.:: I ::.

The whole story of the planet, since the most remote times, has been marked by cycles. Things are born, grow, decay, and die. Every component of the huge world organism follows its own cycle. The planet itself is no exception. To die, to be born. Repeat. Forever. Or, at least until some cosmical catastrophe engulfs it. No one know exactly why the humans decided to appear after the last ice age. It's one of those eternal universal questions.
Dozens of thousands of years have passed since the first drawings found inside remote caves. Human race has been there following the flow of the planet's brand new cycle, gaining intelligence, agro-pecuary, technology and other useful knowledge along the way. They grew and expanded throughout the land, until the mighty Athlantean Empire of humans had taken almost the whole continent that had been named Arth.
And now, humans have at last begun to expand over-sea. To search for new knowledge in the unknown world beyond Arth. Considering the inevitable ambition that seems to inhabit anything possessing 46 chromosomes in a cell, it was at least predictable.
But for us right now, ultramarine discoveries are irrelevant, at least for the moment. Let us stay in Arth, shall we? Our story is set in a small city of the Southest Zone of the Athlantean Empire. A city called Taquara.
Taquara, although not very influential, is relatively well-known across the Empire. The reason for that is because the biggest Hero Academy of the whole Southeast Zone is located there, the Enerv School for Hero Graduation (ESHG, or just "Enerv" for the friends).

On the concept "Hero Academy". Every being, at the time of its birth, is given by nature a character that tends to either Good, or Evil. Most scholars agree that this helps keeping the balance of nature's law. Strangely enough, Neutral beings are the most unbalancing of the alignments, and thus are very rare.
Of course it didn't take long until people realized the fact. And just as some have the vocation to be teachers, others sport players or plumbers with uncanny jumping skills, there are people who end up with a "hero" or "villain" vocation. Ignoring that fact would be a waste of perfectly capable professionals. And so were the Hero and Villain Academies founded.
Since the Athlantean ruler, Empress Argenta, is one of the very few Neutral humans known, she tends to support the natural balancing of things. As much as it is a legal action to help an old lady cross the street in the Empire, to burn down and pillage helpless villages is also in the constitution as a perfectly normal act. Of course, professional villains do not pose that much of a threat, since that's what professional heroes are there for: to stop the villains.

And now that that's cleared up, back to Taquara. It is a Sunday early morning; not even past 9 o'clock yet. The whole city is quiet, filled only with the soft smell of Saturday night's hangover. There is still some fog in the air, and the temperature's quite pleasant to anyone awake enough to feel it.
And that's, perchance, the case of Arch Guaribe. A young man, 16 years old, and a graduate of the Enerv School. Since the younger you are, the better you learn, the only chances to teach people the real abilities a professional hero must know is to start teaching them young. Students leave the Enerv School graduated at 13, although the avarage in other regions of the Empire may go up to 18.
Arch graduated in the Ninja College of the Enerv. He spent extra 2 years specializing in Stealth, and has unfortunately been unemployed since.

But his amazing Ninja skills were the last thing in Arch's mind right now. Because he was sleepy. It wasn't an acceptable thing to wake up at 8:30 on a Sunday. He barely even remembered having laid down. Drowzily wearing his home clothes, the left the small family house and went out in the earth-paved street of Taquara. A calm neighborhood, full of trees and friendly little wooden houses like his own. Birds sang in the trees. There wasn't one person, horse or waggon in sight.
Arch walked down the road until it broadened and began to get paved with white stone. It was the end of Taquara and the start of the highway to Pechincha. Before reaching the highway, Arch turned to his left, leaving the city road until he was at the foot of a hill. He went up the hill slowly, cursing the lack of a path there.
Arch then reached the top. Up from the hill, the whole plains and hills that surrounded Taquara were visible: a sea of endless green, with the occasional glimpse of the highway's white. Heh. Nice view. You could really contemplate it if you felt like it.
Just a few meters away from Arch, someone had placed a huge dark stone taller than himself. It was the formal mark of Taquara's northern end. Sitting on the stone, Arch found exactly what, or better who, he was expecting to find.

