A Warrior's Redemption (The Warrior Kind)
A Warrior’s
Redemption
Book One
of
The Warrior Kind
Guy S. Stanton, III
Words of Action
Copyright © 2013 by Guy S. Stanton, III.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
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A Warrior’s Redemption/ Guy S. Stanton, III. -- 1st ed.
ISBN 978-0-9910565-0-7
Table of Contents
Dedicated to my wonderful
wife. You’re the best! You’ve always
been there believing in me and inspiring
me to do more. I couldn’t have made it
without you Honey. 143
― The Map of the Ancestor’s World
A long time ago…..
The Prelude
In the distant past there was a tribe of people on Earth called the Vallian. They were warriors, a people of the sword and they lived by honor and the integrity of their belief in the Creator of all life.
The world was changing all around them as it drifted more and more from the old ways of the beginning of time.
Their enemies hated them for their stubbornness not to change and go along with the wicked tide of man’s fall from grace with their Creator.
The Vallians prepared in secret to do the only thing left for them to do, leave Earth the first world. Sensing that a judgment was coming they prepared a way to escape the catastrophe that they felt had become inevitable, given the conditions surrounding them of the fallen peoples of Earth. With their preparations complete they left the place of their creation, two hundred years before the global flood sent by the Creator to destroy the earth save for one man’s family still living upon it, who was found to yet be righteous and of pure blood lineage.
The Vallians traveled far and long through the galaxies of the Creator’s handiwork until they came to a planetary system where they decided to make a new home. They were not the only ones there though. Other peoples from Earth in the more distant past, had found the series of worlds in this distant galaxy first and had settled there.
The Vallians claimed their spot in this new realm of space and had peace among their generations for over three thousand years in which they grew and prospered into a powerful nation above any other.
They made a mistake though and replicated the evils and fallen natures that they had once escaped from on Earth and an enemy, with a grudge three thousand years in the making, had no pity upon them. War broke out and millions upon millions died of the Vallian kindred. They could not win a war they had not been prepared for and so a surviving remnant of their once proud people fled the galaxy.
They knew nowhere else to go other than the galaxy where man was first created. They found the Earth and its resurgent peoples after the great flood a vastly different place than they had left. They had left in 2150 BC. And now they were back and the year was 1350 AD. So much had changed that they felt they could not stay, but they took the words of the Creator, which had been spoken in their absence and recorded, with them in their journey to find a new home where they could both hide from their past and forge a new future.
They found a solitary, uninhabited world, not far from Earth and this is where they settled. They abandoned their technology for fear of replicating the mistakes of the past, but inevitably civil war broke out and the Vallian people fractured apart and the new world became a place of factions, warring against each other in bitter envy and hatred of belief, where once had been brotherhood and unity.
Over seven hundred years passed as life continued on, bitterly contested among the descendants of the Vallian. They as a people had now split apart into many and were without any clear knowledge of the grandness of their ancient past. They had no real hope for what lay ahead in their embittered views of what life had to offer. They only fought to survive as brother warred against brother. However, there comes a chance in every people’s existence to make a change for righteousness and to adopt the justice of the Creator’s path.
One of the factions of people broken off from the tribe of the Vallians still adhered and fought on among their kindred to see this accomplished and for unity in belief in the Creator of all life to once again be restored, but they needed a leader to help accomplish this quest and one day they found him.
Chapter One
Hell is Hot
The sun was hot and I felt a drop of sweat make its way down through the grime of days of built up dust that I hadn’t so much as had a chance to wash off yet. I was doing well to still be alive, but I hated the smell of stale sweat that I reeked of.
Still it was better to be alive than a rotting corpse left out for the vultures to dine out on somewhere in a lonely gully. I didn’t have any spare water to wash with anyway now that I did have some time to think about how bad I smelled.
Water at the moment was the most pressing problem I was faced with. The Hagathic Wastelands were just that, a wasteland without drinkable water. It was a good place to lose a posse of enemy riders in or die of thirst. Take your pick, but I didn’t want any part of either option.
