Aries Mars's Arc

Chapter 2 of 8

The arena gate swings open. Aries turns, fists already rising. But the figure that enters doesn't take a fighting stance. She walks slowly, her armor gleaming with medals and scars. A champion. He can see it in the way she moves. She stops at the edge of the pit and looks at him. She drags something behind her. A crude rack made of stone and wood, weapons hanging from it. Blood drips from the blades into the sand. She sets it down without a word, then pulls an axe from her belt. The blade swirls with colors that shift and change. She holds it out to him. Not as a challenge. As an offering. He stares at it, confused. Champions come to fight, not to give gifts. She speaks. Her voice is steady. "I've won forty-three battles. Built monuments in five cities. They sing my name in halls I'll never visit." She looks at the crude stone warrior he carved. "But when I stop, when the crowds leave, I feel nothing. You fight every day. How do you fill the space between?" Aries feels something crack inside him. She thinks he has an answer. She thinks he knows something she doesn't. He looks at his bloody knuckles, at the empty arena, at the days of silence he can barely survive. "I don't," he says. The words taste like ash. "I just fight so I don't have to feel it." She nods slowly, taking the axe back. She walks to the stone warrior and kneels, placing the weapon at its base. Then she builds. Stone by stone, she adds to what he started. A forge takes shape around his crude monument. Obsidian platforms. A place where something could be made instead of destroyed. She works until her hands bleed too. When she's done, she stands beside him. "Maybe we're both looking for the wrong thing," she says. She leaves the way she came. Aries stares at the structure. For the first time, he wonders if being undefeatable means something different than he thought.