Chapter Thirteen

The arena that Noah was competing in was filled with healthy green grass and small thorn plants combing the side walls. There were also dozens of stone structures placed around randomly and throughout many parts of the arena were small canals with a constant stream of water running through them. The Tri-elements Arena, this place was called. And now Noah knew exactly why. It favored nature, stone, and water magicians, but this didn’t matter to Noah.

His first opponent was a man around his age who seemed to be bursting with confidence. At the start of the fight Noah used a huge sum of his own energy to shoot out a beam of lightning aimed for his opponent’s pillar. The attack itself had taken him several seconds to prepare, but only a couple to destroy the pillar and win him the match.

He immediately felt the strain of that attack and almost fell to his knees until his hand went into his pocket and touched the stone. His energy returned to him right away, giving him the strength to keep standing and he noticed his opponent staring wide eyed with disbelief. He kept his hand on the stone as he walked back to the waiting room until he was fully recharged.

After leaving the arena Primordious said to him, “Good, but next time summon an elemental or two to do that. It will take longer, but just draw from inside yourself and your surroundings to save you from killing over.”

Noah sighed and said, “There is just no pleasing you.”

His next fight Noah did as Primordious said and within a minute was able to summon an electric serpent without almost falling to his knees. His opponent got in a few good hits on his serpent but it was tough and managed to destroy the pillar shortly and then Noah returned it to the card so it could rest. He already knew what Primordious was going to say and beat him too it, “I will have to summon at least two elementals from now on, one for diversion, and another for destroying the pillar.”

“Very good,” Primordious said, pleased Noah was finally learning.

Through his next four fights Noah was able to win before the opponent did too much, using only a storm wyvern for distraction and the other electric serpent for offense. His opponents were not completely helpless and managed to wear down his wyvern and serpents, so in order to preserve them he had use two storm wyverns for his last fights while he destroyed the pillar himself.

That first day was tricky, but not something Noah would call too challenging. With the stones’ healing powers he was able to go far past the normal parameters of magicians and use the energy inside himself for immensely fast summoning speeds and then hold the stone to keep from being too exhausted to do anything more. He had a huge advantage over other players who had to draw from their surroundings naturally to preserve their own energy, in fact his advantage was so large he felt like he was cheating and the next day he signed up for four fights, but resolved not to use the stone.

When the time came for his fights Noah, without letting Primordious know, left the stone back in his room. The first match he summoned a storm wyvern much slower than before and when his opponent summoned her elementals and charged him, the storm wyvern was wiped out swiftly; it was too weak from the previous days fighting to handle so much on its own. It had managed to buy him enough time to summon the colossus which he nearly collapsed from doing so, this time he didn’t have the stone to save him.

Fortunately the thunder colossus was a powerful might on its own, and was able to quickly destroy the opponent’s pillar before she summoned anything too large to counter it. Primordious knew then that Noah left the stone behind and gave him hell for it but Noah argued, “That stone is as good as cheating, I may accept your help in battle and to gather other elementals to help us, but at the least I don’t want my victories to be a false gain. I will not rely on those stones to reach the top, even if it means I lose some battles.”

The two then said nothing more until the second battle came for Noah. He was still feeling very tired and his other elementals were too weak to fight for long. Just as well he couldn’t afford summoning them unless they were to do all the work. At this point he was so exhausted from using so much energy to summon the colossus too quickly that he needed to summon the colossus, Primordious, or even his ace the lightning dragon just to pull off a win here.

He knew he could rely on Primordious, but he worried for the elemental if he was forced to fight solo without much back up from Noah. He knew that the ancient elemental was living off of extreme borrowed time and worried for him; their time together bonded them to each other. And Primordious, strange as it was, is Noah’s friend, his only friend and he wouldn’t dare risk his life for his own sake of pride.

With nothing left to do Noah started backing from his pillar, he had to admit defeat this match. His opponent wasn’t sure if this was some kind of trick by Noah so the woman went on with summoning her defensive elementals then shortly after her offensive one, which was a single stone titan; a massive rock monster that shook the every ground with each step.

