader. I don’t believe that he has been honest with me or my people, so I came here seeking answers myself. He told me that this enemy is the one who killed my father when they first arrived. For many years, I believed him because I didn’t have any other reason not to. Until I got older and began to see him for the man he truly was. I then began to question everything about him as well as the story he told about my father’s death. So, to answer your question honestly, I cannot.”

This man stood up which is when I really got to see him clearly. He was tall, abnormally tall. It wasn’t just how tall he was that threw me off, but the armor that he was wearing as if he had recently been in battle. This was odd, to say the least. My mind began racing. Could this be someone that is a part of who is supposed to be my enemy? If so, he didn’t look anything like what Erik had described to us.

He turned around, his eyes now gentler than they were moments before. “I expected you to be a little less cooperative. If I were being held captive, I’m not sure I would be so forthcoming with information as you are.”

“When you despise the person who claims to be a leader to your people, there really isn’t much to hide no is there?”

His smirk caught me off guard. This man was abnormal, but weirdly, he was sexy too. My God, Riven, get it together! “I don’t know whether to admire that about you or be worried. You are the first one that we have captured that he has sent into this place to kill me first.”

Suddenly, my smile faded. My hunch was right after all. This was the enemy that I’d been told about but instead of being fearful, I was oddly calm.

“You don’t seem surprised to find out I’m the one you have been sent to kill.”

“Nothing much surprises me anymore. Since I’ve been so open thus far, I was wondering if I could ask you a question. If you knew that I was sent here to kill you, why save me? Why not let me die by those creatures in the woods?”

As if he had to think about the answer, he turned around slowly, taking a seat once more. “I only saved you because of my second in command. He is, how can I put this, very keen on visions. The moment you entered this place, he sensed you and had a vision. Without speaking to me first, he went in search of you finding you out by that field, and reported to me only after he laid eyes on you.” He took a moment, lowering his eyes only to lift them to mine once more. “There are things that you don’t know about us as well I’m sure there are things we do not know about your people. One thing I can be sure about is that your leader has lied to you and your people about our purpose for being here. He labeled us an enemy because we refused to bow to him. My family bows to no one. When my father refused, he made an enemy out of us, killing many of us in the beginning. We moved further into the woods here to try to stay away from him in hopes of showing him that we weren’t his enemy but that only seemed to piss him off more. In the beginning, he sent men after us, like his own personal army. When he saw that didn’t work, he began sending women. I guess he thought we would be more open to hearing out women than men and he was right. When my father saw a woman being attacked, he helped her, only to have her stab him and kill him. Now with me in charge, I refuse to give him any other chances to harm my people.”

Wow. All this time I had been right about Erik, but I always thought that I was imagining him being a monster more than he really was. I guess there were no redeeming qualities that he had after all. “I came here to seek answers for my people, to finally show them who Erik was once and for all so that they would be brave enough to make a stand against him. However, I will be honest with you. I wanted to kill you and your people for so long for taking my father away from me.”

“Riven,” he cut me off. “There is something that you should know. The moment my second in command told me about you after his encounter with you in the clearing, I knew exactly who you were. I brought you here for the truth but had to be sure that you weren’t a threat to us first. You should know that we didn’t kill your father. Your leader did.”

What? Tears began to pool in my eyes at the thought of the man my father trusted, literally stabbing him in the back. “Tell me.”

He shook his head softly. “Your father was one of the first people to make it to us and build a relationship with my father when he was in charge. My father quickly opened up to him, showing him our ways and proving that we weren’t here to start any war. Our planet had been destroyed by enemies of our own. We were in search of a new home and landed here. We didn’t know anything about this world or if it were even inhabitable. All my father knew was that he had to save our people at any expense. Anyway, your father showed us the ways of this world. How to talk the way you do to learning the land and all there was about this place and how to survive it. We struggled at first but wouldn’t have made it without your father. Your leader caught him and told him what he would need to do. He set up a meeting between your leader and my father, but it ended horribly. Your leader told your father that he was going to kill us if we didn’t bow to him and when your father refused, he killed him. He was a liability in your leaders’ eyes and the truth about us couldn’t get out. Your leader was smart enough to realize this himself.”

No! So, my father died trying to be the hero even in the end. “I don’t believe you!” I screamed in his face. “He had a family that he knew he would have to make it back to. He wouldn’t have risked his life like that because he knew we would then be at risk!” My father was a kind, gentle man. He was never selfish, but he always looked after us and did everything to protect us. He wouldn’t have left us alone like this.

He walked over to me, uncuffing me. “Come with me. I’ll show you the truth, Riven. That is if you are ready to see it.”

Reluctantly, I followed him because I was curious as to what he had to show me. If he had intentions of killing me, he would have done so already. Even if not everything he was saying was the truth, there was a least a portion of truth in his words.

We walked side by side, mostly in silence until he finally spoke. “My name is Dorian in case you were wondering. I figured it was only fair that you know my name as well.”

“Where are you taking me?”

Dorian sighed, stopping to face me. “To bring you to your father. As I explained before, we are not from this world. Why we may resemble you, humans, we are quite different. The resources you have here are far different than the resources we have back home. Our technology is far more advanced than yours. We have a special pod that keeps our fallen in the state of their death, never to decompose. This is done so we can always remember them for who they were. Not all of our people get this, only the most important. Your father was essential in our survival here, thus we felt he deserved a spot in one of our pods alongside my father. Also, I hoped that one day you would come seeking answers and this would be the way I could prove to you the truth.”

I wasn’t sure if I was ready to see this. When my father died, I was but a little girl. There were many memories that I had of him, but the older that I got even those memories had begun to fade. I tried to remember my father’s face, but over time, like everything else, that seemed to disappear. I’m not sure I was ready to see him again after all these years, but I knew I needed to in order to believe Dorian and his intentions.

“Come,” Dorian said as he grabbed my hand and led me through two metal doors that opened on their own once we stepped close to them.

We walked a little further ahead into a room that seemed unnatural, only confirming that Dorian and his people were not from this planet. He stopped in front of a round metal tube that had small buttons in the center.

Dorian pushed the button in the center and the metal opened, revealing my father’s body. I dropped to my knees as I began to weep uncontrollably. Dorian was telling the truth, or at least part of it. There was my father’s body as if he hadn’t aged at all.

“There is more that I wish to discuss with you. However, I know how it feels to lose someone so special to you. I will give you a minute.” Dorian then stepped outside of the room through the two doors we walked through moments before.