Lord of the Arena | Godtear Lore
Today we’ve got something special for Godtear fans—a short piece of fiction outlining the backstory of everyone’s favourite bloodthirsty gladiator: Titus, the Disgraced!
Lord of the Arena
“I was born in Gyle. I saw my father killed in a knife fight. My mother was sent to the border forts. She didn’t take me—thought I’d have a better chance of surviving on my own in that cursed city than I would with the beast raids every few days. She was probably right. Gyle… is a strange place. Hard, cold. Ruled over by a madman, but a madman who cares that his people get enough to eat. So I wasn’t starved. Merely in fear for my life. Stalked through the darkness by strange shapes. I killed my first man at the age of eight. Knife through the eye when he tried to steal three gold coins from me. They sent me to the same fort as my mother. I arrived just to see them carry her body back in, trampled to death in a beastfolk charge. The fort wasn’t bad—they taught me to wield a sword. I was good with a blade. Better than good.
“By the time I was seventeen I was the commander of the patrols. I led the men and women conscripted into the border troops, out into the Broken Plains. For four years, I slaughtered my way across that wilderness. For four years, I saw the men and women I was meant to lead butchered in front of me. For four years… and then they told me I had to go after that bastard Minotaur. The Red Tyrant. With rookies. So, out we went. Out into the barren land, into the darkness. And finally, when we were surrounded by slavering beastfolk, water ran out and no hope of surviving, I said stop. Enough. I led us back to the fort. Through a hundred miles of parched earth and the claws of our enemies. And when we finally got back—the few of us there were left—they threw me in prison. Said I was a deserter. Said I was a coward. Prison, then here. The fighting pits."
The man listening to Titus looked over at him through the bars. Titus looked young. Blonde. Powerful shoulders visible through a battered cuirass—the only armour he wore. Skin dark olive. Handsome.
The man in the next cell had a similar level of bulky muscle to Titus, but shared nothing else with him. Where Titus’ armour was dented and old, his own glowed. No dents, no abrasions. His sword was carefully tempered and etched with names—other men who had fallen to him in the fighting pits.
“Why are you telling me this?” said the man from beneath a heavy helmet which obscured his face entirely. “What makes you think I care?”
“Oh,” said Titus, suddenly smiling. “I don’t think you care. I just wanted you to know who was going to kill you.”
The crowd was already hoarse with screaming by the time Titus emerged into the glare of the evening sun. Final fight of the day. That was nice of them, he thought. Nice to schedule an expert to murder me.
The champion—Blerin the Butcher—had killed forty men in the arena, so they said. But Titus knew at least half of those men were already half-dead with exhaustion by the time Blerin had begun to stalk them around the sandy pit.
The pit was about sixty feet across, the ground made of stone and then covered with sand. Gobbets of blood and brain were splattered across it from the last fight. The walls of the arena were wooden and sheer, the top of the pit adorned with spikes to prevent any escaping the combat in the pit. But Titus had no intention of doing anything so dull. Instead, he sat down in the centre of the arena, crossed his legs and laid his sword across his lap. Waiting. The Butcher would make an entrance. He was welcome to it.
The crowd momentarily took an interest in the figure of the challenger—his unusual breadth and apparent coolness upon entering the pit were certainly not what they were used to. But this interest was quickly replaced by demanding bellows for Blerin the Butcher. The clapping took on a crushing rhythm as the gate to the Butcher’s cage swung open, and a hum of chanting began. Screaming, cries of surprise and fear and adoration. Titus remained comfortably seated.
The Butcher stomped into the arena, aiming for heavy footsteps of doom and achieving something closer to a childish tantrum. Titus smiled. He almost regretted the necessity of killing the Butcher. He hadn’t seemed particularly evil or cruel. Stupid, perhaps. But that wasn’t a reason for killing a man.
Shame. It had to be done.
