RUMPELSTILTSKIN RETELLING.
"I challenge you to find my name, princess. Three tries." Light flickers beneath the recesses of his mask, the wooden fangs and shadowed eyes. "Think you can beat me?"
***
A witch doctor, user of dark magic, terrorizes a...
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I bow my head, brandishing my favored weapon of choice, my buzdygan, or a lethal flanged mace that I've lovingly named Baqir, which means "one that can rip open". It was less graceful than the regular curved blades of the Empire. I didn't want a sword though. That was the goddess of death's favored weapon.
And I wanted nothing to do with that so-called legend.
"General," I look to General Sol, twice my age with black braids down her back and soft brown eyes and skin. But her appearance is anything but a common village girl like her mother. An axe is embedded in her right arm. She was a failed science experiment from the Lunes, who gave her far freer will than they should have. Half her body is twisted into iron and heated, enchanted metal. Her opponents call her General Tin Can behind her back.
They don't for long once she hears about it and breaks their legs.
"I saw you training. My father gave you a good gift, no? Only seventeen." She smiles favorably upon me. Her father, Cato, the god of war. Her mother, a mere human villager. In the First Divine War, the god of war was imprisoned and beaten half to death. We bond over it, both of us hating the goddess of death and her relations.
We bond in our hatred for the gods the Empire seems to worship so much.
"I think I'll be able to beat you in a fight soon," I poke teasingly at her stomach. "Your wife's fattening you up."
"My wife, yes," Sol frowns at me. "I haven't been home in a while. Kura, she sent a distressing report from the village of Raja. Children have been disappearing. It concerns me." It makes me uneasy. General Soleil rarely looks worried. When a golem broke through her encampment, she laughed as she slew it. For her to be worried....
"Send my squadron to Raja." I try to hide my excitement behind a mask of disciplined indifference. "We'll find the missing children and put an end to whatever mischief goes on there."
"Are you challenging me, for once, princess?" Sol snorts.
I laugh, walking towards the training yard, picking up my pace so I sail past her. "It makes for a nice change, no? And besides, I'm ready to face real evil."
Sol puts her hand on my shoulder, her axe-arm hugging close to her side. "I see myself in you, Arni. You want a destiny that's free from the gods. But that's just the thing, you see." She smiles, looking to the horizon, to the world past the Lioness Gate. "One way or another, the gods make their mischief." Her hand slides off my shoulder, the muscle that steadily stretching and repairing. My buzdygan swinging at my side. "I hope you aren't like me."
And then she walks away.
The daily patrol isn't exactly a struggle. A monster raid on a village in the more fertile areas of Rahasia, where the grains and the seeds grow. I beat the shit out of my opponent, a golem brought in from terrorizing a local farm. I beat the golem until it's nothing but rubble. Swinging at its ankles. Its arms. Once, when it roared, now it only whimpers.
"Stop whining..." I mutter, not knowing whether that was meant for me or the golem. And then I swing for its head, ending it.
"You're crazy." My squad mates clap me on the back, commending me.
"Not enough." I shoot back, feeling in a foul mood. All my life, I'd looked up to Soleil, a woman general who overcame brutal odds. A bloody parentage of a village girl and a god of war. Was twisted into a half-metal beast. Killed the leader of the Lunes in revenge. She was everything Ode Ngayoh was not. She didn't serve the gods, she served herself.
The gods gave me gifts when I was three.
I wish they hadn't. Maybe then I'd stop accepting challenges.
Maybe then I'd stop trying to prove that I didn't need them.
