Bracelet

Lucas grit his teeth as the roof of the tunnel trembled above them.

Hundreds if not thousands of soldiers marched on top of them with thumping boots against the stone brick structure above the ex-prisoners.

"That merchant better keep his end of the deal…" Lucas frowned.

"He better do." Rodric whispered under his breath behind him. "Or else we are all dead."

Dwenson Stronghold was a fortress of stone and iron with nearly no openings, save for the air ducts, altars and the gates, there were a limited number of passageways one can use to move around Dwenson without using the streets. In order to ensure that there was a sufficient flow of goods without causing traffic, merchants from decades ago bought entire streets for exclusive use for transporting goods.

The residents however, did not like this.

As such, they took a plea to the Lord to fix the issue.

The Lord at that time did not know what to do, the merchants were an important part of providing supplies to Dwenson Stronghold and its numerous residents. Arbitrarily deciding on making roads available for all would nearly cripple the performance of both residents and merchants.

Thus, the Lord called for a meeting with the Chamber of Commerce of Dwenson during that time.

When the Church heard about this, they labeled the Lord as a heretic for conniving with merchants.

Merchants were, according to the doctrine of the Church, the devil's messenger, or incarnate of greed. With this justification, the Church spread word that the goods that merchants sold them were items of evil, and that they should only buy from the Church and the stores they support.

This caused an uproar in the citizens, causing Riots all over the cities.

Thousands of Merchants were hunted and burned at a stake together with Duke Visivius von Arcedina Dwenson XV, the Duke that ruled Dwenson at that time.

The Duke's family had escaped and the remaining merchants of Dwenson hired non-believers of the Church to build the Black Market.

The braver merchants had used special means to be one of the merchants supported by the Church.

They pretended to be allies with the Church and slowly built another city on top of the original Dwenson City exclusive only to the believers of the Church.

The Church approved of this and supported them.

Thus, old Dwenson City had no believers in them, allowing the Black Market to creep in and organize themselves.

Soon, both the Nobility and the Church lost all control of old Dwenson City and decided to cut off all airflow and passages leading there.

They created a gag order to the people to never talk about old Dwenson ever again and everyone who did was taken away to 'Re-education' camps of the Church.

57 years later and here lied the abandoned and forgotten tunnels of Old Dwenson City. Not many people were in here because of constraints from the air but merchants of the black market were still using these for their operations.

These tunnels were normally silent, quiet like a grave.

Yet today, thousands of ex-prisoners cowered in these old tunnel systems beneath the city.

"I can't believe that something like these were built in the past…" An ex-prisoner spoke in marvel.

"Quiet!" Another prisoner hushed. "Do you want to get us killed?!"

The people in these tunnels shared a tense atmosphere.

Not only were they being hunted, they could not hide here for long.

They sold off the magic stones they chiseled from the Gate Control Tower to a merchant.

They were only able to buy everyone sufficient air for a few dozen minutes by selling all the gear they stole from the armory.

"Damn it…." Lucas inhaled deeply on the cylindrical iron piece he held in his palm. "We've been here for 17 minutes already…"

Lucas distracted his thoughts by looking at the iron cylinder in his hand.

This was a marvel created by the alchemist association before the Church deemed them as heretics.

After the Alchemist Association was dissolved, the Church then proceeded to seize all their inventions and claimed the credit of inventing them since Alchemists were not well known.

Lucas felt the urge to fiddle with the device but stopped himself seeing as he might break the very thing keeping him alive in this dungeon.

"Lucas…" Rodric called out from behind him. "Can I ask you a few things?"

Lucas tried to peer through the darkness but cannot find Rodric's face.

It felt awkward for him to reply to the nothingness, but he answered anyway.

"What is it, Rodric?" Lucas wondered.

"It's about your friend, Rowan." Rodric spoke. "Who the hell is he?"

The whispering around the two of them immediately stopped. It seems that the others wanted to listen in.

"He's just my childhood friend?" Lucas furrowed his brows. "He was born a natural hunter, an orphan and a general asshole most of the time."

"Pfff." Rodric stifled a laugh.

"Don't make me laugh boy. There is no way a commoner would be able to unite thousands of people in hours, not to mention make up a plan this detailed in minutes."

Lucas just realized the absurdity of the situation.

'Wait… Rodric has a point…' He thought.

"I-I don't know…" Lucas wondered himself.

'How come I, of all people, don't know?!' Lucas internally asked himself. 'Aren't I supposedly the childhood friend?!'

"Looks like you don't even know huh…" Rodric sighed. "A talented lad like Rowan would not be left alone by any faction of society. I'm rather suspicious of him to be honest."

