Halfway up the ramp leading from the stone chamber, Dovik paused. When he stepped again, his footfalls reverberated through the tunnel he walked up, bouncing off the stone and being enhanced by it somehow. Beyond, the roar of the crowd grew quiet, and the sound of his steps preceded him. At the far end of the tunnel leading up, a square of light opened, and with it, the hushed silence and echoing beat of his footfalls grew louder.

  White, clean light beamed down from a roof more than a hundred feet overhead. The chamber, the pit, was a cylinder crafted of unadorned stone that stretched more than a hundred feet across. The eight distinct wells of magically created light turned the flat stone floor alabaster in their radiance, and it is from one of those wells that Dovik walked out of. No trace of the ramp or doorway remained when he turned to look back the way he came.

  “Let us hear you roar!” a woman’s voice bounced off the high ceiling and reverberated loudly through the pit. The echoing cry that followed shook the stone itself. Then, Dovik noticed the audience.

  The smooth walls of the pit he stood inside of was broken in many places as large rectangles were cut away from the stone. Through the darkness of these windows, he could just make out hundreds sitting on risers built into the stone. The people ranged all kinds, from men and women, dwarven and all the myriad peoples who lived in Faeth, bored, excited, curious. They all had one thing in common. There was no mystery around their status in the city. Dovik stared into the shade and found a sea of silks, fine business attire, and accessorizing splashes from mostly the expensive part of the rainbow. The sound peeling from the throats of Faeth’s finest citizens was a jumbled mess that hit him in a wave. He couldn’t understand a word of it, but he didn’t like it all the same.

  “I knew you were holding back on me!” the woman’s voice called again, bouncing off the hard stone. She was so loud that Dovik first looked for her somewhere near the top of the chamber before he caught sight of her standing not too distant from him. He blinked, watching as an elven woman in a red dress walked across the stone toward him. She looked around, smiling up at the cheering crowd, waving at them as she approached. Her hair was like spun silver, and on her shoulder was perched a green lizard of some kind Dovik had never seen before. Its mouth hung open as it held its head pointed toward the ceiling. When the woman spoke again, it was from the lizard’s mouth that the sound came, and it was loud enough to carry throughout the pit.

  “It is the time of the night that you have all been waiting for,” she called, cheers answering her in reply. “On this week ahead of the Talos Moon celebration, we dust off many customs that we put away a year ago, and none is more exciting than The Run. Tonight, we have three people interested in trying to make their attempt. Each wants to prove that they are the strongest in the city, but to beat our fighters, they will have their work cut out for them. Isn’t that right?” Once more, the people above exploded in sound.

  Dovik watched the performance, unsure of how exactly he was supposed to act. He had come here for a fight. Well, really, he had come to win some money off people in a casino and found himself in a fight, but what he was witnessing now felt far more like a play. He hardly noticed when the woman stopped in front of him and closed the lizard’s mouth with her hand. The creature’s teeth clicked closed, and it made no further sounds.

  “Hello, your name is Dovik Willian. Yes?” the woman asked, offering him her hand.

  “Right,” Dovik slowly extended his hand, returning the greeting. “I’m sorry. I didn’t expect this amount of spectacle.”

  “You have not been to the pit before?” she asked.

  “First time.”

  The elven woman nodded like she might have expected that answer. “Very well then. I have to keep this short. The show must continue. My name is Galla, and I will be announcing all of the fights tonight. If you plan to make it all the way through The Run, we are going to be seeing a lot of each other.”

  “Here’s hoping.”

  “Adventurer?” Galla asked, looking down at the sword he carried.

  Dovik smirked, hefting the weapon. “How could you tell?”

  Galla ignored his joke. The woman was all business. “Well, no one dies here. That is the goal, at least. I’m certain that your weapon was dulled before you exited, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Sometimes, hopefuls will try to sneak a new weapon into these fights to gain an edge. We confiscate all storage items prior to our bouts for this same reason.”

  “So, I wasn’t being robbed earlier,” Dovik said, hitching a thumb back toward the unseen portal that led out into the pit. When they had asked him to turn over his storage ring earlier, he had been reluctant. At the end of the day, the contents weren’t worth nearly as much as the money he would stand to gain from doing this job.

  “Healers are standing by as well,” Galla said, ignoring his jest once again. “If anyone wearing a black robe appears in the chamber, stop fighting immediately. Other than that, not killing your opponent is on you. Remember, this is sport. You aren’t here to kill any monsters.”

  “Right,” Dovik’s smirk fell, and he regarded the elven woman again. It was there when he looked, sitting just behind her well-practiced mask of professionalism. There was nothing he could do to ingratiate himself with this woman. He might as well stop trying.

  “Do you have a moniker?” Galla asked.

  “What do you need one of those for?” he asked.

