“We will not be the next Burlox!”
A mob of noise built into a crescendo, breaking his focus.I would kill them all if given the chance.Vedikus glanced at the tiny silver orb of the moon and asked allowance to do so knowing it would never be given.
“Please at least let me say goodbye to my family!” the female cried. And for some reason it enraged him.
Vedikus’s lips parted and heat suffused his face. The centaurs watched him as they spread into an arch on either side of him, their spears all loosely poised in their hands.
“Minotaur, we would rather not fight you,” the middle one said. His hoof lifted and stamped the ground, breaking bones from long ago battles beneath it. “Our peoples are not enemies. Do not cause this to change.”
Vedikus gripped his axes. “Not when it comes to this.”
The centaur’s lip twitched, revealing a chipped tooth. His hair was long and braided, broken knots and messy but adorned with wooden beads and shells.A stud by the sea.
“No.” The centaur nodded. “Not when it comes to this, but still, we find you in our way.”
“Then you must go through me for the female.”
The centaurs growled in unison, and three sets of bloodthirsty, amber eyes trained on him.
“You know the sacrifice is female?” the one on the left asked.
“Can’t you hear her screams?” Vedikus fumed, letting his horns dip in warning. “I’ve spoken to her. She is already mine.” Her cries were at his back, and the sound of the pulley on the other side of the barrier sounded with a screech. The thrill and excitement of her people’s jeers bolstered with each piercing turn. With it deepened the approaching drums of the orcs. His eyes stayed on the stallions. He still had time to kill them.
They swiveled toward the sound and readied for the coming attack. Orcs were a nasty business.
Vedikus stepped back toward the wall he now guarded. He prepared to protect what advantage he had. They would not take his spot over his gushing dead husk.
“You’ve spoken to this female? How? Is she magiked?” It was the left centaur again. His gaze darted around as he spoke. “Minos don’t deal in witches.”
“The Bathyr deal with no one,” Vedikus taunted.
The stallion sneered and broke rank.
The middle horse, and what he presumed was the leader, lifted his hand.
“Stop Telner, I did not give the order to attack.” The leader looked to Vedikus. “If it is as you say, will she choose you?”
She does not have a choice.“Yes. Only the vicious best capture the blood breeders. You against me? She would have no option but to choose me. I’m the safest bet. One look at your bulbous, hanging pricks and she’ll choose a pack of nipping hobgoblins over you.”
All three centaurs stomped their hooves and brayed angrily, not taking his mockery lightly. But it was true. Centaurs weren’t rapists, but they were widely known for having a hard time with the humans they collected. They’d been known to resort to taking many measures to convince their human captives to bear their young. He found it weak that the species couldn’t master them.
Telner moved closer and stood up on his back legs before bringing his front hooves down. The strewn-about bones and bone dust cracked and powdered the air. “You want a painful drawn-out death, minotaur, I’ll give you one!”
Vedikus hoisted his axes and positioned his legs, bowing his head slightly forward to jut his horns. The sound of the pulley had stopped and the pleas of the female were now almost directly overhead, high up in the mist and beyond anyone’s sight. There wasn’t much time before she fell. If the centaurs attacked him, he would only have moments to slay them.
“She’s at the top!” the lead centaur yelled, lowering his spear. His men looked up just as the orcs entered the clearing. They hesitated.
Vedikus slammed his axes into the ground and used it to his advantage. “Protect me while I catch her!”
The sacrifice had come all too quickly and that hope he had felt earlier had stabbed him in the back. If there’d been more time, he wouldn’t need any beast’s help. But he had to catch her fall. He could not chance her life.
Vedikus didn’t wait to see what the stallions chose to do, but when their spears didn’t pierce his back and the battle cries of the orcs sounded, he assumed they shielded him.
“You will let her choose, Minotaur! Or face the consequences,” the centaur leader shouted in warning.
Vedikus grunted but his focus was on the mist above him—its thick impenetrable shroud—as he watched for her fall. He bent his knees and lifted his arms, readying for the exact moment to catch her. His jaw tightened at the thought of her landing on his horns or crashing into the bone-strewn dirt.
“We give this sacrifice willingly to the labyrinth... To honor the magic that protects us from those trapped within... May this human feed your hunger and deliver us safety from your wrath and your expansion...” A haunting, jeering chorus of voices droned out the rites. The female had gone eerily quiet. It wasn’t that he couldn’t hear her amongst the ruckus but that she’d likely given up trying to persuade her people.
