Harold opened the door of my father’s house as I approached. You should have gotten the impression by now that he was a very dry and single-minded man, devoted to service but finding very little to excite him in life. He had been a part of my world since my earliest memories. In fact, I had spent a great deal more time around Harold than around my father, who was always busy away on trips, conducting business, or living the indulgent life of a criminally wealthy merchant. I would like to say that Harold filled the void, provided the father figure and nurturing emotional warmth that was absent, but as you’ve possibly noticed, Harold never seemed to overflow with emotional anything. I did know him well, though, and as I approached the door, I could tell that, in his own repressed way, he was agitated.

He said, "Master Tiberius, the kitchen almost has your supper ready. I shall have it sent to your room immediately." I observed his darting eyes and understood immediately what had upset him. I spoke low, "He’s drinking."

Harold hesitated, then faintly nodded. "Why don’t you go to your room, young master? You must be exhausted after the day’s events, and congratulations, may I say. The city is abuzz with the news of your last-minute triumph." Harold may not have been a warm pillow of love and expression, but he cared for me in his own way. If he was herding me to my room in this manner, it could only mean that I was in danger of becoming the victim of my father’s drunken tirades. I couldn’t understand the possible source of a tirade; I had survived the day and gained the beam.

"Thank you, Harold," I said and entered the house, moving immediately towards the stairs. There was a slightly slurred shout from the parlor, "Harold! Who is that? Is that my triumphant boy back from the arena?"

Harold looked at me apologetically. I answered for him, "Yes, Father, I’m back."

Father shouted more loudly, seemingly uproariously victorious, "Well, get in here, boy, have a drink with your old man." I nodded to Harold and crossed the foyer to the parlor.

The parlor was a strange mix of antiquity and modernity. The walls were adorned with tapestries depicting knights and battles, suits of armor stood in the corners, and heavy wooden furniture gave the room an air of bygone eras. Yet, there were also electric mood lights casting a warm glow, and a large display screen dominated one wall, currently showing footage of battles fought over orbs, Griidlords cleaving through hundreds of men like harvesters through fields of corn. My father stood in front of the screen, swaying ever so slightly, holding a huge whiskey glass in his hand.

As I entered, he turned to the cabinet, "You must deserve a drink after your survival today." I hesitated. He was offering a rare treat, but I was suspicious of his mood. "I don’t know if I should, Father. I must return to the arena again tomorrow."

"Nonsense," he said. "We won’t get you drunk, just one little sup with your old man to celebrate." He poured a rather large glass of whiskey and passed it to me. Offering his glass in toast, he said, "To my boy, who survived the day."

We clinked glasses. As we did, I could feel the threat—he had twice referred to survival and not victory. He must have been displeased. I sipped, the liquor burning hot, making my jaw throb. He gulped, then slurred worse, "And you gained the beam, my son. I understand that may be a first in the history of Boston."

"Somebody said something like that to me earlier," I replied.

He leaned close. I could now see his eyes were glazed but also desperately furtive, panicked even. "Do you think the beam will help you have better success tomorrow?"

"I don’t know what the competition will be like tomorrow, Father, if the beam will come into play. The others, they’re awfully good."

He snapped at that, slamming his glass down on the cabinet. It didn’t shatter, but I heard the clink of a crack emerging in the incredibly expensive crystal. "Awfully good? Better than you? My son! I probably spent more on your tutors than all the rest of them combined. You shouldn’t just be scraping through, you should be coming out on top, you should be the favorite by now."

I cowered back slightly, desperate to avoid worsening his eruption. "I’m learning fast. I have the beam now. None of the rest of them have the beam."

He stepped forward as I backed slightly, towering over me. "But as you said, the beam might not come into play at all tomorrow. Tomorrow, you might be coming home with a tale of woe."

"I’m doing my best," I said, my own anger rising now, swallowing my fear.

"You’re my son! Your best should be dominating those nose-turning bigots! We can’t afford for you not to win!" He seemed to startle himself as he said this, his eyes blinking.

"We can afford almost anything..." I said, confused.

He turned his face, found his glass, drank again. He seemed to be thinking. "Father, what is it?" I asked.

