The Arena by R. B. Ellis

Author:R. B. Ellis [Ellis, R. B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Epic, Dark Fantasy, Action & Adventure
ISBN: 9781734371710
Google: FYfGzAEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Mage Publishing, LLC
Published: 2020-05-17T23:00:00+00:00

14

The Artist with the answers

V aleina watched her father—a short man with trimmed hair and a steady hand—tap his pointing finger along the spines of books upon the shelves, titled document bindings, and random pieces of parchment in his shop for scribe services and official documentation. The night air blew cool through the opened windows, swaying the curtains but not so belligerent as to disturb the candles or the pages of all the open books.

She had tried speaking to him, but he silenced her with inarguable logic. It never failed: Amos amused her with his wit, his cunning, and his insightful persona—even if at times he was snide. She took the advice of her father, quieting herself, and scanned his bookshelves and documents. Most were legal texts and scrolls pertaining to marriage, land holdings, arena contracts, and common law.

She withdrew a mammoth-sized book labeled Marriage from a wall-to-wall shelf and opened the ending pages of the book, a great many blank. The entries from the Choosing had yet to be entered, which told her that her father had been busy as of late. Very busy, seeing as his assistant hadn’t done so either. He had a fortnight following the Choosing to complete the records. It would be years before the city needed the next edition. She extracted another book of similar size and flipped to a page with writing on it. She finally made it to the page for which she subconsciously searched. Her marriage, written in her own father’s hand:

Be thee wed on this 11th Cycle:

43.11.9. Rovert Sangr Orik & Valeina Elydian Varos.

43rd Coming, 11th Moon, 9th Day , Valeina repeated. She and Rovert had been the only match allowed to marry during that cycle. None wed under the moon which the chancellor wished to marry, not the city or the country until the next cycle—it was meant to be a respectful notion. But Valeina didn’t care about that. She kept at the “43” in the “43rd Coming,” counting the years. Life existed long before her. Why were the years so low? They should’ve been on their 4,000th Coming. Why hadn’t she questioned it before?

“Why does our history only date back fifty years?” she asked.

He sighed a frustrated smile at the surrender of his search. He hopped from the stool to the wood flooring and said, “Our history is much older. Things have only been recorded for that long, or have been mandatory to record. We’ve no extensive documents, save marriage and legal, contractual agreements with the council. We’ve no historical records. Nothing to annotate, save a single major battle. The arena founding marked the beginning of our ‘history.’ Prior to that, we’ve only kept track of the lineage of noble birth and the Founding Fathers. But some of the Fathers’ bloodlines have been lost.”

A convenient structure to hide the past. Everything seemed centralized around the arena.

Valeina had asked for her father’s help to find Oreceron but hadn’t revealed the nature of the object for which they searched. She

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