Noah waited for the stone titan to come over and destroy his pillar until with a flash of blue light, the lightning dragon shot forth from his belt and with a single electrical blast battered the stone titan aside and charged forth at the woman’s pillar. With a powerful blast of lightning shot from its mouth, that went right over the woman’s defenses it shattered the pillar and ended the match.

The lightning dragon returned to the sealed card after that and left Noah a little baffled. After collecting his rewards and returning to the inn he spoke to Primordious telling him to contact the dragon for him since he didn’t know how.

He waited alone in silence impatiently until Primordious finally answered him.

“Noah, I did the math,” he said. “You will have to compete and win at least four arena matches each weekend to gather enough points before the spring to get into the final tournament. If the coliseum points are what they were back in the city and offer four times the reward for wins than arena then those will help immensely but you still must compete in as many matches as you can and win.”

“Okay, so what if I don’t make it this year to the tournament finals?” Noah shouted within his head, which felt a little weird as he almost shouted it out loud to nobody in the room. “There is always next year and I told you before I don’t want to cheat or have to rely so much on another’s power to win. And you still have yet to fully tell me why were in a rush to infiltrate Ragnarock.”

With a heavy sigh Primordious said, “Alright, yes tomorrow I shall tell you everything, no more secrets no more holding back, but only if you allow Vereo, the lightning dragon, to help you as he sees fit. He understands the importance of this all which is why he has agreed to help us. I know you also considered leaving his card back for these next two fights but you take him with you, let him win these battles and then tomorrow after you’re rested when you are ready I will tell you everything….”

After some thought Noah reluctantly agreed and when the time for his next battles came he took only Primordious and Vereos’ cards with him. He told Primordious to have Vereo wait a little bit to at least make it look like Noah was summoning him after gathering a lot of energy to do so. And so Vereo did wait, not as long as Noah hoped but long enough for it not to seem so obviously suspicious. And without much trouble the lightning dragon won him his last two matches that day.

By then there were already rumors spread around the capitol about Noah. As he walked back to the inn people on the street time to time would look his way then whisper something that he couldn’t make out. He ignored them best he could and shut himself in his room the rest of the night. Sleep was difficult but at some point it came.

The next morning Noah woke up eager to see if Primordious would finally tell him the truth. He sat up in bed and called out, “Primordious are you there?”

After a short wait Primordious said, “Yes I am. I assume you want to hear my tale then? You want to know what we are fighting so hard to keep from returning?”

Without hesitation Noah said, “Yes.”

For several minutes after that Primordious was silent, gathering his thoughts. Noah waited patiently expecting something like this. Finally Primordious said, “In the time before elementals is where this all begins. I do not know why or how he found his way to your planet or realm but I know where he came from.

“A godly creature with no name so we call him, ‘the void ethereal’, since he came from an unknown void. Now why he was in that void in the first place I cannot say. When he came to your planet your lands were all connected into one big mass, created and shaped by the process of the planets core magma leaking into the ocean waters, hardening and conjoining, again and again.

“Something about this planet intrigued the void ethereal as he decided to stay here and spawn a new life; using nine pieces of himself he created slowly my species the Elementals. He based each of these nine pieces off of natural forces around your planet, such as water, or stone. The very first elementals he created were other ethereals made in his image as a sort of test, I was among the first ethereal he ever created.”

Noah sat back listening to Primordious tale’ unbelievable. All that Primordious was telling him was so unfathomable, but then again he was never fully a student of history, and some of the things Primordious was telling him connected to ancient beliefs that Bran told him about too. He listened intently to hear more never daring to interrupt.

“After many years the void ethereal had finished creating his kingdom of elementals, other creatures just like him in a sense. But he had one major problem with this planet now that he was finished, there were other species about it, intelligent ones, though devoid of powers like us; humans. And so the void ethereal resolved to wipe out humanity but by then some of you humans had absorbed certain powers from being around so many single type elementals, and thus the first magicians were born.

“The few of you that had magic within you were able to resist the void ethereal as he went around slaughtering your kind by the thousands, but it was a futile attempt as even though he was weakened, the void ethereal was too much for you to handle. The elementals though, the very species he created did not join him in this conflict like he demanded of us, and we simply wanted to explore this life that we had been given. And so our creator turned on us too sweeping through areas destroying all life around him.