  “It works for the audience. Sometimes, it is hard to remember a name, but they won’t forget a good moniker. Most of the fighters here use one, and adventurers do the same, don’t they?”

  Dovik paused. If he was being truthful, he had been a bit jealous of Jor ever since one of those women he saved in that dungeon started calling him Galant. Names stuck to adventurers, and soon, half of the official papers the man signed with the guild had his moniker next to it. Something similar happened to Charlene; the name Nightmare stuck to her whenever she went to the guild. Both were equally unhappy about it, but Dovik had always liked the idea. Now, someone was asking him for a name like that.

  He considered a moment. What would be a good name for him? There were a lot of ways to come up with a good name, and his friends were firmly stuck in the powerful singular noun category. Dovik favored the adjective-noun type names.

  Steel wind? He thought. No, there has to be something better. Blue Blur? No, not for me.

  His smile reappeared as he settled on something. Without even considering it further, he spoke again to Galla. “Blue Wind,” he said.

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  The elven woman arched a brow, but shrugged and took her hand off the lizard’s mouth she was holding shut. Once again, the creature opened its mouth impossibly wide, and Galla’s words came spilling out of its throat. “Today, our first hopeful in The Run is a young adventurer who believes he is a match for our experienced fighters! His name is Dovik Willian, but the people at the Adventurer’s League know him better as the Blue Wind! Give this man a welcome to how we do things in the pit!” Once more, a roar of excited shouting followed her proclamation, and Dovik found himself liking the attention this time.

  Galla continued to walk away from him, gesturing forward toward the well of light pooling on the ground directly opposite Dovik. Before his eyes, a form began to appear out of the white stone that rippled like water. First came shining golden fabric that captured the light and reflected it back in a sparkling radiance. The fabric was followed an instant later by a mass of red fur that wore a golden suit and mask.

  “He is the Captain of the Skies!” Galla called as the crowd exploded in cheers once more, the sound only growing louder as more and more of the man walked up from an unseen ramp. “He is the Bearer of Golden Clouds. His shadow strikes fear into the prey that scurry beneath him, and his fists can shatter boulders! From the far-off lands of Ysllada comes a man raised by sky rays, and one who has made their dominance of the air a part of his identity. Let us hear a grand cheer for Raez, the Golden Ray!”

  Walking out into the light was a wolfman that stood over seven feet tall, his back erect and proud. Dovik had no idea what his people were called. Charlene would know; she was always raving about a restaurant run by one of these people from the other side of the world. Raez stood, draped in golden cloth that hugged his lithe body like a second skin, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination. He wore a golden mask that his canine ears had been tucked into, fitting inside two blocks of amorphous gold that stuck up from his head for a good ten inches. The man even wore a gold cape, one that was attached to his wrists so that it blossomed as he held his hands up and waved at the cheering crowd.

  The sheer oddity of what he was looking at stuck Dovik dead in his tracks. There was no other word for it than bizarre. He vaguely remembered hearing something about sky rays before. They were massive animals more than a hundred feet across that only lived in the highest layers of the sky. You couldn’t find one less than ten miles from the ground. Once, he had seen the aquatic brethren of the sky rays, manta rays, but he could never have thought up the costume Raez wore.

  As the wolfman spoke with Galla, his voice being amplified by the lizard as well, going on about some threats about what he was going to do to Dovik, Dovik didn’t hear him at all. He was too busy looking down at himself.

  “Should I have dressed up?” he asked himself.

  He had dressed up, but those clothes were ripped and torn from the beating he had taken in the alley. If he wasn’t in the habit of carrying around his combat gear with him in his storage ring, he would have had to fight in a torn suit. As it was, the cerulean jacket and light armor he wore beneath it felt too subdued for whatever it was that was going on here. He felt like an actor who forgot to change before coming on stage.

  “And with that,” Galla said, her voice picking up in volume. “We are ready to begin the first match! Competitors, prepare yourselves. Your fight begins in ten, nine, eight…” the woman continued to count down.

  Dovik snapped his attention up to where Raez, the Golden Ray, was putting a clawed hand to the white stone at his feet and bending over in a sprinter’s stance as the woman next to him continued to count. Dovik caught the flame burning inside the man’s chest, flaring just an instant before a silvery aura of magic spilled off his body, stretching out around him but never making it further than ten feet from him.

  A close-ranged combatant, Dovik figured. Good.

  Dovik spun one sword in his hand as he pulled his other from its scabbard. The sword in his right hand was a fine thing, eminently sharp and endowed with powerful reinforcement magics. The one in his left was a mirror of the other, a copy created by the ring he had bound to his soul as an artifact. Blue light rippled off of Dovik’s skin as he called his own soul presence into the pit. His stretched further, able to make it a good twenty-five feet from him with his current strength, but he knew that reach wasn’t everything.

