The Exodus Sagas: Book I - Of Spiders And Falcons by Jason R Jones Page B

were lined like the deep city of Unlinn, chiseled stones, manmade, and not natural. Saberrak smiled as he moved quicker now, he thought of how he fled a city under the ground to escape to a city built underneath a city on the surface. Regardless of his ironic conclusions the smells of troll could not be denied as the beast sniffed the air. And the blood. The gray warrior could distinctly, eyes focusing and caution taking his movements down, sense the odors of fresh blood, none like he had ever been near or passed before. His breath now visible from his bull nostrils, Saberrak crept with a silence only his breed could claim.
    The violence sounded brutal, and was just as savage to his eyes once he peered around the side of a broken wall. Glowing streams of white light forced down into this perfectly round pit. Trolls, three of them, at least two feet taller than the horned gladiator, swarmed about a man of incredible size for a human. He stood the same height as Saberrak and looked just as muscled. His long beard stretched over his dirt covered chest. Chained to pillars of stone at least eight feet across, this man stood silent and barely moved as claws from the horrid troll cowards ripped his flesh spilling blood from dozens of wounds. His only motion was to look up, meeting Saberrak’s gaze from fifty or more feet away, while he had barely even glanced around the wall for more than a few moments. He knew Saberrak was there. Those eyes, glowing blue, like light shone from within, inhuman, yet a man for certain being ripped apart and staring at the gray minotaur with effervescent blue eyes. The sickly green and deformed cowards continued pleasuring themselves with the torture of this man who was chained with restraints that could hold a giant. The maiming continued and Saberrak crept closer, unable to release his eyes from the stare across the room, gripping his axe in one hand and the chain and hook in the other.
    From behind in a rush of echoed stampeding, the hooves of a white minotaur broke the silence and Saberrak’s unknown approach. Blood covered and screeching in their bestial troll tongue, the three wretched deformities, green and warted, turned to see an albino minotaur charge into the pit with its head down and great curved scimitar in its hands. They also saw the gray gladiator, positioned on the other side of the entry, whip out his grappling hook round the charging beast’s horns. The hook caught its eye and lodged deep into the skull. Saberrak raised his arm and planted his feet forward, lifting the white off the ground from its own momentum. It roared in pain and thrashed, reaching to get the hook from its deep embrace. With two calculated steps, watching his foe reach for the huge curved sword, the gray warrior struck down with his double edged axe into his foe’s chest and buried it deep through bone and vitals. He raised his weapon again, this time bringing it down across the first gaping wound. Blood puddled into the air and landed with a quick splatter. More blood poured from the X on the twitching albino’s chest and Saberrak crouched, head lowered, eyes fixed upon the trolls that he assumed would come for a meal. The gladiator whipped the chain free from his adversary’s horns and began spinning it playfully as he approached the slope down.
    Saberrak felt no fear, not a tremble, he had fought trolls in the arena and ones with armor and spikes adorning their soft yet strong figures. He knew where to hit a nine foot troll, and that was in the back or through the side with something sharp and heavy. The gray had been told that the only part of a troll that was bone was the spine, the rest, including the skull, was just cartilage and prone to regrow given enough time. The only way to put one of these swamp colored, black-toothed, razor clawed fiends down for good was to cut through that spine. The first two came directly, screeching to the third back and forth in whatever hissing language that they used.