The Mimic Blade

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Book Excerpt

Chapter One

It was Thursday, the 14th of Yulex. The winter months had been settled in for some time, and the snow fell on the majority of the Antacian Kingdom, as it had for generations this time of the year. Everything was normal.

 Everyone in the Kingdom was excited for the upcoming festival that was due to take place in eleven days. The Festival of the Blades. This year it was their turn to host the great exchange as one year faded into the next.

 Deep within the bowels of Lom Castle worked at least one man who was not excited for this, or any other festival.

 He is a dishwasher by the name of Pen Kenders, as miserable as being a dishwasher sounds this was a job he actually didn’t mind.  Pen drained the last sink and sighed.

“I hate the holidays, his royal lordship seems to have some kind of ritual feast every day, it’s enough to drive me insane,” Pen said to his long-time work partner as he dried his hands with a clean towel, then threw it in the large black basket by the door.

 “Yeah, you complain every year, the same old thing. Yet you keep coming back so it’s obviously not enough to make you quit,” Shane replied to him with an annoyed tone.

“I guess you’re right but still, I hate the holiday seasons. I mean they don’t even make any sense,” Pen said the same thing he said every year around this time. He closed the door to the dishwasher and backed away as it turned on by itself to avoid the blast of steam to his face.

A few seconds later Shane opened the metal door, pulled out the rack of plates and did his best to avoid the steam but it was nearly impossible.

 “You should lighten up and enjoy it, it doesn’t do you any good to be so bitter about them,” Shane said as he stacked up the clean plates.

“We’ll talk about it later. I just want to go home. Let’s clean this place up and get out of here, tomorrow is another day after all,” Pen changed the subject, tired of talking about it.

 “I can’t argue with that,” Shane said with a knowing smile as he picked up the stack and walked off to put them away. Pen just shook his head, grabbed his metal scrubbing pad to begin cleaning the scum that built up in the past six hours.

Shane and Pen worked well together and the cleaning up took only twenty minutes.

“See you tomorrow Shane,” Pen said as he put his jacket on over his soaked black shirt.

“Yep, see you later,” Shane replied and left the room. Pen looked around the place, after all these years being here, as miserable as it was sometimes, it was a second home. It was a place where he was in charge, it was safe. He shook his head, breaking out of the daze.

“Good night,” he said to no one, shut the lights off and left the room.

Pen walked outside and was discouraged. Snow was falling and the cold air caused his warm, wet clothes to steam. He stumbled through the fresh snow to his car. The castle walls usually broke the wind but tonight the wind was blowing in his direction.

The snow felt like tiny blades as the wind whipped them in his face. Shane was gone, he could see the tire tracks leading away and now he wished he would have hurried out of here, too. He walked to his car and brushed the snow off of it to get in.

 He put the keys in and turned them, but the engine barely turned over.

“Oh, come on, don’t do this to me, not tonight,” Pen said desperately and tried again. He sighed in relief when the engine came to life.

“Thank Taro,” he said quietly and got back out of his car with the brush to get all the snow off the windshield and the rest of his car. Pen brushed off the powdery snow as fast as he could, got back in his car and turned on his wiper blades to do the rest of the work.

“Alright, let’s go home,” he said, talking to himself. Pen pulled out of the parking lot and drove very slowly to the exit. He pulled up to the guard post and stopped, rolled down his window.

 “Finally leaving today, Kenders?” Dan asked him the same thing every day. Pen found it annoying but dealt with it anyway. “Yep, another day, another coin, you know how it is,” Pen replied as he handed his ID over.

“I know who you are, you don’t need to show it each time,” Dan said, glanced at the laminated card just to make Pen feel better.

“Old habits and all, anyway, stay warm tonight,” Pen replied and retracted his arm and rolled up the window. The guard pressed the button and the gate lifted, then he waved to him as he left. Pen drove through the gate and pulled onto the road.

It was abandoned but that was typical on a night like this. He felt lucky that he didn’t have to drive too far from the castle. Normally working as a dishwasher would put you on the bleak side of town. Since Pen worked for the King and the royal family, it paid much better. He always considered himself lucky but knew luck had nothing to do with it.

Pen drove down the road slowly with the radio off to make sure he wouldn’t be distracted in the winter weather. The trip home was lonely and uneventful just how he liked his trips home.

Soon he pulled into his garage and shut the door behind him. He got out of the car and made his way into the house. The house was pretty big but he lived alone, in fact he only ever used four rooms in the place regularly, the other three remained empty. The minute he walked inside he peeled off his grease soaked clothes and threw them in the basket.

It was something he’d done by heart for about fifteen years now.

From here it was straight into the bathroom to take a shower to get the feeling of being grimy and coated with slime off of his skin. This was always a quick process because his feet were always so sore by the end of the night that standing became difficult. Standing in six hours in one place all night did a number on him.

 He got out of the shower and put his night clothes on, a pair of gray shorts and a black t-shirt. With that he hobbled into the kitchen to grab his half gallon jug of water from the refrigerator and right to his favorite recliner. Sitting down in it was always the best part of his day, leaning back and doing nothing was something he looked forward to each and every night.

