Rise of the Crimson Sun - Tales from the land of Asteria Prologue

9188, year of the Crimson Moon
38th and final year of King Adamantiu's rule

The boy opens his eyes for the first time in this wretched world. Fat drops of blood are falling from the gauntlets and brown bearded chin of the man holding him, travelling down his chest and staining red his golden breastplate. Every other child would be crying fresh out of his mother’s caring womb, but not this one. This one is looking him straight in the eyes with two small marbles of blue. Is it curiousness that’s circling through his small mind or pity? He can’t tell.
The nearby river is overflowing after a long period of dryness. The night sky is clear though; no rain has fallen tonight as it has not fallen for the past three dry years. It is not water that runs in the river tonight. The river of the valley is overflowing with flesh and blood.
A woman lies near his feet with eyes wide open, bulging out from her eyelids and belly cut open from chest to uterus. Her long black hair fall on her motionless face making her eyes look like white worms trying to get out of the ground where roots of dead trees are planted. He wonders on how he survived. He wonders if the gods were merciful on him. He was the last survivor of the fallen king’s guard against one hundred bloodthirsty Gigantes, charging at him in a distance of no more than a hundred leaps. In their hands tree-like clubs ready to devour every living being that gets close. How could an exhausted man, on the brink of death, survive against that overwhelming power?
It was the boy, it had to be. It was earlier in the day that the poor woman lying on her back in the middle of the massacre, screamed to him with a river of tears falling from her lingering eyes, “Cut me, save my child, I beg you”. And so he did, and so did the crimson light come and the valley known as black was illuminated.
With a whirlwind motion he cut through the bewildered Gigantes like the sound cuts through the air. He did what five thousand of his comrades couldn’t do for five days, in the blink of an eye. The Gigantes’ ugly heads fell before they could even raise their massive green hands holding their destructive clubs. The power that consumed his body at that moment was immense. And then he collapsed. He didn’t even know how much time passed before he came back to his senses. All he knew was that now it was night.
He stood up and moved a couple of paces back where he slew the poor woman. The child still in his mother’s open womb was alive and sleeping covered in her clotted blood. He plunged his hands inside her sliced body and pulled the child out cutting the umbilical cord with the edge of his sword. And now he stands holding in his hands the only good that came to this place on this day. And this good opens its eyes for the first time in this wretched world.
He kneels besides the woman and leaves a storm of tears fall out of his eyes, mixing with the blood on his body, bathing the sleeping child. He weeps, but a word can’t come out of his mouth to disturb the dead silence. He raises his teary eyes and throws a glimpse on the gruesome carnage that lies around him. The stench of death reaches the long horizon. The dismembered bodies are forming waves of a sea filled with death. There is no wind, no chirping from the crickets and no wolves howling; only the sound of the river of blood. And the child is watching him silently with his little blue eyes, unaware of all the devastation that lies in this brand new world. Perhaps its innocence is the only thing that holds him sane.
He closes the miserable woman’s eyes and holds her hand tight for the last time as if he’s asking forgiveness that he is taking the child she never saw away from her. He suddenly spots something on her other hand. He first thought it was her blood, but it is not. With a little bit of force he removes it from her tight clutch and brings it in front of his eyes with his left hand while holding the child tight with the other. It’s an oyster shaped crimson necklace with what they seem as ancient carvings on it. Something is strange with this necklace; something that makes him feel warm amidst all this chaos.
He puts the strange jewel around his neck and finally finds the courage to stand straight and does what not his mind is telling him but the pure will of his heart; he walks. He finally ends the dead silence with the sound of his bloody chausses. He walks; slowly, briskly, stumbling on a severed hand, a decapitated leg or a startled head detached from the body from time to time, but yet, he continues to walk. The only thing this night left for him is walk, walk and leave this cursed place behind him and with it one of the foulest acts of evil ever to befall this sacred land. Perhaps if the gods indeed feel merciful, they will smile on the fate of this newborn child as well and see it survive this wretched night. In the meanwhile, somewhere in the far end of the universe thousands of stars are dying...