He sighed, his shoulders slumping. Father was the most composed man in the city, more regal than the Highlord, but in that moment, in many moments when he was too deep in his cups, he looked a little pathetic.

He said, "I made a wager. That's how I got you into the competition."

I didn't understand. With my father's wealth, how could he possibly have made a wager that could worry him? Many of the lords couldn't afford a house in the first sector of the city, where order was high and things like video screens and electric lights functioned. My father owned the largest house in the first sector of this city, and he owned homes in the first sectors of other cities. He owned whole towns, trading outposts that had grown into full settlements. What could he have done?

His eyes were wet, not just from the glaze of the whiskey, but from emotion, from guilt, fear. "I wagered a good deal, son, a great amount of my fortune. Worth it, of course, because you will win, and then we will be first among nobles here, title and wealth, unlike those flailing impoverished bastards with titles but no gold."

"How much?" I asked, the words barely escaping my lips.

He seemed to try to assure me, his hands waving. "A lot, enough, not too much... but things have changed."

"Changed? Changed how?" My emotions chilled me, the pressure on me deepening.

He said, "The Horde hit Dodge City. It's gone."

I gasped, unable to help it. Dodge City was an ancient settlement in the wilds, far from order, that my father had essentially bought and transformed into a hub for his empire. Huge warehouses holding goods between transits, holding other goods waiting for market fluctuations to increase their value, holding fortunes of goods simply to allow them to appreciate. The army that my father employed to defend Dodge City might have been enough to rival the military forces of some of the smaller city-states, might have rivaled Boston's own army in those days.

"Dodge City... gone?" I echoed, struggling to comprehend the magnitude of the loss.

He nodded, his face a mask of despair. "It's gone. The Horde came through, and our defenses couldn't hold. Everything is lost. The warehouses, the goods, the settlements. Everything."

I understand that this is the first you're hearing of the Horde. Maybe I should have stuck an addendum on them somewhere else. For now, a little bit, enough to give you an idea without breaking the flow of the story too much.

You should by now have a fair picture of the world: technology functioning in the centers of cities and in regions owned by the city, dependent on the city having enough Flows to spend to raise order levels required for whatever tasks were needed—to let an army use tanks and guns, to let the farmers use machinery for the harvest, to let factories churn. Most of the land was far from cities, nominally governed and taxed by a city-state, but never feeling the touch of Order. We called such places the wilds. In the wilds, the only power was muscle power, horses for plows, men for swords and bows.

But there was the Horde. To tell you of the Horde, I must briefly mention chaos storms. I'll tell you more another time, but for now, chaos storms were relatively rare events, or at least rarely observed by humans. Strange swellings in the entropy field that appeared and faded at random, sweeping across the land, destroying, spawning fiends. They rarely hit a settlement—the simple odds of it were so low—but the storms sometimes came with the Horde.

Back then, we didn't understand the Horde. They were a people alien and terrifying to all civilized men. They weren't Griidlords exactly, but they had collections of armor and rode terrifying motorized bikes. They came in the hundreds, sometimes, it was said, the thousands, with the storms. Not all storms, not nearly, thank the Oracle. Even then, when we didn't understand them, it was clear that their tech was related to the storms. They could use guns, power weapons, the bikes, out in the wilds where none could. But their movement was limited. Away from storms, their tech functioned no better than anyone else's.

The Horde swept away villages from time to time, but the idea of them falling on Dodge, with its wealth, with its thousands of defenseless inhabitants... The army defending Dodge, with swords, spears, bows... They would have been like ants to the Horde with their guns and armor.

I stood there, breathless for a moment. This couldn’t be. I tried to grasp what this would mean for us. Dodge was a city that my father had basically built from the ground up. It was repository of treasures and goods. I tried to fathom what would have been lost to us, what this would mean for us, but the scale of the tragedy was too vast.

"Dodge City... Dodge is gone?" I breathed.

Father looked at me. His eyes were a little unfocused by the whiskey, but I could see the strain there. He said, "Between that and the wager... if you lose... if you don't win the Choosing, or at least do well enough for me to renegotiate the wager... we'll be ruined."