A few kilometers northwest of the stone, on another hill, but much higher, something completely different was going on.
The Dark Knight smiled under his glistening dark, full-face horned helmet and adjusted himself in his glistening dark, studded full-plate armor. He caressed the knob of his sheathed sword in a very evil way, and looked down at Taquara.
It was a nice city. Not very big, the Dark Knight thought. Almost no stone streets or tall buildings, everything pretty much still green and arborized. But, in the middle of the mass of simple constructions, there lay a huge, rectangular grey stone building. It was the Enerv School for Hero Graduation.
The Dark Knight's army of evil minions could be eventually seen from the town. But he had been careful enough to hide it behind the hills.
Again, the Dark Knight smiled under his helmet.


---//---



Gnashy comment on this chapter:
[spoiler]I had to be a little too descriptive in this one... you know, after all, it's still the first part so the setting has to be introduced. ^^ Next up, I promise more things will happen. =P
By the way, the similarity between the character's name ("Arch") and the Empire's island name ("Arth") is NOT intentional. In fact, I just realized it as I typed the story. So please, try not to mix the two up.
Ah, if you went through all the trouble of reading all those words up there, no matter what it is, I want your opinion!! Even if it's just a "u n00b" one![/spoiler]

As you said yourself it is an introduction. But a good one. I will be watching for future installments. I like your writing style. Nice work!

[spoiler]BTW 'cicle' is spelled 'cycle'[/spoiler]

... I might have missed something, but you make it sound as though no one actually has the choice to follow the Light or the Darkness, but that they are born either or. ... That's depressing. ^_^

But I like the story so far. You `da man, Gnasher.

... One question, though -> Is Arch supposed to be pronounced as "Ark" or literally as "Arch" with the ch sound at the end?

Thank you for the comments. =)

in5ult..., thanks for the correction too.
SK, you might be either right or wrong there. Depends on the point of view =P I'll only remind you that humans still have free will. Now you decide.
And ah, I pronounce 'Arch' with the ch sound, but if you wanna pronounce it otherwise, feel free to do so.
^^

.:: II ::.

There wasn't anyone else you'd expect to find up that time of the day, anyway.
She was sitting on the black stone, her wavy light brown hair falling on her shoulders. She had her back turned to Arch, probably staring at the landscape below. Like she always did. Arch smiled to himself and climbed the rock, letting himself sit by her side.
"Morning," she said, keeping her eyes locked in the far horizon. "You don't wake up at 8:38."
"Not, not usually," Arch replied. "Dunno why I'm up now. I'm still drowzy as hell."
"Why don't you go back to bed? It's stupid," she said, still not looking at him.
Arch smiled and nodded. "Nah, I don't feel like it. Besides, I knew I'd find you here at this time."
The girl slowly turned her head to face him. She had an emotionless expression and still, relaxed eyes. Her pupils were grey, the mark of a trained witch. Arch looked at her. Heh, she was pretty, behind that mask. As if she had read his thoughts, the girl turned back to face the lonely emptiness of the plains.
Yeah, Arch thought, the only problem with Anna is that if you managed to get her mad, you'd be in for a long ride to hell... and back. Three times.

"Hey boss!" said the goblin, poking the Dark Knight at his waistline.
The Dark Knight's concentration was broken suddenly, and he looked down to face his small green adviser. "What is it, Peppo?"
"The army is all up. We're ready to charge at anytime. Everyone is urging for blood, boss," replied the goblin, hopping happily as the yellow teeth formed an awful smile.
The Dark Knight looked back at the distant city. Soon, he thought, soon it would be reduced to ruins. That school was way too dangerous to stay active.
He kept staring without a word, always caressing the knob of his sword. Peppo was starting to become impatient.

