《The Green Prisoner》


 Prologue.

    Starriver City laid sleeping beside its eponymous water that drifted along through the city''s canal network and out toward the pastures far away. A meeting place of the peaceful folks of all walks of life, from the sprawling humans to the noble elves and even the peaceful variants of primitive orcs. It was a complicated city, with complicated problems.


    In the night, the city was calm, but not quiet. Even evil learned to conduct itself in relative silence. Many people were unwise to the true nature of their neighbors, or those who lived in the austere mansions of the noble quarter. If they could learn that truth, there would be misunderstanding and grief. If anyone saw it without the proper training to hand it, they would be cursed somehow just by knowing what could happen in the hearts of every creature.


    Those who kept the darkness segregated into the lonely night were the Knightguard. They were the proud defenders across the whole of the region, and the Starriver City Knights defended the people in the day and during the night. The patrolmen of the nightly hours dealt with far more danger than the men who were paid to stand at street corners in shining armor during the day, but they held no anguish over their positions. The pay was good and kept their families fed and sheltered, and it kept their city safe by their own hands.


    Johan von Claus was one patrolman, walking through the streets at night, an apprentice knight with incredible talent. His position was placed in trust, rather than as a languishing role of punishment some saw it to be. To be a knight after dark meant facing criminals directly, whether with a sheathed sword or the will to drive cold iron through a belligerent foe. In the end, they had to see justice be served, either by a straight blade or iron shackles.


    Despite his pounding headache, he kept up his patrol. Each sound that he heard in the dead of night, he heard double, first when it reached his ears and then again when it sank into his pounding brain. Even the clatter of his blade at his side had too much impact as he held onto it to keep it from clattering around. A knight with one hand on his sword was not a pleasant sight for any freely wandering person in the dark hours. It meant he was looking to use it.


    Johan was as disciplined as any other and continued his duties regardless of his headache. He would walk forward even if he had no legs to stand on, and he would fight even if his arms were gone. That was the resolve he had been trained with and raised with. First, out of desperation, to go hungry with pride so that his younger siblings could eat in his stead, and so his parents could work an extra day to try and feed them all again. Being a knight meant those troubles were far and distant to him. All he had to do was walk in darkness to keep his family in stable living.Stolen novel; please report.


    One sound irked him the most. It seemed to come from nowhere and split into his ears like a stake driving into the ground. It was the unmistakable sound of a struggle and a cry for help. The second time he heard it, he knew it was muffled. An active conflict. For a moment, his headache faded away as the presence of something more distressing held over his mind. His duty outweighed the pain.


    He charged into the alley and followed the noise to the scene of an ongoing disturbance. A sickening display of an awful power struggle was before him. He drew his sword, and its metal voice preluded his own unwavering command.


    "Halt!" he shouted. "I am a guard of the Starriver City knights, I command you to halt at once!"


    He could see, faded in just barely by the lights from the stars, the victim curled on the ground with a man hovering over him. The boy was at 8, or some other terribly young age, and his attacker was much older. He had the boy in a grip by his shirt, which he was forcing off with one hand while a knife was visible in the other to keep the boy under threat. Johan could see by the man''s ears and fair hair before he even turned to confirm it, that he was a half-elf.


    The man let the boy slip away from the distraction, and the young lad ran off into the dark before Johan could call him to his side. When the errant man stood up, he revealed himself as fully exposed from the front in a shameless way. His intentions were laid as bare as his crotch. All of his wild desire warped into a passionate hatred in an instant towards Johan, whose headache returned to pester him.


    "You bloody idiot," the man said. "Do you know who I am? Who you''re dealing with?"


    "A pervert," Johan answered.


    "A nobleman!" he retaliated. He waved his knife as he spoke, like a conductor to control the tone of his voice, as he shifted to a devious controlling tenor. "That''s right. You speak to the son of the man who helped build this magical city. I am beyond your mere concept of justice or law. I exist at a service far above your peasant station."


    "No," Johan refuted. "You live by the law as everyone else does. Noble or not, there is no excuse for what you''ve done. Only justice remains."


    The nobleman smirked deviously, and the very sight of his wicked grin twisted Johan''s mind with further painful collapse.


    "You''ll be the one," he warned, "inciting justice if you turn me in. I shall use the weight of my word and name to crush you and your entire family like bugs!"