Pen reached for his remote and turned on the television. It was EFF news network that came on.

“Well I wonder what happened today,” he said to himself and watched.

“Today a necromancer raised three ghouls and used them to attack Desert Wind Elementary School, thirty are dead in this horrific, but all too common place event. It has brought up the topic of magic control once again in the courts of King Lom,” Pen turned the channel.

 It was tragic but he didn’t care about things like that because there was nothing he could do. He only worried about the things he could change and he knew nothing about magic.

 “Just a dishwasher,” he said to himself. There was a time in his life when he could have made that jump into the magic world, but that was long past. Nearing thirty years old and magic users often started at fifteen. No, Pen knew he was stuck doing this and would likely do this job until he was dead. He didn’t mind that idea.

Pen turned to another news network.

 “And the royal families are coming to Lom castle, preparing for the blade celebration, each family is bringing their sacred blade as it’s been eight years that the families have been gathered here,” Pen turned the channel again, he was sick of holiday stuff and wanted to avoid it whenever he could.

He turned the channel to Sinistars and one of his favorite movies was on.

 Delta Squad part three. It was better than holiday stuff and it would make for great back ground noise. Pen rarely watched television directly. Most of the time he spent his nights connected to the Internet. Pen was an avid player of games.

 His favorite online game was World of Snowcraft. It was a roleplaying game for millions of people from all eight of the kingdoms. It connected ordinary people across The Distance as he called it, others just called it the Outside.

Pen picked up his laptop, turned it on and quickly logged into the game. His character was nothing like his real life identity. In real life he was content to be a nobody, a small cog in a massive machine, just making the thing go.

 In Snowcraft he was a level one hundred Dreadknight of The Blue Ice clan and he went by the name of Sir Kenders. In truth, this was less about him and more honoring his father. In the game, he kept it secret who he really was, and if anyone ever asked he would just say it was an homage to the real guy, nothing more.

“Hey there, Kenders welcome back,” A voice came out of his speakers, he turned down the television a bit.

“Hey, glad to be back Iceshaper, any good raids today?” Pen responded with a voice that was just a tad bit deeper than his normal voice. Iceshaper was someone Pen always had a bit of a crush on. She was a high level cryomancer

.

While they were common in the game very few people had the patience to play the job to be really effective, just like in real life, warrior types were much more common.

“Yeah, the frost giant’s lair is opening up in celebration for the blade festival. The clan is going to raid it and beat the boss sometime tonight, we’re just early,” Iceshaper replied with that sweet voice.

 “Oh good, more holiday stuff. At least we’ll get to kill something,” Kenders responded, and smiled at the thought.

“It’s still hot down this way, I suppose it’s snowing where you are by now,” Iceshaper replied with a laugh. “You know it is, cold as a, well, frost giant’s breath,” Kenders said and laughed at his lame joke, Iceshaper laughed too, she must have thought it was funny.

“Hey the rest of the group is logging in, let’s go to the home base,” Iceshaper said to him as they teleported to the home base.

The next few hours were spent with him and six other people rampaging through the lair of an evil frost giant. The enemy at the end of the dungeon faded away at last and the clan was rewarded with special holiday themed gear.

 Pen looked at the clock and it was about three in the morning.

“Sorry guys it’s about three my time. I gotta get going. I’ll talk to you later,” Kenders said, the rest of the team said their goodbyes before he logged out.

 He had been sitting in one spot for hours and this was just as hard on him as working was. He closed his computer and slowly started to stand up from the chair, putting the computer on the arm of a couch he never sat in and shut the television off.

He slowly made his way to his bedroom.

 “I’ve got to quit doing this to myself,” Pen said to himself, but knew it was a lie. He said the same thing just about every night as his stiff body struggled to move.

He made it to his ice-cold bedroom, he left the window open before he left today, but it wasn’t snowing then and he’d forgotten about it until right now. He tried to close it, but it was frozen shut.

“Come on, you can do it,” Pen said and pushed a little harder, the ice broke and he was able to shut it. Pen fell into bed and looked straight into his ceiling. Sleep never came easy for Pen. He was always thinking of vast things, ideas that came from nowhere.

Tonight however, he turned his head and looked at the picture, the last picture that was ever taken of his father and sighed.

“It’s been three years, where are you?” Pen asked that question sometimes but didn’t know why anymore.

It was hard on him but much harder on his mother whom Pen had no choice but to have committed, driven mad with a wicked kind of guilt that came on when they got the news that someone they love had gone missing.

Pen shook his head and cleared his thoughts. There was no need to be thinking of things he couldn’t change or do anything about. These were words he’d lived by for ages and they haven’t failed yet.

 Life could have been so much worse right now and he had the news to remind him of that fact every single day. This was a day in the life of Pen Kenders. He shut off the light with a push of a button, lay there in the dark only to drift off to unknown dreamscapes.