Minutes of comfortable silence went by until Anna spoke again. "There is someone there," she said. She had her eyes locked on a hill far away in the plains, almost invisible due to the fog.
Arch focused on the hill. "I can't see a thing," he said, "can you?"
She looked at him again with the expression warm as the stone below them. "I don't see. I feel. You know that."
"Heh, yes, you're right."
Anna was in fact a true witch. Not those cheap hexes you found at Villain Academies, but a real witch. The kind that harnesses the powers of nature, that was one with the environment. You couldn't learn those things in schools or academies. You had to learn it from a real master.
Anna was more connected to the plains she was looking at than the grass that grew on it. She could feel, hear, and see what the plants and animals told her. And she had this ability to know the hour of the day just by looking at sunrays that often made people uneasy. Her master had been the best around.
"And behind that hill," she continued, "more. About... a thousand." She noticed that even herself wasn't expecting that. "Yes, one thousand. And I feel a strong calling... as if a thousand voices were urging for..."
Her eyes opened wide and she almost seemed scared for a fraction of a second.

Peppo was totally impatient now.
"Hey, boss!"
The Dark Knight found his internal evil-declaring monologue suddenly interrupted again. He was almost at the part with the squids. It was the best part. "What?" he asked.
"Uhm..." Peppo started. He didn't know how to put it. "Shouldn't I... rally the troops...? Prepare the for the coming battle?"
The Dark Knight looked as outraged as one wearing a full-face pitch-black helmet could look. "Of course not! Why do you think so?!" The sudden burst made Peppo shrink.
"It's because... er... you know, it's a Sunday and it's like 9 o'clock in the morning." The strange thing is that Peppo almost felt embarassed saying it. "No one is up right now... we could attack without any resistance, and..."
"No!" the Dark Knight interrupted Peppo in mid-speak. "I may be a professional and graduated Villain," he stated, "but I still am a honored man. No, not now. We charge at dusk."
"May I ask the... uhm, point of your decision, boss?"
The Dark Knight recovered his calm and looked back at the city. "Because," he said, "the citizens will have then a perfect view of us charging down the hill here just as the sun sets over there." He took a deep breath. "It's a metaphorical thing, you see. Villainous. Understand?"
Peppo didn't, but he preferred to stay quiet.

The northern hill of Taquara was now empty.


---//---



Gnashy comment on this chapter:
[spoiler]Nothing much worth noting. Still kinda slow-paced, but wait, just wait =) I refrain myself from putting too much into a chapter to keep it an easy reading and not something heavy. [/spoiler]

.:: III ::.

Donn was having quite a nice dream. It had something to do with girls who had cat ears or big white wings, but he couldn't tell exactly what. It felt nice, at least.
Like a diver who swims back to the surface, Donn started to notice the real world surrounding him. Laying on his bed, he opened his eyes really, really, slowly. His room, alright. Bed. Old and ragged posters of the Golden Paladin on the wall. Clock. Almost two o'clock in the afternoon. Ah, now the memories were flowing back in. At the exact moment he remembered what he had done last night, a stinging pain came crashing into his head. Darn, just what I needed, headache, he thought.
Half an hour and a bath later, Donn headed into the living-room, just in time to see his sister coming out of the other bathroom. She was wearing a long white shirt that fell down to her knees, and her face was looking just as much as a crumpled pillow as Donn's. Donn eyed her for a moment and commented, "Someone got lucky last night, heh?"
"Ah, shut up, Donn," she replied.

While Donn's face looked like a battlefield recovering from a recent invasion of acne troops, hers was smooth and round. He had his straight black hair cut very short, she let her long black hair fall on her back. There was a time, long ago, when the twins looked exactly alike; but it had been a time long ago.
Donn and Rhyme lived alone in a small house in the periphery of Taquara, near Arch. They had been sent as kids from the capital by their parents to learn in the Enerv School. The parents were classic traditionalists, retired Heroes of past times. All they wanted was to have their son go to a nice fighter school, and their daughter to a standard wizardry college. An error on the papers and a mix-up of the kids caused the twins to be swapped.
When people realized it, it was far too late. Donn was a masterful wizard now, and few peple in Taquara could beat Rhyme in a direct one-on-one confrontation.

