CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Darius stood at the entrance to the Capital arena, the roar deafening as he looked up at the thousands of Empire citizens in the coliseum, shaking the ground as they all screamed out for blood. Darius was chained to dozens of other gladiators, faces he did not even look at this time, faces he did not even want to recognize: he knew that soon they, like he, would all be dead.
Darius tried to drown out the noise, this arena so vast, so overwhelming, dwarfing the other arena in size. He had never seen anything like it—it was a spectacle beyond the imagination. So many people, he thought, so devoted to bloodshed and cruelty.
Standing beside him, in his brown robes, was Deklan, holding his staff and looking out serenely, as if he had seen it a thousand times before.
There