    The man was walking forward with a knife out, and Johan could only hear a screeching pain in his ear. He did not see the political background of the foe before him or hear his threat that went beyond thuggish violence. As a knight, he had a duty to live so that he could protect others. So he took up his sword and struck the villain down. He enacted an ultimate justice, he fulfilled his duty through his own sufferage of pain¡­

 Chapter 1.

    It was a bright day. Few clouds and a timid wind that swept down from the high vaulted open-air roof of the arena and swept a pleasant breeze across the blood-stained sandy floor. In the middle of that floor, looked down upon by a crowd of intrigued and invested folks from all backgrounds in appropriate placements, was a Stage. A wooden platform that stood out among the sand as unnatural and purposeful.


    Two doors faced either end of the stage, barred with thick iron gates that slid open to the buzzing delight of the audience. One man came out in armor. It was dark and drab looking, but well kept and maintained a firm polish by disciplined hand. Upon the hip of the armor was a sheathed sword with a black grip, the blade of an executioner. Its wielder was a proper looking man, with the air of Knightly duty, and the sleepless distress of a prison guard.


    Johan marched to his place on the stage and stood in waiting. He heard the hearing of the crowd around him, and it quickly summoned up the first awful pangs of a growing migraine. It was the cheers that summoned it. Loud cries for death and justice, as if the two were the same thing in their eyes.


    The crowd was diverse. Humans, Dwarves, Elves and Half-Elves, all assembled under a united front for entertainment in its most twisted form. Laborers with a day between work and lordly workers taking a break from their days managing bureaucracy were all welcome to the Prison''s courtyard to observe the frequent exercises of justice. Common folk and the lesser nobles, all assembled to see the Play commence with the second Actor''s arrival.


    Then he came. A middle-aged man with stress-grown grey hairs around the bald crown of his head, wearing rags and shuffling forward from his gate with his face cast down away from the natural light. The crowd turned to a mixture of jeering boos and derisive laughter. On his side of the stage was a chipped and overused wooden stick. The whole thing was awkwardly hewn to be an ungraspable edge, like a blade with no handle to be thrown rather than held.


    He picked it up and gave it a look over. Then he glared at Johan. He had in him a terrible fire of will to survive, stick or not, and summoned up his very last hour of strength and life from within his frail underfed form to square against the former knight. Johan recognized his stance and drew his sword. At first, he did so in earnest. The prisoner held his ground like a true soldier and projected that air into the arena.


    The crowd mocked him for it. What do you think you''re going to do, old man? He ain''t sleeping like your wife was! You can''t kill him like you did her! Their mockery didn''t seem to reach him. He was intently focused on his own survival, despite knowing the obvious and seeing the signs all around him that contradicted his drive. He knew he was a dead man. The Stage was for his execution, the Play was to make it palatable for the crowd. He knew it and Johan knew it, and yet neither of them moved for the first passing moments.


    Johan saw something greater in the man than what the audience seemed to understand. He was an inmate at the Starriver City Prison, an annexed dungeon detached from the main castle and made an independent facility just within the limits of the City. His crime was singular but great, and his punishment was death. As if to placate the tedium of the cityfolk, his death, and many others were staged before them, so they could see the final desperate struggles of a man prisoner and watch his evil body breathe its last as justice was served in a final stroke.


    Johan saw a man standing his ground, protecting his honor even as death stared him down. A man of many years of experience that daunted the young former Knight. He knew the old man was a soldier in the war, one which was waged to protect Johan''s own childhood. He was one of the many faceless men in iron clothing who Johan once wished to become. He was an expert of combat and strong as they came, even after days of being forced to fast to make his last fight more pathetic, he held onto his strength deep within.


    But, he was a murderer. That was true, even outside of the just cause of war. Johan knew because he dared to learn the truth that no one cared about. That the man''s blade fell upon his wife''s head and the head of her adulterous lover when he found them together one day. It was a crime of passion and rage committed to unjustly punish another crime before the justice of the courts could oversee it. Instead, he took justice for himself, and that truer crime led him to prison, where those who were meant to dispense justice like Johan would punish him.


