Ren of Atikala Read online

HOME.

  THE WORD HAS A special resonance with us all. Great or humble, rich or poor, everyone cherishes their home, and if deprived of it, loses a piece of themselves. We crave the stability of the known, a warm bed that we can crawl into every night, our possessions around us and everything just as it is supposed to be. We fight to defend it. If we are lucky, home is the place where we die.

  I remember looking back at Atikala, its ceiling collapsed, the homes of fifty thousand kobolds crushed under unimaginable tonnes of rock and dirt. I wanted to reject that this had happened, to scream to the ceiling until the rock receded, until fate changed its mind and restored everything to the way it was. I thought life could not be so cruel as to take everything I’d known in an instant—everything we had all known.

  Oh how I now understand that life can be capricious indeed.

  It took me many years, but I eventually realised that my species is not so dissimilar to the humans, the dwarves, or even the gnomes. We hate and fear so much and so many, but we are more alike than most know.

  We all have one thing in common, and that is we love our homes. To lose our home is a terrible thing that pains our hearts like the death of a close friend. Physically a home is nothing more than inanimate stone and wood and nails, but it is so much more when surrounded by friends, by family, and by all the things we love.

  I don’t remember how long Khavi and I wandered in the long, winding tunnels at the north of the world. We survived entirely by chance. We were two kobolds stumbling around the underworld with nothing but our patrol gear, weapons, armour, and a backpack full of supplies for a week’s march. We had no plan, only a vague idea where we were going, and nowhere to return to.

  It was the single great event that changed my life, and I feel, beyond even the strange circumstances of my hatching and training in the great city of Atikala, beyond discovering my sorcerer’s talent and awakening the spark of magic within me, that this is a good point to begin the story of my life.

  There are other stories that I wish to tell, and I will tell them one day, but this story must come first.

  The story of how I came to the surface of Drathari and unwillingly traded a life for a life.

  — Ren of Atikala