The Butcher drew his sword and held it aloft, stabbing at the sky to the roaring acclaim of the crowd. Titus started giggling quietly to himself. Finally, once the Butcher had finished his extravagant gestures to the crowd, Titus stood and braced himself. He could see what was going to happen with a clarity that had once disconcerted him. When he was young, he’d been convinced that he was going mad—that his mind was broken somehow. It had taken him a long time to realise that his abilities made him special, marked him out as being more than simply one more soldier shoved into the onrushing path of a beastfolk raid. He’d tried not to think of himself as better, elevated. But it was difficult. He was faster, smarter. Saw things almost before they happened. He was fairly confident the Butcher didn’t, as the king of the fighting pits began a slow lumbering charge.
The rhythm of the crowd’s chanting and clapping synchronised with the Butcher’s run, gradually growing faster and faster, as he picked up speed. Titus waited. The Butcher raised his huge meat-cleaver of a sword, holding it before him like a holy talisman.
Titus still waited. The Butcher reached a a crazed, heedless charge, and the crowd howled in anticipation. As the hulking form of the Butcher was about to drive his sword forward, Titus moved.
He shifted his weight slightly, taking a sudden step to the left and bringing his sword up in a shallow arc. The Butcher was no swordsman, merely a brawler who’d been given a sword. Titus’ blade slipped beneath the Butcher’s outstretched sword, splitting flesh like a thumb slips through ripe fruit, and withdrew.
The Butcher ran on for several seconds, and then finally toppled heavily into the sand. Titus was impressed. Running a good twelve feet with half your insides left behind is no mean feat.
He wiped his sword clean. It wasn’t a good sword—lined with notches where the poorly tempered metal had barely withstood the blows of better blades. But you should always treat your weapon with care, especially if it's your only one. A good lesson from the days at the fort. It took Titus a few moments to realise that the crowd had fallen entirely silent. He wondered if they’d chant for him. But he didn’t care enough to wait and find out, simply walking easily back to the fighter cages.
***
“Who are you, fast hands?”
A voice in the darkness. Titus was silent. There’d be more words, and he didn’t feel like talking. He’d told the Butcher everything because he’d known he was going to kill him. It seemed like a fair exchange. The tale of a man’s life, for a man’s life. This hissing in the dark was less… dignified.“I’ve never seen hands so fast. The Butcher… you carved him up.”He couldn’t quite figure out who was talking. A fighter? A trainer? “You don’t talk much, eh, fast hands?”
“I talk to the people worth talking to. Or to those I’m going to kill. Which are you?”
A slight laugh. “Anger. You sound calm, but you’re angry, aren’t you?”
“I’m certainly starting to feel that way.”
“Good. Good. You’ll need it.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a friend, fast hands. Just a friend.”
Titus heard something drop to the floor of his cell. Something heavy, solid. A weapon? He became conscious of the light in the tiny chamber growing brighter, emanating from the object that had just dropped on his floor.
It was a crystal about the size of his fist, facets glimmering softly. Titus had heard of these things—they’d talked about them in the border forts—the godtears… the essence of the divine. Raw power. The ability to conquer the world.
Or be ripped apart by energies which mortals couldn’t possibly begin to contain within them… Who had given this to him? Was it an assassination attempt, or salvation? Titus reached out towards the chunk of broken god.
They came for him again the next day; as the morning brightness had softened into the glazed light of the afternoon. Titus huddled in the corner of the cell, shivering, wrapped around himself. The guards jabbed at him with spears, keeping their distance, and not just because they had seen him kill the Butcher. There was a pallor to his skin—something vaguely unwholesome.
“Get up,” barked one of the guards. “The crowd wants blood, and after killing the Butcher the boss saysyou’ll fight till you’re dead. First on, last out.”
The guards kept on prodding the wretched figure until he finally stood. He seemed, one of them thought, taller than he had been when they’d brought him in here yesterday.
The paroxysms of shaking continued to grip Titus as he stood, his hands only stopping their violent trembling when he gripped his own arms tightly. But, even as he stood and felt his body aching, he could sense something different. A power in his limbs. A clarity to his sight, to his thinking. A sharpness to all of his senses. The guards began to jostle him and this time he acceded, moving where they directed. He was quickly shoved down the corridor, clad in armour, and pushed back into the arena.
The crowd wasn’t as loud as it had been the previous day. They remained unsure of him, of this deserter. Yesterday, they’d cheered his imminent death and the approach of their hero, the Butcher. Now, they cheered the rumours they’d heard of his skill, most of them pure invention. They cheered what they might see.