  It was a general rule that the shorter the range of a magician’s soul presence, the more powerful the effect. His was middling in that regard, but he had no complaints about its potency. Still, that did not make him any less wary of his opponent.

  “Begin!” Galla’s voice bounded off the stone walls as she jumped away from the beginning melee.

  Across the stone from him, Raez wasted no time, his powerful legs uncoiling like springs as he shot forward toward Dovik. The issue, as he quickly found, was that Dovik Willian was no longer where he had been standing.

  The flat edge of Dovik’s saber came down on the wolfman’s back before a second in the combat had passed. Dovik’s considerable strength drove down on the lunging Raez, driving him into the ground. Raez’s chin cracked against the stone, his barrel-chest following it a moment after as he flipped forward over himself. Dovik let the man spin away from him as his feet clapped to the ground. Energy thrummed through his hand as he looked on at the warrior picking himself up off the ground.

  “You’re fast,” Raez said, turning and wiping a smear of blood off his chin. “You won’t catch me like that again.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Without giving any warning, Dovik activated the ability granted him by the essentia of space, vanishing from the spot he stood and appearing behind the wolfman. Raez was right. As Dovik lashed out with his saber once again, Raez spun, his claws lashing out to deflect Dovik’s weapon. The wolfman’s claws caught only empty air. An instant later, Dovik’s saber landed once more on Raez’s back. The blow was only enough to make Raez stumble forward a step, spinning and lashing out with claws that streaked sunlight.

  The wolfman once again lost his prey. Raez’s silver aura flared, igniting the air in the wake of his claws, burning with an intensity that made Dovik wonder just how safe these combats really were. However, around the silver aura, Dovik’s cerulean one sat comfortably, and inside its field, he could appear and disappear at will.

  As Raez floundered, lashing out and trying to catch the man that was appearing and disappearing around him, Dovik never stopped moving. His sabers landed like hammers against the incredibly tough body of the magician in front of him; each strike sounded like two boulders crashing together. Dovik felt it building with each blow he landed in rapid succession, a store of energy thrumming up his arms as he continued to build momentum. After twenty blows, he had it; he had enough power.

  Raez grew bright, his entire body shining like the sun itself, and Dovik lost sight of him inside the well of brilliance. Raez, the Golden Ray, lunged forward, his claws trailing sunlight as he drove them toward the blinded man. But Dovik didn’t need to see with his eyes. Weeks of unintentional training had helped him hone his perceptions of the soul. He recognized the instant the wolfman felt elation at having caught his enemy, and in the moment that elation turned to aggression, he teleported away.

  Blind, Dovik appeared on the right side of the flame he watched, his twin sabers striking out with all the built-up momentum he had collected over the short fight. Magic exploded as the blades made contact with the surprised fighter in front of him. A wave of force peeled away from the blades of his sabers, cracking into Raez, driving him from his feet and throwing him twenty feet across the stone.

  Dovik panted, gasping as he tried to catch his breath. His heart was pounding in his chest louder than he had ever heard it before, and he felt like he couldn’t suck down enough air to make any kind of difference. Slowly, the blinding white began to recede from his eyes, and in the dead quiet of the pit, he made out the form of the golden Raez lying on the stone in front of him. Gasping for air, he started to smile before the wolfman threw his hand up in the air in a fist. The crowd watching the fight cheered so loudly as Raez slowly climbed back to his feet that you would have thought the whole chamber was going to come apart.

  “I won’t go down that easily,” Raez said, sneering at Dovik.

  The man was right, again. For the next five minutes, Dovik moved like a tornado, appearing and disappearing around the man as he struck out with his weapons. Raez’s wild swiping claws did not reach him. When the wolfman took to the air, he found it a poor idea as Dovik knocked him to the stone far below. When he called on sunlight to extend the reach of his claws, he only spurred Dovik to push himself faster. By the time the fight was through, half of his abilities remained unshown. In the end, it took eight explosions of Dovik’s momentum to make the man stop standing back up.

  A man and a woman dressed in black crowded around the fallen Raez as he lay on the stone. Raez was breathing and speaking with the pair, but Dovik couldn’t hear any of it. Sweat ran over his face in rivulets as he kneeled on the rock, staring down at the dark splatters of moisture on the ground in front of him. His heart would not stop hammering. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t control his breathing. He gasped, trying to suck in air, but all of the calming techniques he knew weren’t working. What was happening to his body?

  “A spectacular debut for the Blue Wind!” Galla called up the spectators as they cheered. “We might have a true contender on our hands.” Behind her, the two dressed in black got Raez to one of the pools of light where they slowly disappeared down an incline. “However, if we are going to get through all of this tonight, we can’t stop now. There are nine more fights left for the Blue Wind to prove himself. So, let’s keep this rolling.” Galla gestured toward one of the other wells of light, where another figure was already beginning to appear.

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