"Well, we used to be living in Lakeshore Fall…" Lucas tried to remember the details but never found any memory of ever living in such a place.

'Now that I think of it, I don't have any recollection of memories from childhood…' Lucas' face paled.

'What the hell…' Lucas clasped his mouth.

'I don't have any memory before we were abducted by bandits and ran off to the border…'

Lucas felt chills run down his spine. His hands were shaking furiously and his heart started beating faster.

'What is wrong with my memory?!' Lucas cursed inside. 'Why don't I have a recollection of anything?!'

Lucas hugged himself as he fought the urge to vomit, his body lurching forwards followed by gagging in his throat.

"Lucas!" Rodric cried out as Lucas's head crashed into the old man. "Boy, what's wrong with you?!"

Lucas tried to find the space to breathe and fiddled in the ground for his breathing device with no avail.

"Air…" Lucas gasped.

"Found it!" Someone called out.

Moments later, an iron tube was pressed against his mouth as he breathed in the air from the inside, clenching his chest in pain.

His head was spinning in circles and it felt like being stabbed with a hot knife, his chest felt extremely constricted and it was near impossible to breathe.

His pupils were unfocused, even if someone lit a candle he could only see blurry images of men standing around him.

Rodric's mouth opened and closed but all Lucas could hear was the ringing noise in his ears.

He felt for his bracelet that always gave him a sense of peace.

Lucas clasped his wrist as he tried to calm himself down.

He desperately felt around his wrist but found nothing.

Lucas finally lost his consciousness at that point.

He never paid much attention to the accessory since he never took it off as far as his memory reached.

Only today he felt how significant it was.

His bracelet was gone.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Koelhar watched as the fire mages melted through the iron portcullis of the gate control tower.

The rebels had ditched the tower and escaped through the tunnels, most likely retreating at the sight of fire mages and crossbowmen.

'But that feels wrong…' Sir Koelhar thought.. 'Any sane man would have sent more men to the tower rather than abandoning a position specifically fortified for sieges, they should have defended it…'

Koelhar felt annoyed by this as he could only march forward the burned down gate in front of him.

"Are you perhaps wondering why they fled, Sir?" Magus Kyserine asked him.

Koelhar's brow twitched at the mention of Kyserine. The man had a bad reputation for reading thoughts which was annoying.

"Yes, Kyserine." Koelhar spat. "I 'badly' wonder about it."

"Well you see my Lord, they are farmers." Kyserine rubbed his long beard. "Those inferior creatures cannot shoot bows or have an idea of crossbows. They cannot defend against fire and they don't know how to operate the Phylactery."

"They might as well have been chickens defending a wall." Kyserine chuckled.

Koelhar sighed. Kyserine was right.

But then again the eerie feeling in his chest persisted.

"Something felt very wrong here…" Koelhar mumbled as he surveyed the tower.

'Now that I think about it, I haven't heard a word from the men I sent to the air ducts down south…'

He had instructed a good few hundred men to infiltrate the ranks of the escapists and slaughter them in the tunnels.

It had been a good few hours, how could the men not be back yet?

Koelhar felt a shiver down his spine.

He was about to ask when one of the fire mages, Kyserine's apprentice, fell down to the ground clutching his chest.

The young man was immediately tended to by a healer but still suffered, uncontrollably shaking and flailing his arms around.

"What is going on here?!" Koelhar approached the mage.

"Air… I need… breathe… huuuhh… some…one… hel..p." Was the words of the man before his eyes rolled to the back of his head and freezing stiff.

Then the man arched his chest up in the air in a very disturbing way before collapsing to the ground. Not moving in the slightest.

The soldiers stepped back in surprise.

"He's dead." The healer gasped.

"What is the meaning of this?!" Kyserine was furious. "I thought you protected him!"

"Calm down, Magus." Koelhar sighed. "He wasn't injured in the slightest."

"Then how could he die?!" Kyserine stomped his feet like a child.

"It could be something he ate or something he drank..." The healer mumbled.

"That's right." Koelhar spoke. "Was there anything that he had taken which was new? A food or a drink perhaps?"

Kyserine managed to calm down a bit and stroked his beard impatiently before freezing stiff.

"We were in charge of appraising the items confiscated from the 'Volunteers'." Kyserine mumbled. "I got tired of it and made him do it instead…"

"Then, what happened…?" Koelhar had a bad feeling.

The only confiscated items that were to be appraised today was from the two boys they picked up from that village in the southern border.

"He asked me if he can keep one item from the pile and I agreed." Kyserine looked at his desciple's wrist.

"Something about an item with complex enchantments. A magical bracelet, or so he said…"