Chapter 1: My Name Is Ikaris

"Hey, what do we have here? A buck-naked kid hiking alone in the Forsaken Lands?" A male voice guffawed boisterously.

"Hehe, it's your lucky day Tuari. It looks like lil' Lanu won't have to give blood this month. Tho', he looks bad... not sure we'll get much out of him." A second man cackled out with a hoarser and even more unpleasant voice.

Following this tasteless joke, more laughter and saucy banter broke out. Most of these deep, malicious voices were male, but there were also a few women among them.

To understand the reason for their craze, one had to understand the precarious conditions they lived in. Sadly, the object of their shabby jokes was unable to understand their gibberish.

'What the fuck are they talking about?! I can't understand a word they're saying. What kind of fuckin' language is that?'

The naked boy of about 14-15 years old who stood before them on the fence was currently thinking hard, wondering all sorts of things. He was putting on a dispassionate front, but inwardly he was petrified.

His face was pallid, and drenched in sweat. His looks were rather average, not to the point of being ugly, but he was a bit puny and the bone structure of his face was not particularly delicate. The two unique features that made up for it were his raven black hair and his almost equally dark eyes sparkling with intelligence.

His skin was covered with blisters and badly healed burns and a gaping wound large enough for a dagger lay a few inches below his heart, bleeding profusely.

If his wounds weren't immediately tended to, the boy wouldn't make it through the day.

A spark.

An infinitely pure light, that was the first thing he had seen when he was brought into this world. When his eyes were still closed, his consciousness as fragile as a wind-tossed candle, the light already dazzled him. When he finally opened his eyes, it was no longer there, but he still felt its existence.

Replacing that spark, a lush jungle and a group of men and women decked out in paintings and other tribal ornaments had suddenly filled his field of vision. Each of them was very craggy, their skin wrinkled and sunburned, although they were surely younger than they looked. What they all had in common were the deep rings under their eyes and an almost sickly gauntness as if they were suffering from anemia and malnutrition.

The boy wouldn't have been so frightened if they weren't at least a head or two taller than him. He hadn't yet realized that he was the one who had become smaller. The fact that they were all armed with spears, bows and primitive axes had obviously nothing to do with his shivering...

As these natives bickered, raising their voices more and more in a language that eluded him, the boy felt weakness creep over him as he was bleeding to death.

"... Help." He felt despair wash over him as he became aware that he could barely hear his own voice, let alone these barbarians who didn't speak the same tongue as him.

If he was thinking clearly, he would never have pleaded with them for help, but instead ran for his life. He could barely remember his name while his memories before appearing in this godforsaken hole were extremely blurry.

"Hmm, Koko I thought I heard him say something..." Tuari's eyebrows rose in surprise.

Sadly, although he had heard something, as expected he had not understood anything.

"Surrender, kid, and no harm will come to you. You'll just have to... cooperate a little." A native woman wearing only a leaf crown around her waist and chest addressed him in a sweet voice, but the boy's hair stood on end at her fake smile, revealing a row of yellow stumps.

'I-I need to run.'

As that thought crossed his mind, the glowing Spark cluttering his field of vision like a buzzing fly seemed to glow a little brighter for a fleeting moment so brief that he thought he had imagined it.

His legs jerked back, but it was already too late. It was already too much effort. His vision blurred and he felt his wavering consciousness sink back into the same pit of darkness and misery that plagued his mind.

However, unlike before, he hadn't realized it yet, but the pain that tortured him seemed to have lessened a bit.

Thud.

His eyes rolled back, and then he collapsed face down like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

"Doli, your charm is such that he passed out from sheer bliss. Either that or your breath got worse than I remember, hahaha." Another barbarian mocked gleefully.

His jibe was immediately followed by a collective peal of laughter. The scantily-clad woman glared at them, but her pouting evoked more disgust than pity and they laughed even harder.

"Stop being a jerk! The kid is losing blood! What will you tell Malia if he dies before the sacrifice? Will you take his place?"

The group of men, though so manly and boorish, shivered in terror as they were called to order. They definitely did not want to take his place.

"Doli is right. Let's get back to work. If the other teams don't meet their quotas, we might even be rewarded."

The one who had just spoken was an older barbarian than the others and carrying the only bronze sword of the group. He was as emaciated and weathered as the others, but the respect the other natives had for him was genuine.

Unaware of what was going on around him, the teenager's wounds were hastily stitched and then quickly dressed with a poultice made from local plants. Then, the warrior Tuari placed him on his shoulder like a sack of potatoes before setting off towards his village.

Shortly after.

SPLASH!

The boy woke up with a start, the bucket of ice water momentarily making him forget the severity of his injuries. As he pulled sharply on the threads of his barely stitched wound, he gasped in pain, drawing attention to himself.

Becoming the target of all these eyes, he finally realized where he was. Or at least, where he was no longer.

It was a decrepit village. And even then, it was perhaps a tad too flattering an assessment.

At first glance, it was just a muddy patch of land reeking of piss and dung on which had been erected a few dozen dingy tents woven from animal skins. In the center of the village, there were two yurts, spacious enough to compete with his bedroom on Earth.

Anomaly in the middle of this ode to prehistory, a humble thatched cottage made of stones and stacked pieces of wood overlooked the village from the top of a small hill barely six or seven meters high. Just outside the entrance, which was devoid of doors, stood a pitiful altar.

