For Sadir, things had been going just so well. Or at least, about as well as a condemned man's life could go. He'd been involved in more one-on-one fights lately, which while being difficult, at least removed some serious elements of chaos from the fighting ring.
There was nothing worse than going in with your head held high, only to get impaled on, say, a shard of the chariot that just crashed into the wall. Sadir had seen it happen, and happen often, to far greater fighters than deserved it. He didn't fear much, but going out in a truly bitch fashion was one of the few things he did.
He didn't even know what had happened. One minute, he was circling his opponent-- it had been a markedly unfair fight, the other man coated in protective armor, a roll of netting in one hand and a trident in the other, while Sadir himself had little more than a dirk to defend himself with. Maybe it had been the heat of the sun, maybe it had been the beating he was taking, maybe it had been the fact that it was his third fight that day, maybe it was the dull roar of the crowd and the echo of stomping feet.
Maybe it had been the sleepless night he had beforehand.
The netting had caught him around his ankles, had tripped him up and thrown him on his back, and the more he struggled to free himself, the more trapped he became. The mere notion, coupled with all of those other things, had sent him straight out of any rational thought and right down into a darker, more primeval part.
Sadir didn't like rope, and he had panicked. He had lashed out, again and again, rolling this way and that to keep his opponent from skewering him like some wild boar. He had roared, had screamed and cursed and stabbed as far as his arm could reach, had felt his pulse pounding in his ears, drowning out everything else around him.
Everything else, but the earthquake. At first, it had been small, and he had thought that maybe his head was swimming from the dizzying heights of adrenaline and battle-frenzy. But then the sandy ground had cracked, had split open like the fragile shell of an egg and spilled forth the golden contents within.
His opponent had been standing just there when the lashes of lava sprayed out, taking his leg with it. The man had screamed, and screamed, right until another great upheaval splashed him with molten rock. Sadir had scrambled back, had kicked out as if that might save him, even as the skin at the bottoms of his feet began to blister. Finally freed of the netting, he had run, as hard and as fast as he had ever run before, the cracking of the earth on his heels like a pack of baying dogs. He didn't slow, couldn't slow, even when it was obvious that the gates weren't going to open, weren't going to let him out, were just going to stand sentinel as he was burned alive or swallowed whole.
What Sadir hadn't expected was the gates to cave in beneath him, the stone and metal bent like wet clay, wood sprayed across still-occupied cells and no doubt catching many of the other waiting fighters. But he didn't have time for that, for any of that, and he kept running, even though the rumbling of the earth had stopped and the devilish lava flow had ceased chasing him. He crashed into the far gate, much the same as the first, and very nearly took out some poor old man in the process. But the primeval bit of him was still screaming at him to run, and so he ran, ignoring everything around him except to use it to get away.
It was like that time eighteen years ago, all over again.
Still, he was only a mortal man, and his muscles were screaming from fatigue, his legs threatening to lock up and buckle beneath him. He darted down another alleyway, down a third and a fourth, until finally he could go no further. He very nearly crashed into another wall, so defeated were his legs, and he used the cool limestone to prop himself up, his fists raised and ready for a fight should he have been followed.
Still his pulse thundered, still his feet burned, and still his chest heaved for breath, each one coming like the hottest winds on the dunes, and hotter still, singing his tongue like over-boiled tea without him really able to ask why.