“It was then that a legendary hero of our kind stood up and started rallying us all together, humans and elementals, to fight the void ethereal. I was his top commander and helped him engage in an all-out war with our creator. This war would inevitably shatter the single great land into three where on the continent you now call ‘Aeon Toris’ is where the war ended.

“With great sacrifice from both elementals and human alike we were able to seal away the void ethereal into the place from whence he came. But doing so cost us our legendary hero, commander, and my brother. Sometime after that I had my visions of the future, of what would come if we didn’t stop it; the void ethereal returning. I didn’t know how this would be until at the height of your magicians power the single guild Ragnarock rose up and slowly started changing the world into what it is today.

“No longer did you humans see us as another intricate species, but soon as tools for powering your work and homes, and as viscous monsters that kill any human on sight. And then somehow the guild Ragnarock began to manufacture these blank cards that you use to capture our kind with. By then I couldn’t travel far from the stone of ever life and could do nothing to investigate into this, but as time passed I soon realized that it would inevitably be Ragnarock which somehow brought the void ethereal back.

“I could do nothing on my own, but from my visions I knew I had to wait for you to come to the stone of ever life before I would be able to stop them. However I was able to get into contact with two former warriors that once fought under my command in the war. Two dragons by the name of Lienna, and Galrin, I told them of my vision of the void ethereal returning and they confided in me they also had a similar vision and too saw that a human child would come to aid them in stopping this from happening.

“I first thought that you were that same person, but they foresaw meeting him somewhere else and I knew that there was another. I believe they are both now working with this other human to also get into Ragnarock and stop them from summoning the void ethereal. That is why you must win the tournament this year, and secure your place within the guild, so we can stop them from summoning my creator.

“I can sense his power getting closer, and I fear if we don’t stop them this year we might not get a second year to ever try again. And when sealing the void ethereal away all those years ago I took a powerful blow from the creator; one that never fully healed, which is why I need the ever life stone so much.

“It’s the same reason we cannot charge at them full power, even with the dragons help we cannot face the army secretly built up at Aeon Toris. We need to destroy them from within if we want to have a chance at this working.”

Noah was astonished by all of this, he wasn’t sure how much of it believed, but he didn’t feel like Primordious was lying to him either. When he finally took it all in he said, “So that’s what this is all about, this is been your life’s mission since forever? Okay so say I believe all of this what if we fail and your creator does return?”

“Then he will kill us all,” Primordious said coldly.

After a few minutes of thought Noah said, “There was something else you said when we met, you had another objective?”

“Mine is a fading race,” Primordious said with deep sorrow in his voice. “We cannot reproduce like your species can and our energy slowly fades away as time passes, it won’t be long until we are gone from this world entirely and our magic with us. There is so few of us left now Noah, and I don’t want the rest of my species time to be spent in slavery.

“That is my other primary objective, to free all of the elementals for good, for our last couple centuries at most of life to be that of peace.”

Noah had nothing to argue about there, for is that not the right to every living creature. A laugh came over him, not of joy or madness but of irony. When he settled down he said, “You know it’s funny but I finally realize when we succeed in stopping Ragnarock, we’ll probably end up dismantling them. Furthermore they are the only guild capable of creating the cards to seal your kind away, as far as I know at least. And they are the only hosts for the sport, I also only see the referees that repair the pillars wearing Ragnarock uniforms.

“As soon as I reach the top, even if it is without my own power entirely I will descend back down to the bottom with nothing to hold me up there. With Ragnarock gone so will be the sport, and I will have to find some other job or something.”

“Are you reconsidering all of this?” Primordious asked, a little hostility in his tone.

“No, you’re right—your kind deserve freedom as much as my kind would, probably more since you’re going to go extinct with no hope. I promise you my friend when this is all over I will do whatever I can to help you free all the elementals, and find a way to make sure they stay free.”

After a short silence Primordious said, “Thank you Noah, you have a good heart.”

Noah shrugged and said, “Yeah well it took a great friend to bring it out in me. Anyway, we still have a lot of work to be done and the arena doesn’t open until weekends so I’m going to explore around a little.”