To the east about fifty miles off was the edge of the Attorgron forests. There was good water to be had there and it was closer than the other source of water I was heading for, but it came with its own problems. For one my pursuers would be expecting me to head off for water there, not to mention the cover that the forest could offer us as we made
our way north, but running into the Attorgron people would be unavoidable at some point along the way.
To them I was a wanted man with a bounty on my head that made me more than worth the trouble it was to them to hunt me down and stick one of those poison darts they were so fond of into me. No thanks; I’d take my chances out in the open as opposed to dying from some poison burning my in
sides out.
Decidedly all my options were somewhat grim. When had it ever been any different? Not for a long time.
I glanced back through the shimmering heat waves over the way we had come. I didn’t see anything amiss so I decided to stay where we were for a while longer. Both I and the boy needed the rest.
It would have been nice to get some sleep, but the thought of a Zoarinian lance point being rammed through my middle, while I slept kept my eyes open. I hadn’t seen any signs of visible pursuit in two days, but I could feel them out there all the same. It was like an itch that wouldn’t go away.
Rats! I smelled and now I could add itching to the list of maladies of neglect that I was suffering under. The chase was definitely starting to get to me in a bad way. Going without sleep for days and being responsible for a kid would do that to you.
How had I got suckered into doing this fool’s errand anyway? It was one thing to be a man alone and be chased, but carrying along a kid laid down a whole new array of prob
lems to contend with. I didn’t know anything about kids!
Taking this kid along hadn’t been a part of the plan, but he was here and that was that. A chase was tough on man and horse alike, but on a kid it had to be especially tough and I was grateful that this kid exhibited a lot of toughness.
The kid’s toughness reminded me of my own tough childhood back in the lowlands of the Hills of Ernor, near the Zoarinian city of Cassis.
My family was not of Zoarinian lineage or of the Ernorian people either. My father had brought us to the hill country to get away from some difficulty of the past. No one knew us there from before and that seemed to be what my parents liked most about the place, only I could tell that my father hadn’t been happy to be there. The land of his birth, which he would often wistfully look off towards in the north, was where his heart seemed to have stayed. The Ernor Hills were the closest he could come to the mountains of the Val
ley Lands, which could be seen in the distance on a clear day.
My brother and I had grown up largely alone and had few friends as our parents kept us from mingling with the local people for the most part. The most we had seen of the out
side world was when harvest time came and we would float our harvest on rafts down the Tegre River to the hungry markets of the Zoarinians farther down the river.
Though my brother and I were kept from much interac
tion with others we still had the love of our parents and the security of the home they had provided us with.
Those had been golden days, but I hadn’t known it then. Those
kind
of days weren’t likely to be seen again by either myself or the poor lad, who lay curled up in a ball over by the small fire fast asleep.
The journey from Kharta had been rough. We had been chased from the onset and it had been a near thing for a while before I was able to buy us some time and distance by losing our pursuers temporarily in a swampy stretch of territory that I was familiar with. The boy had stood up to the task remarkably well and my respect for him had grown dai
ly. I hadn’t directly told the boy yet that his father was dead, but I didn’t think I had to as he had already guessed it. I’d seen him crying quietly at times, mostly at night when he had thought that I wasn’t looking. I had respected his wishes and had not let on that I had noticed him crying.
I decided to let the boy sleep a little longer. It would be better to travel after dark now anyway. Settling into a semi more comfortable position against the bank of a long dead stream I continued to rest. I let my mind wander back to the past again, when I had lost my family and the innocence of my youth.
All I had left of my past was my name, Roric Fortigar, the son of Lorn and Ni’isha Fortigar. My brother’s name had been Faron. While we had lived peacefully enough in the Hills of Ernor the world around us was not so settled. The world outside was cruel and merciless and grew more so with every day that passed.
I had been naïve to the ways of the world, until one day when it made its harsh intrusion in a way that changed my life forever.
My parent’s raised my brother and I
differently than the hill people around us, who had in large part adopted the Zoarinian way of life. Unlike our neighbor’s kids, we were taught the old ways. We learned of the Great Creator, who had made all that we saw around us. We learned how man had fallen and how he had been redeemed and much more.
