Infinity Blade 01- Awakening

these people had toasted his bravery. They’d sent him off with a feast and fanfare. They’d praised him and lauded him. They didn’t want me to win, he thought, looking into those hostile eyes. They’re afraid. They spoke of freedom, but they don’t know what to do with it.
    “You should go quickly,” Renn said. “We’ve sent word to Lord Weallix, inviting him back.”
    “Him?” Siris demanded. “You’d serve that rat ?”
    “Our best hope now,” Master Hord said, “is to look cowed, placated. Dominated. When the other gods come searching, they must not find a town in rebellion.”
    “It is the best way, Siris,” Master Renn said.
    “You’ve been slaves so long,” Siris spat, “you don’t know how to be anything else. You are fools! Children.” He was shouting, he realized. “After all of these centuries, time after time feasting and dreaming, now you throw it away! Now you throw me away!”
    The elders shied back before his rage. They seemed frightened of him. Terrified.
    Siris formed fists, but then found his rage evaporating. He couldn’t be angry at them. He could only pity them.
    “Fine,” he snapped, moving to pick up his gear. “Fine, I’ll go.”
    An hour later, Siris lifted up an old, worn axe. Its blade was chipped, the haft grayed and weathered with time. He hefted it, judging its weight, and tried to ignore the tempest of emotions inside of him. Betrayal. Frustration. Anger.
    His training let him banish all of that for a moment, as he stared at the axe. In his mind, he saw the ways he could use it to win a fight.
    Smash his foe at the knees, then bury the axe into his chest as he fell . . .
    Hack at the neck, coming in furiously, using the long haft for additional reach . . .
    Bash the axe against an opponent’s shield time and time again to throw him off balance, then step back and strike unexpectedly from the right . . .
    He raised the axe . . .
    . . . then swung it down at a log resting on the stump before him. He hit the log off-center, and the axe bounced away, as if the wood were stone. Siris growled and swung again, but this time only managed to hack a chip off the side.
    “Damn,” he said, resting the axe on his shoulder. “Chopping wood is a lot harder than it looks.”
    “Siris?” a shocked voice asked.
    He looked up. A middle-aged woman stood on the pathway up to the forested hut, clutching a bucket of water. Her hair was starting to silver, and her clothing was of the simplest wool. His mother, Myan.
    His mother would know what to do. Myan was solid , in the same way that an ancient tree stump was solid, or the balanced boulder outside of town was solid. He’d tried to push that over as a child. Though it seemed delicate, he hadn’t been able to shove it an inch.
    “Mother,” he said, lowering the axe. She hadn’t been in the hut when he’d arrived a half hour ago. Fetching water. He should have known. That task he’d always done for her, as the jog to the river and back fit well with his training.
    “Siris!” she said, putting down the bucket. She hurried to him, stepping with a limp from her fall ten years back. She took his arm tenderly. “You saw reason, then? You actually refused to go to the God King’s castle? Oh, lights in the heavens, boy! I never thought you’d come to your senses. Now we . . .”
    She trailed off as she saw the object that Siris had set down beside the woodpile. The Infinity Blade. It almost seemed to glow in the sunlight.
    “Hell take me,” Myan whispered, raising her hand to her mouth. “By the seven lords who rule in terror. You actually did it? You killed him?”
    Siris swung the axe down again on the log. He hit it off-center again. It’s the grain, he thought. I’m trying to hit it across the grain, instead of with the grain.
    Strange. He could kill a man seventeen ways with this axe. He could imagine each one in perfect order, could feel his body moving through those motions. Yet he couldn’t chop wood. He’d never had a chance to try.
    “So you didn’t see reason,” Myan said.
    “No,” Siris replied.
    His mother had never wanted him to go. Oh, she hadn’t been overt about her displeasure. She hadn’t wanted to undermine what the rest of the town—the rest of the land itself—saw as his destiny and her privilege. Perhaps she’d sensed, in some way, that it had been his destiny. He’d never given serious thought to fleeing. That would have been like . . . like climbing the