The back door of the house broke open and Arch stormed in the kitchen, hastily.
"Morning, Arch," Donn said from a small table. He had a small bowl of cereal in front of him.
"Mmm," his sister said, half a sandwich in her mouth.
Arch grabbed a third wooden chair, pulled it close to the table and sat. "Guess what," he said cheerfully. "We've got news."
Donn frowned. Deep inside, he knew it couldn't be good news. Someone who had just stormed into your kitchen during breakfast couldn't be carrying good news. "Good or bad news?" he asked, just to be sure.
"Well, depends on how you see it," Arch replied. Donn rolled his eyes. Now, he thought, it was definetly gonna be bad news.
"What is it?" Rhyme asked curiously.
"Oh no, not another one of those 'Legalize Necromancy' manifests..." Donn said. Those manifests made him vomit the last time. He knew quite well the formulas for many necromancy spells, and, he was sure, it was not cute.
"Nah," Arch said. And then added, "Eew."
"Then what?" Rhyme asked.
"Invasion," Arch replied, laying back on the chair. "Probably going for the Enerv."
Donn halted his ceral-filled spoon stop in mid-air. "Another one?" he asked. "It's the third one this month! Don't those guys ever get tired?"
Rhyme, on the other hand, seemed almost too happy. "Ah, finally!" she said cheerfully. "I missed it. I was out the last time it happened, remember? You had all the fun yourselves," she said, resentful.
"You're far too bloodthirsty, sis," Donn commented, disapprovingly.
"And you're far too soft," Rhyme replied, smiling.
"Ah, shut up."
Arch was quite used to the discussions between the two tiwns. Afterall, they were twins. "Calm down you two," he said. "We've got their numbers, and more than enough time left to prepare for it. Relax."
"How do you know those things?" Donn asked.
"Anna felt around thousand invaders. Mostly orcs and humans, she said." Rhyme smiled at that remark. A thousand. It had been six hundred last time, at the very maximu, they had told her. Donn stared at her with a disapproving look. "As for the time," Arch continued, "we believe they're coming around dusk. So you gotta be ready around five, at most. Got it?"
"Yeeeah," Donn replied, lazily.
"It's settled then," Arch said getting up. "Five o'clock in the northern hill. See ya then." Arch left through the back door, still opened.

It had been hard for Arch to discover the exact time of the invasion. He had to appeal to the city's elder, the senior witch Grandma Lolita, and the only 100% reliable foreseer around. As always, the old hag hadn't been any helpful and didn't tell him what she had seen. But he managed to catch the word 'sunset' and then some blabber about metaphors he didn't understand.

As for Donn, he really wasn't that happy about the whole thing. He wasn't in the mood to cast spells at all...
Freaking headache.


---//---



Gnashy comment on this chapter:
[spoiler]Chapter III out. I'm predicting about 5 or 6 chapters, total. Doesn't matter that no one reads it, I-am-gonna-finish. It's a matter of honour now =P [/spoiler]

[spoiler]master bumpxorness![/spoiler]


.:: IV ::.

The Dark Knight opened his eyes slowly. His first thought was how come the people before him were standing on the sky, but the quantity of blood around his brain quickly told him that he was upside down. He took his time to analyze the situation; his right feet was tied to a rope hanging from a branch of a big tree, and the whole thing kept him hanging upside down as he swinged lightly. The sun was rising in the vast blue floor. From the corner of his helmet-limited vision, the Dark Knight could see Peppo hanging from a nearby branch in the same fashion as himself. He knew he had been captured, but he also knew that remembering how that happened was not going to be a pleasant experience.

