A King is born pt.1

The Sounds of fighting and distant thunder echoed through the halls of the Colosseum, its massive marble structure stood in the center of a large city that ran across the face of a slanted mountain, at the peak of the mountain was a lavish castle.

 The Colosseum had a wide open field around it and past the several floors visible above ground, it also had two lower levels hidden beneath the ground, the lowest level housed all the slaves who called it home. The entire lower level was simply support pillars with slaves wandering around its depths, dirt and sand only broken up by chunks of old rocks that used to decorate the arena of the colosseum lay scattered around, having been tossed into the depths when they broke during particularly harsh fights.

The lowest level had a total of four exits. All exits were covered by large metal gates and had several armed guards on the other side. Outside of the three times a day when they were fed, the slaves were left to wander among the pillars aimlessly, with the most interesting things that ever happened were when a man and woman went into an old blocked off drainage pipe to get their freak on. 

Every few days a few guards would lug in some broken furniture or a few pillows and laugh as the slaves beat the shit out of one another in a desperate attempt to claim the item for themselves. If they felt like watching someone die they would go out, buy a single fresh clean blanket, and toss it in before the winter months started, which always turned into a blood bath.

The Capital was often ravaged by freezing winds and harsh snow in the winter months, and the slaves who were forced into a match barefoot with only the thin sacks they called clothes to act as warmth rarely survived, those who did usually died of frostbite before the turn of the next day, so a blanket would mean life or death for some.

For all their strife the Slaves had but one rule, if you win something in a fight, it's yours, and if someone tries to take it before you die all the others will beat the thief down.

Even just having a single pillow to come home to was sometimes enough to give them the strength to live through their fights.

As one such fight started over a few musty couch cushions a young man watched his fellow captives fight. He looked androgynous from a distance but was indeed a man, he had a spark of life shining in his eyes, something that irritated the other inhabitants and caused them to avoid him, that and his race.

He had been tossed in the Colosseum before he could walk, he was one part-elf and one something else, he had the light fair skin of an elf, with dirty blond hair, his teeth were sharp and thanks to a racial ability he was able to force them to fall out and grow new ones within an hour allowing him to have the shiniest teeth among the slaves.

 His nails were inky black and just as sharp as his teeth if not sharper, with a mismatched set of Green and Blue eyes, he looked like an elf but his teeth and nails gave away he was no full elf, and no parts human either.

 The shine in his eye annoyed some of the adults. How could a man, nearly twenty years of age, have so much life in their eyes when they've never even seen the sky?

Those who didn't find it annoying looked at him with interest, as though they were awaiting the day the light in his eyes would die and were excited to see what would finally squash his spirit.

He couldn't help having a sparkle in his eye, it wasn't from childish overconfidence in himself, and it wasn't as though he was content with his life, simply put that sparkle was him reminiscing on his old life and appreciating every moment he had gotten to live it.

The man was a Reincarnation, he had lived a life before this one on a miserable blue marble, in a world without magic or monsters, and he had wasted that life. He had worked a dead-end job, lived a loveless life, barely scraping by on food and rent, and complained about how awful his life was without ever trying to do anything to improve it.

Then one rainy day he was struck dead by a truck while crossing the street. He had woken up in a dingy crib, a sleazy-looking man talking in a language he had never heard. 

He now knew the man had been selling him to the Owner of the Colosseum, a Bearded man with three deep gashes running across his face. Soon after that, he had been handed off to a slave woman, and when she had died another took her place. Once he was able to walk and talk the woman stopped paying him much mind and focused on any new babies that arrived. 

After that day no one had cared much to talk to him, he was the only sub-human in the Colosseum, and no one else had so much as a point to their ears. 

until a few weeks ago when a young elf woman had been thrown into the slave pit. The young girl had taken to him immediately and followed him everywhere. As of yet he hadn't spoken a word to her but that didn't deter her in the slightest as she talked about her family, and how much she missed them.

"I wonder if that guy was my dad?" The thought had crossed his mind many times as he thought back to the sleazy man who had sold him into slavery as a baby, but he couldn't remember if he had looked anything like an elf or not, he had no idea what orcs even looked like so at the moment his one goal in life was meeting that man, and bashing his face in with a rock. The thought of achieving that goal helped keep a light in his eye.

He flashed a sinister smile, one that the elf girl seemed to find endearing for some reason, in his past life he had never been one to resort to violence, but over a decade of being told how gruesomely he would die in the Colosseum had, admittedly, scared him enough to push him to a more violent path.