The Legend of Jeer the Brave and Honorable

The Legend of Jeer the Brave and Honorable

Torren was running. The maze of cavernous steel walls met him and pursued him around every corner. Sweat beaded on his upper lip and turned to steam in the dry heat of The Strata’s main carrier. Heavy feet pounded behind him. Chains rattled. No, not again. He had to see the light. He couldn’t go back to that holding cell. Especially now. The Walls began to close around him as Torren raced through the map of The Strata’s Military Carrier in his mind.

Just one more turn. He thought. He was almost free.

Jeer had said that the hatch had been this way. The old man from the Independent Islands had never steered Torren wrong. Sure, they had only known each other for a few months, but they were the same. Penance. Different coins of the same metal.

Torren rounded the turn. The faint traces of a smile touched his face as he thought of the impending freedom. The racing of his heart mixed with the adrenaline in his veins and together they propelled him forward and drowned out the footsteps behind him. The air felt lighter and he could almost taste the sunshine if that were such a thing to be tasted.

All of a sudden, a brick wall rose up from the ground. Torren slammed into it. He couldn’t breathe. The air had been forced out of his lungs reminding him of the fate that awaited him if he failed the escape. The fate that Jeer had already met. Torren clawed himself to a sitting position, pain seizing his ribs. He gasped. Another wall. This wasn’t supposed to be here. “No!” He thought frantically. “There has to be a way out. I can’t go back. They need to know! Jeer can’t have died for nothing.”

Tears sprang to his eyes as he searched to find a way around the wall. Fear clawed up his throat like bile. This couldn’t be it. He had to get back. He had to help them. He couldn’t die here. Blood was roaring in Torren’s ears, but it was cut by the sound of chains rattling. Panic sliced through Torren’s heart like a knife. His speed was all he had. His only weapon. Now his ribs were most likely broken, but worst of all he was trapped. Never to see the light of day again.

The last thing he saw before everything went black was the chains that would take him to the cell that he would die in.

. . .

Torren sat up with a jolt. Phantom pain still seized his chest as his eyes adjusted to the grey lighting. For a moment he had forgotten where he was and had to calm his nerves when he realized that he was on the IzzyMae, Maia’s air ship. Maia was the scrappy young pilot with a reputation for being the fastest pilot in the Independent Islands.

Torren sat up and ran a hand through his buzzed blonde hair. He still wasn’t used to wearing it this short all over his head. He usually, in normal Crevnar fashion, had kept the top of his head long and the sides and back well buzzed or shaved. It was a symbol of rank, military status and even relationship status. He usually liked his hair longer on top. He liked his nation’s traditional status-indicative braided ponytail. He had cut it before being presented as Penance, but he still could have a small ponytail that still showed off his tribal pride. However, Maia had suggested he cut even that last bit of hair off after dropping the bounty hunter off a nearby outpost with nothing but a shirt and some pants. She had also suggested that he grow a beard or dye his buzzed hair. While he did not like the idea of dying his hair, Torren saw her reasoning, also he had never been able to grow a beard. Jeer had teased him for that, and it had brought Torren some joy amidst the troubling circumstances that they had found themselves in. being offered up as Penance for your country’s rebellion and jailed alongside hundreds of other people did not exactly scream joy.

Torren tried not to think about Jeer, but the man’s dark eyes, hair and skin flashed through Torren’s mind as he tried to go back to sleep. He could not have escaped without Jeer’s help. Unbidden tears rose to his eyes and a frog croaked in his throat. Jeer had sacrificed himself for Torren to get out.

The Strata had invaded Torren’s homeland of Crevnar and used the natural canyon caused by a fault line in the earth to split the continent in half, displacing hundreds of families and ending so many more. The Strata took over the southern half of Crevnar by force and when a resistance threatened them massacres of the Crev people had ensued, forcing the resistance to back down. As punishment The Strata called for a Penance. That had been three of the Crev people from Southern Crevnar and their very own prince, Torren. Disguised as a Southern Crev, Torren had boarded The Strata’s steel war carrier and had not looked back at his home. He knew the risks. That was why he had volunteered instead of his zealous older brother Zavan, who was the Crevnar crown prince and heir to the throne. When the Resistance had contacted the royal family about this opportunity to learn any weaknesses of The Strata, Torren knew that Zavan would try to find a way onto that carrier, but Torren beat him to it.

He was loaded onto the carrier with three of his fellow countrymen, outfitted with a shock collar and fed to a metal beastly contraption that shot them down into the inner workings of the steel ship. Torren had been separated and been given scouring soap and told to swab the decks and scour the engine equipment. Torren strained to hear anything about potential weaknesses but hadn’t learned anything yet.

As he worked, he noticed that he never worked alone. There was always one guard and one other person who was working with Torren. Every day was the same. The shock collar woke him up. He was escorted from his cell, past the screams of the punishment chamber and went to work on the decks and the engine, never seeing the light of day. One day Torren had been working on the engine. He had to climb a precariously steep and treacherous way to clean the top, the heat from the running engine burning any exposed skin. He had just whipped out a wet rag to clean when the ship pitched forward and Torren’s foot slipped. He fell. When Torren hit the floor, he skidded across the rough steel floor with the movement of the ship finally stopping when he hit the wall of the ship. His shock collar began to go haywire. Torren clawed at his neck to get the collar off but all that did was burn his hands. He opened his mouth to scream but nothing came out. He felt something strong grab his foot and jerk him forward. The shocks stopped at once.

