"Are you sure he's the right one? He's so… small."
"For the last time - Yes, I am sure." A familiar voice said.
August groaned, and slowly opened his eyes to a dimly lit room. He was laying on something cold and hard. He looked up to see two shadowy figures standing and peering down at him.
"Look what you've done, now he's awake. I'll have to tranquilise him again." The girl said.
"You weren't supposed to tranquilise him in the first place! They want him unharmed." A male voice said.
"He is unharmed. He's just easier to deal with when he's not conscious."
August slowly attempted to lift himself up and failed. He felt a throbbing pain in the side of his head. His body felt like it was made of lead as he struggled to move. He looked around again, seeing that he was in some sort of a small room. The ground was made of wood, but he couldn't make out much else.
One of the people standing and watching him was the girl from before. She had removed her flowy robe, revealing her long, tightly-braided white hair. The man that stood next to her was nearly identical to her, except his hair was cut short and uneven. They had the same pale skin, light-brown eyes and the same tall and thin frames.
"Who are you?" August managed to say.
"Hi. I'm Dex." The man said, his teeth flashing white in the darkness. He created a rather unsettling image that gave August the impression of a creature that ate children.
"He's not as scary as he looks." The girl said, as if reading his thoughts. "I'm Catriona. And like I said before, we aren't here to kill you. We were ordered to take you to our headquarters."
August slowly processed what he was being told. It wasn't easy to do when he felt like someone had removed his brain and stuffed his head with cotton, but he was trying. He felt the panic flood into his body as he suddenly sat upright. "Who do you work for? Why do you need me?"
"We work for Locusta." Dex said.
"What's that?"
Dex looked dumbfounded. "What? How do you not know what that is? Do you live under a rock?"
Catriona smacked Dex on the side of the head. "Idiot. You can't expect the average person to know what Locusta is. We wouldn't be able to do our jobs properly if they did."
"Well, he's clearly not the average person if we were ordered to specifically hunt him down. How long have we been after him anyway? It's been at least three or four weeks." Dex replied.
Catriona sighed. "Ignore him. Locusta is an organisation that works behind the scenes for… a lot of people who don't want to get their hands dirty. Governments, royals, nobles… Anyone rich and desperate enough. We also do research, of course. We're all highly trained and most of us have a high percentage of Ichor," She paused. "surely you know what ichor is."
When August nodded, she continued. "The reason why we were asked to hunt you down is because your DNA was found at one of the crime scenes in Xandon a few months back. Of course the defence forces had to run it through tests to see if they could identify it but there were no hits. Not even one. You should be proud of yourself for maintaining that level of anonymity in an age where so many things are documented. But that wasn't the only interesting thing. Your blood is - pure. Or very nearly so - they said it was 99% but that can't be true. Nobody, other than the Royals of Alpenglow I suppose, are that pure. Finding someone with 99% ichor out in the wild is… unprecedented. Raven wanted to test it himself."
August tensed up. He had to find out what they knew about him before he could give them any information about himself. He still didn't feel safe. He knew there was nothing his father would stop at to hunt him down if he believed that August was a threat. "Alpenglow royals?"
"Are you serious?" Dex looked annoyed this time. "Please tell me you have at least heard about the wars that happened all those years ago?"
August nodded, pretending to understand.
"Okay, great. So you know that you are statistically impossible, right? You shouldn't exist. There's no chance that you're some long lost relative of the Crown Houses of Alpenglow because your blood would be a lot more diluted. If there was a Noble who had been lost or kidnapped then we know the king wouldn't sit idly. And no offense, but you don't look royal. So we can just cancel that out."
August stayed silent, thinking about what they were saying. "So what do you want from me?"
"To join us, of course. We are both pretty powerful ourselves but we can't compare to you. With the right training, you would basically be a God. Kind of like that Nyx guy that disappeared all those years ago." Dex said.
"Who?" August said, truly clueless.
Dex just sighed. "There was some guy that tried to destroy the walled capital of Alpenglow and take down the royal family nearly two decades ago. He wanted the commoners to be treated as equals to the nobles."
"Nobles? Commoners?"
"Maybe you really do live under a rock," Dex said, clearly running low on patience.
"I don't know how much you know about Alpenglow, but this is pretty common knowledge. We are both from different Kingdoms as well, but we have heard about it too. After the wars, the King of Alpenglow created nearly pure-blooded beings so that the royal line would stay powerful. The commoners with human blood were always discriminated against. Nyx probably thought himself a vigilante hero of some sort, and tried to kill the royals and most of the nobles." Catriona explained.
August looked confused. "What happened to him?"
"You sure ask a lot of questions." Dex said, yawning.
Catriona ignored him. "We don't know. He disappeared." She sighed. "We'll clearly have to include some history and politics lessons in your training. That is - if you accept the offer of course." Catriona paused and looked at August expectantly. "We can help you hide from whoever you've been running from. You don't have to answer now. Just wait until you talk to Raven and the others. For now, let's get some rest."
August spent the next few hours in a haze. The water and the food that he was given did nothing to help with the fuzziness in his head. He was promised it would wear off with time, but it almost felt like it was getting worse. It's non-lethal of course. Catriona had said to him. It's only meant to knock you out for a little while. I'm sorry about that, by the way.
August sighed. He had asked more questions and gotten satisfactory answers. They were on a ship, headed to an "uncharted island". Dex was captaining it, and August had been given a small room below decks and told to rest. It was the first time in months that he had slept in a real bed, and it felt strange. August didn't know how much he could trust these strange people. What if they were just lying to him, and they were just going to sell him to his father? They didn't seem to know more about him than what they had said, so he felt confident that it wasn't likely.
He slowly made his way to the deck where Catriona stood, staring at the horizon.
"How did you know my name?" He asked.
She glanced at him. "A tip. Someone on the coast of Alpenglow. There was a man who said you begged him to let you live after sneaking onto a cargo ship." She looked at August, whose face had turned red from shame. "You're acting like you don't know a lot about the Kingdom or even the rest of the world, and I want to believe you, but… That's the furthest back that we could trace you to. To that ship in Alpenglow. You're like a ghost of some sort. There's no record of you anywhere. No birth certificate, no papers about your education, no medical records. You've either never had those - which is impossible - or you've gone to great lengths to destroy any information about you. I'm not trying to pry. I'm saying that I know you don't trust us, but don't expect us to trust you either. You're a pure-blood. You must know how powerful you are."
August stayed silent, feeling the weight of her words.
"One day," Catriona said. "When the truth of this all comes out. I don't want to find out that you were a threat to us all along." Catriona looked at August in the eyes. "I won't let anything hurt my brother. I hope you know that."
Before August could answer, Catriona walked away, leaving him alone with his thoughts. He sighed. He had never asked to be dragged in to this. There was a reason he worked alone. He closed his eyes and wondered if accepting this role would be a step closer or further away from finding what he wanted. He couldn't dwell on it. He made his way back to his room before he could feel the tears stinging his eyes.