    "Get on with it!" the crowd began shouting. Their voices annoyed Johan. He saw the old man wouldn''t budge. He was determined to either die standing or fall fighting. Johan took his sword in hand and extended his free hand outward. He focused his mind and began gathering energy through his body, out toward his palm. Like a hot wind that swept inside of him, he breathed and controlled it, forcing it through the hollow portions of his arm.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    In his hand, gathered around his fingers at first, a fire started. Then, in a flash, it bloomed into a ball which he held aloft in his armored glove. The audience was in awe. They watched magic occur, a rare treat for those unblessed with Johan''s unique potential. The old soldier stayed at the ready. Whether he was impressed or not went unseen. He still foresaw a chance of victory, which Johan had to destroy.


    Johan thrust his sword into the fireball and flicked his wrist to twist it out. The fire spread like a curtain in front of him and coated his blade from hilt to tip. The soldier was taken aback and raised his sword up to guard against the fanned flames. Johan moved in through the fire, brushing it away with the wind that cut past him, and came in close with a lunge.


    He saw, for just a moment, the old man''s eyes. They were still alive and furious, willing to fight. There was still honor in them as Johan''s blade burned its way through the old man''s neck and killed him with a quick, decisive stroke. The fire on his sword sizzled away, and the wound he opened was burned shut by his Fireball Slash attack. There was no font of blood or scream of torture. It was a solid fight, won quickly and precisely.


    The crowd didn''t like it. Where''s the fun in that? You should have let him hit you once or twice! Why bother making fire if you won''t burn him with it!? Boo on you, you bore!


    Johan swung his blade clean of the fire and the scraps of burnt skin he scraped away, then sheathed it back again. The cool summer breeze that swept down into the arena pit drove away the heat from his fire show and dragged up the dusty ground that was still dry from the untouched edges of the ring too far away for blood to spill against. He looked at the corpse and retrieved the head. It was lighter than he expected it to be. He placed it neck-down so that the old man''s face could stare up with the frozen shock of defeat that Johan gave him.


    Johan left the Stage from the chorus of boos and jeers, all coming to his direction, just as his headache started again. He re-entered the tunnel into the prison and continued on into the guard''s quarters where he stayed. He took his armor off and reassembled it onto the stand, which held it up. There were a few scuffs and scorches from the residue of the fire that he summoned, along with the remains left on his blade in a blurry smear of burnt blood along the blade. So, he began to clean.


    That was his life. The honor most prison guards would take, and the sick privileges they would exercise with the duty of executioner were all lost on him. It was a sullen, wicked thing he did, and it left him feeling drained with regret for the entire day afterward. No drink would sate the wretchedness he felt inside himself. It reminded him too much of his one terrible error that brought him there, and that in turn summoned up the memory of pain that he felt in his head, which started his migraine over again.


    Johan endured his demotion, as it were, with as much grace as he could muster. For his own crime of killing the son of a noble, he was meant to be a convict at the prison, but a deal was struck between the noble houses that could not deny his credibility. The Knights especially, for whom he apprenticed, vouched not only for his effort in honor but also for his use to the court and loyalty to his family. They, essentially, followed through on the threat of the one rogue criminal who Johan rightly cut down that night, though the headache induced brief amnesia in him that he could not remember how exactly he had done it.


    Without the mercy of the Knights who acknowledged him, and their efforts that went into salvaging his skill for the future, he would not have a life. Nor would his family. Though it was punishment, it was still a stable pay, which he gave away to support his family as he normally did. His quarters were all assumed for him in the prison, along with the rest of the guards who were once interned as castle guards or off-duty soldiers and patrolmen. He was the only man among the staff who was a Knight beforehand, even just in training, and it showed. He was the only one with honor and chivalry. He saw the inmates as people who had erred against justice rather than the animals they were often treated as.


    That was why he concluded the old man''s life so quickly. He heard his story before and knew he was an honest, decent person who happened into a moment of such anger and outrage that it drove him into a thoughtless madness. Johan understood, and nearly related, as he was only able to speak with the prisoner from his death row cell because he had done the same thing. But still, from all of that and in the state his life had come to be, he had no regrets or shame. He saved a boy and killed a criminal for justice. That was the simplest explanation of events.


    Once he finished polishing his armor and sword, he set them both on his display in the corner of his room and sat on the edge of his bed. He would have rounds later that day. Normally, after an execution, there would be a meal or a round of celebration for the guard''s good show, or congratulations from one concerned member of a family who the criminal had offended. For Johan, there was nothing. He was the odd man out within the prison. A man who kept his honor in the cold, immoral walls.