The creaking of wood and rope told him that his opponents were coming, the cage door on the opposite side of the arena had lifted. Half a dozen armed men and women spilled out towards him. They were clad in a strange assortment of garments—furs and leather and mail. They charged over the thin sand towards him, weapons drawn, each bellowing an individual warcry he couldn’t quite distinguish over the screams of the others.
He hefted his sword and willed his body to stop trembling. It was difficult, he could still feel the faint stickiness of sweat on his skin. The armour felt too tight, but the sword wasn’t as heavy as it had been. He swung it about him in easy, gentle arcs, talking faintly to himself. Reminding himself of the movements he had learned as a child from the city training corp. The endless practice in the border skirmishes. Only the pain in his joints and the nausea distracted him.
But it could have been worse. It had been worse until only a few hours ago. Since that crystal had slipped beneath his skin, horrifying him as it parted flesh and soaked into him, into bone and sinew. Since then, since that moment of horror, he had felt as though his insides were rupturing. As though he were expanding. And now that his armour did not fit, he wondered, had he grown? Become something more than he had been?
Was he chosen? Who had slipped him the godtear? And then he stopped thinking—the blade of the first opponent to reach him slashed towards his head and he blocked it with his own sword. The man staggered back as though punched, his mouth wide in shock.
A woman brought two shortswords around in a clumsy swipe, aiming to catch him between the pair. But Titus wasn’t there. He couldn’t believe how quickly he’d moved. The woman stumbled, unable to compensate for the lunge which encountered nothing but air. Both of his opponents were now in front of him and Titus swung his blade with all the strength in his arms. He had expected to perhaps cut one across the chest, drawing a desperate parry from the second. He had not expected to part flesh and bone with such ease. The two died almost instantly, their upper halves ripped apart by a strength which Titus knew he had never possessed before this day.
The other four, seeing the carnage which Titus had achieved in mere seconds, were already determining how to escape the fight when they died. They had been unable to react quickly enough, unable to prevent their charge taking them to within range of Titus’ sword. He dealt with them quickly.
A low rumble of appreciation in the crowd. Titus placed his blade’s point into the ground and held its pommel before him. A statue, listening to the slap of hands and the yells of approbation. He didn’t even consider turning back to the sanctuary of the cage behind him, he knew more would be sent against him.
***
His sword broke on the skull of his twenty-first kill of the day.
During the third wave of gladiators sent against him, his blade caught the parietal bone of a hooded gladiator, and the blade snapped. There was a gasp from the mob in the stands, the ruined blade in Titus’ hands spelling the end of their evening’s slaughter. The gladiators began to circle now, victory secured.
He wasn’t even breathing heavily. It wasn’t possible, he thought. He should be soaked in sweat, gasping. There were a few wounds marking his flesh but he was barely conscious of them; even a dreadful slash through his forearm scarcely smarted. He could fight for days. Titus laughed as he saw his enemies draw in, exchanging glances of anticipatory triumph. He threw the jagged stump of his sword into the air and held his arms open in welcome to the foes before him. Through the thin slit in his helmet’s visor, he could see their sudden reluctance to approach.
“Come!” he called, his voice brittle with laughter, “Come and finish this!”
And Titus leapt.
***
They sent animals next; the grotesque beasts which lived in the Delve. He killed them too. They were easier than men. They’d been treated too poorly for too long, against Titus’ strength some of them simply laid themselves on the blood spattered ground and waited for him to administer the killing blow. Titus did so, but reluctantly.
By now, the crowd had fallen silent. This was no longer entertainment, no longer filled with the tainted thrill of bloodsport. It had become something else, something different. It was like watching the tides. It was something inevitable.
Titus butchered his way through anyone and anything sent against him until the sand in the arena was bloodied in its entirety; every grain made into a miniature ruby. And it didn’t stop. Now the men and women sent into the arena did not even try to fight against Titus, some threw down their weapons and ran, climbing into the stands and pushing past an unmoving crowd, who simply stared into the arena and waited for the next slaughter to begin. Others approached with their arms and weapons crossed against their chests, bowing and supplicating themselves and asking to serve at Titus’ side. He’d spared those who did.
