A boy, they called him.

Fetch me this, boy, fetch me that.

If he was only a boy, then why did he feel so old? He'd seen and done more than many grown men would ever see or do, but still they insisted on calling him boy. The boy slave, the boy gladiator, the racer boy, the messenger boy, the boy of the Brotherhood bachelors.

He had been many things, d'Aramtiz the boy, but no one could ever say he was a cowardly boy.

Sticks and stones, he was told when he was a child. So he took it—the racial slurs flung in his face in the depths of the pegasus fighting pits, along with all the shit and blood and dirt, he took it all.

He did not always fight, not when they pitted him against his own kind, the unicorns, and even sometimes his own cousins. But that did not mean the feeling was mutual, and that's when the slashing and hacking began. He took that too, with gritted teeth and ruby eyes, watching his kin fall around him, butchering and slaughtering each other so that they might live to fight another day.

They could never injure him, not seriously, anyhow. He had to play along, of course, and take the hits and bruises and broken bones when required of him. He learned slowly, though, his stubborn pride often earning him bloodied lips from the ringmasters. The others, his cellmates, they'd say "keep your head down, say yes, sir, no, sir, and no one gives you a second thought." He hated it, hated giving the feather-bastards the satisfaction of seeing him grovel at their hooves. But it was all a game, you see, a game that could end as swiftly as it begin if you weren't smart or quick enough to play along.

And if d'Aramitz was anything, it was quick. But he never moved more swiftly than he needed to (lest he draw even more unwanted attention), only quick enough to just stay alive. And when it was all said and done, he was the last one standing every round, with the fallen scattered about him in a colorful array of shattered horns and severed limbs, engulfed in the stench of piss and blood and gore and the roar of the crowd.

In the cold, dank cells with nothing but gnawing rats and no-horns to keep him company, he would go away to better days and a better place. Home. Home to his brother and father and mother, where the fires burned brightly in the mountain caves and the wind howled and screeched outside, and he was surrounded by kin. But home was behind him, gone and burned, and his family cut down like sweet hay at harvest time. It was childish of him to linger on such things.

And so he didn't. Thinking gave d'Aramitz tedious headaches, anyway. Too much thinking got you killed—you had to keep moving, keep dodging ducking whirring wheeling. He left hem all behind—the Pits, the guts, the glory, the bandit Brotherhood. Even home, he left behind.

And never looked back.

The blue boy traveled at a ground-eating pace, burning off his frustration in a long, cross-country trek, only stopping to water and feed. The days and nights blurred and blended, summer came and went like a passing breeze, and falling leaves turned to falling snow, coating the gray, listless landscape like the ash that had smothered his burned home. When he finally stopped, the rosy fingers of dawn stretched across the sky, cold and beautiful. He stood, in a small clearing at the edge of a stream, his body steaming, legs trembling, and sweat streaking his sides. He could still run, run for hundreds and hundreds of more miles, and he would be no further than where he had begun.

After all, not even d'Aramitz could run from the past.

D'A R A M I T Z ϟ