Intermission
Why are you still reading this?
The man opened his eyes. Before him was a grand chandelier full of lit candles, forming a large six sided star. Or rather, the chandelier was above him. The man couldn’t move, his body held in place by a mysterious powers. However, he was calm and at ease. He had been through much trials and tribulations, being restrained and humiliated was nothing new to him.
With nothing he could do, the man thought about his life so far. Being sold into slavery as a boy, he was worked hard by his taskmasters, spending every sunlit hours in the field tolling the land. When night falls, he will be lucky if his taskmasters spared him a beating for his tardy progress during the day and allowed him time to rest. If he was unlucky, the master himself will summon the boy to his chambers.
The boy didn’t thought of that as being unlucky, but saw it as a chance instead. He did his best to please the master, and managed to elevate himself eventually from a slave to the master’s adopted son when he was a youth. Once he achieved that status, the boy laced the tobacco of the master with slow acting poison, rendering him bedridden.
The youth left the management of the estates to the clerk as he did not trust his own education and sought out a new host to leech off once the fortune of his new family dries up. Attending various balls, he sucked up to the hosts and eventually got into the servitude of a powerful woman as her plaything with the official title of knight.
When his father died, the youth inherited barely anything as he basically ignored the estates, allowing the clerks to dwindle his wealth away through corruption and mismanagement. It matters not, as the youth had gotten what he wanted, the destruction of the house he hated so much, and a bright future with his mistress.
The youth trained and studied hard to be a competent knight and commander, and eventually became a man. Using his wiles and willingness to undermine his opponents, as well as the backing of his mistress the man finally got his own personal command of troops. And then he died.
Feeling the powers restraining him subside, the man sat up and looked at the brown skinned woman staring at him. Her braided black hair hanged over her right shoulder and she had a red dot on her forehead. She wore a purple robe that covered her entire body, but left her left shoulder exposed.
The woman spoke, but the words the man heard doesn’t match the way her lips moved. Something was altering the words, allowing the man to understand the woman.
“Greetings, my friend. I am the princess of Nigerea, Akuti. We have summoned you to my world in the time of great crisis as foretold by our ancestors. If you will help us in our endeavour, we promise to return you to your world with a huge reward that will more than make up for your effort and time. May I have your name please, great hero?”
The man smiled. He knew that this was a scam, that he will never return to his old world since he was dead there. An offer that was too good to be true was usually so. For now, he decided to play along with this so called princess of Nigerea.
“Muh name is... Ascent.”
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