There had been the battle... the beautifully evil Dark Knight and the menacingly evil ranks of his army and Peppo had charged down the hill at dusk in the most devilish poetic manner. But there also had been resistance: the city hadn't been unprepared. A legion of small preadolescent humans had stormed out of the city limit and clashed with the Dark Knight's army on the plains outside Taquara. There hadn't been more than two hundred of the little ones, but the battle had been fierce.
And as in every major battle, the leaders of the opposing armies were attracted to a clean circle in the middle of the battlefield where no other combatant dared to enter; and there, the leaders of the opposing armies faced off. The Dark Knight confronted the four teenagers who led the city's resistance; the only fully graduated Heroes still living in Taquara.
Teamwork. It had always been a strange concept for the Dark Knight... no one had bothered explaining him what it was during his Villain Academy years. At the mention of the word, some Villains just nodded their head in painful understanding, while others simply went pale and mute. The Dark Knight had even tried renting the '10 Useful Villainous Tips to Confront Teamwork' book in the library; but the book was so popular it was never there. All in all, the Dark Knight had a general idea of Teamwork being some kind of power the Heroes had that should be avoided at all costs. But, until last night, he didn't know what Teamwork was or what it looked and smelled like.
Now he knew, and the result was that he was hanging hopelessly from a tree as if he had fallen in a ridiculous trap (which, in a way, he had), and what was rest of his menacingly evil army laid scattered on the plains around him.

"He's woken up," the Dark Knight heard a male voice say. Soon a young man came into view, wearing wizard robes. Behind him came a girl with long black hair carrying a sword and looking unusually happy, a young man dressed all in black, and another girl, also dressed in black. Even being unable to notice any details because of his upside-down-ness, the Dark Knight recognized the teenagers who had led the army during the night.
The Dark Knight sighed, a gesture that looked much less dramatic than in should behind the full face helmet. "I've lost, haven't I?" he asked.
"You sure did," the girl with the sword said, smiling in a way that could have been in a diagram in a Villainous Psychology book.
"We sure did, boss."
"Shut up, Peppo."
"What else did you expect, eh?" asked the wizard boy, looking troubled. "You really thought you'd catch us off guard? No way. We've been having more Villain attacks than sunny days, lately."
"Of course, I should have expected that," said the Dark Knight gloomly.
Suddenly, the boy in black stepped forward. "Why? Is there a reason for these attacks?"
The Dark Knight was about to show that he hadn't lost his dignity and make a dramatic mystery out of it, but Peppo started talking before the Knight could make a darkly disturbing comment to the boy.
"What, haven't you heard?" the goblin asked. "The Golden Paladin's went kaboof, he isn't around anymore! Villainy's the hit this summer!"
The Dark Knight watched as the wizard and the boy in black exchanged questioning looks.
"The Golden Paladin, missing? Is that true?" asked the boy in black.
"Sounds like true," said the girl with the sword, sounding slightly disturbed.
"It is true," said the other girl, the one in black, using the tone which suggested that whatever she was saying, it was definite.
The wizard sighed, looking in a defeated way the the girl in black. "True it is, then."
The boy in black turned to the group. "Let's return to the city. We gotta check that." And they all mumbled in agreement, turned and started walking south, back to the city.
"What about us?!" Peppo shrieked. "You aren't gonna leave us hanging here, will you?"
The girl in black turned to Peppo and stared at him with her piercing gray eyes and blank expression for a brief moment before saying coldly, "Yes."
"Ah, come on, you are Heroes!" Peppo tried, but they were already out of sight.

The Dark Knight broke the silence a few minutes later.
"I have lost, Peppo."
"What, boss?"
"I have lost to Heroes. And they have not killed me. Captured me in a painfully ridiculous way yes, but not killed. Which means I must take the Villainous Vow."
"What, boss?"
"The Villainous Vow, Peppo. From this moment on, I must dedicate my life to pursue and challenge those Heroes who defeated me; until I win, they kill me, or I retire from being Evil."
"What, boss?"
"It probably means that we'll be dead sometime soon, Peppo. They have hold of The Teamwork."
"Ah, I see, boss. And what now?"
"Now, Peppo, we get rid of those ropes and return home. We can stop by a pub in the way to recruit some Minions. With luck, we'll be returning next week already."
"I see, boss."


Atlantic - The End






---//---


Gnashy comment on this chapter:
What, you thought I had given up? No way. I said before I was going to finish, it was a matter of honour, right? So here's the end of the short story for you all to enjoy or not enjoy or ignore. ^^ I just reread everything and I really liked the way it turned out.

Now that it is finished, anyone care to read through it and say what you think? Please? =]