It was more accurate to call it a "shady spot". Four wooden stakes about two meters high were planted in the ground in a square, on top of which was arranged a not too damaged fur.

Underneath was a heap of stone that could be thought of as a rudimentary grave, with a small wooden stele no bigger than a brick propped up over it. It might as well have been a scrap of bark, for there was nothing carved on it.

Right now, he was kneeling and bound like the others in front of this altar with a dozen other people of all ages who looked much healthier than him. Like him, they were all naked, but he was pleasantly surprised to hear one of them slurring in English.

Thank God he wasn't crazy! In any case, he wasn't the only one in this mess. The anguish of not knowing whether he was trapped in a nightmare or fully awake gnawed at his insides and threatened to drive him nuts.

Standing in a circle around the prisoners he was part of, about 80 or 90 villagers were watching them with a mixture of sadism and relief, waiting for their fate to be decided. Their whispers only added to their anxiety.

All of a sudden, the crowd went silent and the teenager noticed two women walking out of the only thatched cottage in the village.

The first one was white-haired and small, and so wrinkled and bony that she could have been living evidence that dinosaurs had existed. Determined to traumatize them before their time, she was dressed as skimpily as the other villagers, her sagging nipples hanging freely in the hot sun.

The boy and the other kneeling men and women swallowed their vomit with difficulty, telling themselves that losing their eyes would not be such a bad closure to this awful day.

The second woman was the exact opposite of the first, young and beautiful. Helping the old woman to walk, she was athletic and curvaceous, her skin slightly tanned but well moisturized, slender but not skinny. Her doll-like face was not anemic like that of the other natives while her lips and rosy cheeks displayed a healthy, radiant glow. She had roundish almond-shaped yellow-orange eyes, long auburn lashes and a cascade of silky reddish-chestnut hair falling to her shoulders. She looked very young. No more than sixteen. She was also not very tall, even shorter than the boy.

The men's eyes lit up when they saw her, but while she was the only aboriginal they wanted to see naked, she was, alas, to their regret, the only properly clothed woman.

Her sunflower yellow ensemble consisted of a skirt and a short-sleeved bolero revealing her toned abs, cute belly button, soft arms and long, lithe legs. She was barefoot like the other barbarians, but curiously this only increased her ravishing charm in the eyes of the prisoners.

The two women walked slowly to the altar, then the young woman whispered something to the older woman after casting a listless glance at the prisoners. The old woman nodded, then raised her palms at them and began to chant in some obscure language.

"Gari gori, goru, giri..."

The boy and the other prisoners were speechless.

'What the fuck are you babbling, old hag?'

Then a miracle happened.

The fossil stopped babbling and the boy felt a surge of foreign knowledge flood his brain. His eyes widened in shock a second later as the old woman announced in a nasal voice,

"It's done."

'I can understand her!'

Disbelief and incomprehension were on every prisoner's face. The boy, who was as agnostic as could be, hardly dared to consider the infinite possibilities that stemmed from this realization.

This was magic.

As his heart accepted the reality, his mind was thoroughly shaken and he slowly came to accept what was happening to him. If he had been transported to a world where magic was a reality, then it wasn't so bad.

Meanwhile, the young woman had sauntered up to them and stopping in front of the man furthest to the left, the stoutest of them, she asked gently,

"What is your name?"

Even her voice was sweet and angelic, heavenly honey to the ears.

"Thomas."

"Hmm..." She nodded thoughtfully.

Then she moved on to the next.

"And you?"

"Anton."

"Hmm..."

The process repeated itself until she arrived in front of the boy. Seeing his pale face, his wounds and his sickly appearance, a contemptuous, almost disgusted frown flashed across her face.

"What is your name?

"Ikaris. My name is Ikaris."

"Hmm..."

Ikaris calmly watched as the young woman returned to the old shaman, then saw her mutter something again as she pointed at some of them. What they all had in common was that they were sturdy men. The English-speaking prisoner was among them.

Without knowing why, the boy was relieved that he had not been chosen.

Once the selection was complete, a group of warriors equipped with wooden spears sloppily escorted the chosen men to the altar where a large wooden bowl had been placed unnoticed by them. A chilling silence settled over the village and out of instinct or wariness the chosen men foresaw the doom that awaited them.

One of them began to struggle.

"I-I don't want to do this. Let me go!"

Of course, his cries were ignored. Because of his "enthusiasm," he was even the first one to serve as an example. The barbarian pushing him forward with his spear forced him to kneel in front of the bowl with a kick over his calf. Ruthlessly, another man grabbed his bound hands, then with the knife in his free hand slashed his wrists.

"Aaaaarrgh!"

Ikaris subconsciously closed his eyes, but surprisingly the scream did not last. It was not the abruptly muffled scream of someone killed on the spot, but the silence of someone realizing that he had been worried for nothing.

Well, so to speak.

The blood spilled from his wrists into the bowl underneath, but after having poured the equivalent of a large can of cola, the warrior who had slashed his veins signaled him to back off, while another one took care of dressing his wound.

The other sacrifices were immediately relieved when they found out that these barbarians had no intention of killing them and they obediently let their veins be slit, pouring their blood with more or less sincerity.

Once the big bowl was about full, Ikaris expected some kind of shamanic ritual for the final nail, maybe even some tribal dancing or guttural songs, but it was not to be.

They were left tied to the sun in the village square for the rest of the day, then the sun went down and he understood why.