Guards had come running. Torren’s vision faded but not before he had seen the elderly man swipe Torren’s hair from his face.

Torren had woken up later strapped in a chair. He had struggled, but the burn marks on his neck were still irritated. A captain had scolded him for trying to escape and showed off a piece of machinery unmatched by anything that Torren had seen in The Strata’s carrier. It had the shape of a dragon with a deep winding belly and a long neck with a gaping mouth. The captain had remarked on the vile contraption as though he was speaking fondly of a beloved pet. He had then demonstrated it on Torren. From the machine’s mouth had shot a small breath of yellow fog that’d engulfed Torren. He had tried to hold his breath but could not. It was as though the fog had pried its way into Torren’s lungs and pooled there. Until the captain had flipped a switch and that was when the burning began. All of the fog combusted, and heat seared the inside of his lungs and throat. With the flip of another switch a whirring began, and all of the heat had been violently yanked from his lungs simultaneously taking the air with it. Torren had screamed, but it burned and then there was no more air. His body had stopped working for what felt like an eternity until the captain punched Torren’s gut. Torren had gripped his seat and coughed as precious air returned to his lungs. The door had opened a moment later and two guards had come to drag Torren away. Torren barely remembered the hazy airless mindset he was in, but the captain had called it the Gasp.

That night a bowl had been left outside Torren’s Cell. Lukewarm soup had greeted Torren, and he had eagerly drank it in. The next morning Torren officially met Jeer, an elderly man from the Independent Islands.

Jeer had taught Torren, teased him, and tossed rags up to him. As they grew closer over the weeks Torren risked it all and decided to tell Jeer about an escape plan as well as a mostly true reason why he needed to get back. After meeting Jeer Torren realized that the Strata had been silently threatening and controlling the nobles of the Independent Islands by the trading of their people for peace. Throughout the cities on the Islands there were places called Underhomes where people of all ages could go to live and work if they had nowhere else to go. However, there were no wages or free will. The longer someone was there the more they had to pay if they wanted to leave. Children and elderly had to beg on the streets for money to buy their freedom back from the very people they gave it to in the first place. Every few months the homes would get crowded and the homes would shift residents. They were told that they were going to another home, but they were going to The Strata. Young men were forced into the military at any age between 13 and 35. Elderly were put to work and anyone who could not work was never heard from again. But why all of this? What did The Strata want?

A few days later, as Torren was cleaning, he overheard the guards discussing what they would do when they were in the Mainland Strata port. They were wary about going onto shore because if one of them came back with the plague they would be executed for acute stupidity in a crisis. It had all made sense then. The Strata mainland was dying in culture and population. They were invading and taking people to rebuild their empire.

Jeer agreed that this needed to be stopped. They devised a plan to escape. Jeer knew how to disengage the shock collar with magnets that he had smuggled from the engineer chamber. Jeer would cause a distraction, and Torren would get out through the air vent. It would be a tight fit, but he could make it. He’d pleaded with Jeer to come but the older man couldn’t move as well as he used to. Torren had hugged the man goodbye and thanked him by whispering a Crev farewell “May honor and valiant love follow you always and your feet never faint under the father’s sight.”

Jeer had told him that if they were still in the archipelago of the Independent Islands Torren should find transport to Crevnar in the Undercity Black market. There had been rumors of a fast pilot who could get the job done.

That night Torren had ditched the shock collar and tied one of the rags around his face as a mask. Using Jeers magnets Torren had fizzied the lock on the cell doors and crept along waiting for Jeer to cause the distraction. Right on queue the sound of a burst steam pipe had flooded the ship. Torren stayed in the shadows as the caped guards came from every direction. He had watched as they surrounded the pipe that had burst. One of them had dragged Jeer out of the shadows. He held a heavy tool in his hand. Torren had watched carefully where he stuck his feet.

Suddenly there was a sharp gasp, and Torren had whirled to find that when he had tiptoed in between two boilers he had stumbled upon a stowaway. He’d covered her mouth and whispered gently that he wasn’t going to her and pleaded with her not to scream. The room had gone too quiet but then there was the sound of a person wearing armor and fabric landing on the floor. In the small line of sight Torren had, he met eyes with the guard and also with Jeer as he landed a solid punch to the guard's face. Torren lurched forward to help him, but Jeer had jerked his head to Torren as the caped guard’s overpowered him. “To the Gasp with you, old man, and you won’t be leaving.”

Torren fought tears as he let go of the girl and scaled the latter. Up to the air shaft above. Torren had escaped that night with more knowledge of The Strata than he had wanted and fresh grief in his heart.

Now, lying in the cargo hold of the IzzyMae Torren mourned over his friend. Torren would not have made it out and should not have it hadn’t been for Jeer. Torren owed him his life and so much more.

Don’t worry, friend. He thought. I found your fast pilot, and now this war isn’t over, it's just beginning. With that, Torren fell asleep.