Gladiator

Prolouge

TW: Death, loss, kidnapping, arenas, fighting rings, gladiators, pollution, animal cruelty, destruction, blood, gore, sadness

I'm going to tell you the story of a little avian girl, with bright blue eyes and golden hair that matched her wings.

When she was born, her mother named her Marcella, meaning brave warrior.

For the first four years of her life, she lived in the Aether dimension. Almost a month after that fourth birthday, that's when the raiders came. 

They destroyed her clouds, leaving them polluted and dirty. They took the Moas, beautiful, majestic birds, and killed each that they saw, until any within hundreds of miles from the portal had long since fled.

The worst offense though, was not what they had done to her dimension, or even the creatures. It was what they did to her flock. It was what they did to her.

Most were killed off, the raiders only seeing little Marcella later. They remembered a friend at that point, someone who collected oddities. The owner of a fighting ring. They decided to sell her off to him rather than slaughter her as well.

For the next two years, Marcella, or Mare, learned to fight. She learned that it was her against the world. She learned not to show emotion. Any memories she had of her family faded into a far-off nook in her mind, most only ever accessed through her dreams. She learned to follow directions. And she learned to kill.

When she was around six and a half, a piglin boy was thrown into her cell with her. He was five years older than her, at eleven.

The first time she saw him, she was just returning from a fight, and the boy was crying on the ground of her cell, mourning his family.

Over the next two years, she and the boy became closer. She taught him to fight, and he in turn taught her to love. He was the closest she had to a brother. She called him Bubbles, a play on his bubblegum pink hair, and he called her Goldie, after her own hair and shining wings.

Powers develop at ten years old, so the boy already had his whereas the girl did not. He has regeneration and quick healing, along with a slight form of super strength, all of which helped him in his learning faze of fighting.

The two were the most feared pair in the ring. The handlers never made them fight against each other, not after the one time they tried. That attempt ended in dozens upon dozens of slain guards, laying in puddles of their own blood.

The Blood God and the Tempest they were called. After every death Mare thanked the spirits of their opponents, thanking them for their sacrifice, thanking them for her life.

They protected each other, always at each other's backs. Mare was now eight years old, and the boy, whose name was Technoblade, was thirteen. That was the summer they ran away. They convinced their opponents to fight with them, rather than against, and together they escaped, the two groups splitting up as soon as they were free.

After a year of running, always being found and having close calls with the hunters, Mare made a decision.

She told Technoblade that they needed to split up. They were far too recognizable together, the tall older boy with pink hair and eyes that flickered red when he was mad, paired with the younger girl with golden blond hair and wings, blue eyes that used to sparkle like the sun, dulled by unimaginable trauma. Technoblade refused to leave her on her own, but she pulled him down to her level, gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, whispered that she loved him, and ran, darting away before he could react. That decision likely saved both of their lives many times over, though she mourned the loss of her closest friend for years after.

He chased after her of course, but when that girl wishes to disappear, then disappear she will.

The two went down very different, yet strangely similar paths, the boy finding a pair of brothers and a father, along with a job as a hero by pure chance, and the girl living paycheck to paycheck with a boy named Grayson, vigilantes together in the poorest district of D'Esempi.

Though two were separated, they never forgot each other, missing the other with all their hearts, until fate brought them together by chance.

But that, of course, is a very long story.