Some still wanted to fight. So Titus killed them.
When the last of them died, Titus laid his sword on the ground again and sat down. He pushed his hands down into the warm sand. Felt the nuggets of compacted blood and grit smear across his fingers. Felt the exertion greasing his muscles, making each action feel awkward, slippery. The arena was silent, almost empty. A few of the more sadistic lovers of the arena had stayed to witness the moment when things ceased to be combat and became mere butchery, but most hadn’t.
A slight figure hobbled across the sand towards him, towards Titus, face hidden by a tattered hood. There was something unfinished about them, Titus could feel it. Something uneven. Something… maybe not unfinished. Maybe the opposite. Something taken too far. Too complete. The figure clambered over the dozens of dead bodies, slow and awkward, but persistent.
“Look what you did, fast hands.”
Titus flicked the visor up on his helmet. “You’re a part of this.”
“Oh indeed, I am. Yes, quite as much my doing as yours in some ways.”
The shuffling, awkward figure sat down in front of Titus. There was something subtly wrong with the way his limbs folded. They stretched the wrong way, bending inwards when they should flex out.
“Who are you? Will you tell me now?” said Titus.
“Do you like feeling like a god?” said the hooded figure, ignoring his question.
“It’s… good. To feel powerful. To feel like my life might be my own.”
“More than just your life is your own now, fast hands. Soon, the lives of other men and women will be yours to dispose of as you please. Soon, whole nations might be yours to control. Should you want it, of course. Maybe you’ll prefer other ways to use your power.”
“Who are you, stranger?”
“Such a boring question, fast hands. I’d hoped you weren’t boring. You don’t know me, so why would who I am matter to you?”
“Because you’ve done this to me. Made me… whatever I am now. Whatever I will become.”
“Fine, fine. You give someone a gift, and still they want more from you. I think your people called me Korrivian. Perhaps.”
“You cannot be the trickster god. The gods died. We watched them fall from the heavens.”
“Don’t be so foolish, boy. We might be dead, but we don’t die. We decay. We break. We fall apart. But we don’t die. How is it you know our names? How is it our shrines still stand? Until we are replaced, we linger on. Diminished, perhaps. But not finished, fast hands. Not yet. And I thought you seemed fun. I thought these games needed a little spark, a little chaos. It turns out the audience don’t like that.”
There was a sound like leaves scuttling along the bottom of a dry river bed. The stranger was laughing. The sound grew louder, grew in intensity until the small, misshapen body shook with it, and the hood shrouding his face fell away.
Titus almost screamed. The stranger’s face wasn’t a face, so much as a framework of skin into which the gulf of space had been improperly forced. Bulges of malformed tissue spewed out supernovas, a vestigial cheekbone spurred up through a churning maelstrom of stars, a strand of ripped muscle eddied in the wake of a comet.
The soft, strange voice continued to speak even as Titus stared into the firmament, into the raw madness of creation.
“You could become a god, fast hands. There’s more power to be taken. So much more. So much left to be claimed.”
“And be like you?”
Leaves in the riverbed again, rushing along into silence.
“Oh no. That’s the thing with gods. You’re however you want to be. I’m like this because I’m fading. It’s hard to keep yourself together when most of you is spread out over the world in chunks of crystal. Gods are so many things at once. Concepts, creatures, moral correctives, consequences. All of it.”
Titus stared into the hurtling universe contained in the decomposing head. I would like all of it, I think. I would like to fear nothing. To be beyond the concerns of men.”
The god reached out a hand and patted Titus, gently, on the shoulder. “I know, fast hands. I know. So pick up your sword, and take it.”
Titus was standing, his sword in his hand. Behind him, he could hear the familiar tread of footsteps made heavy by armour, of weapons. He glanced around and saw a dozen soldiers rushing into the arena. He’d made quite the impression, clearly. He supposed killing an entire arena’s worth of foes would draw attention. He hefted the blade, let it stand in front of him, its tip in the ground.
“They’ll try and stop you, of course, fast hands. But that’s part of the fun. It’s all part of the fun.”
“I’m going to kill these men, now, old one. If we meet again, I will let you know what I think of being a god.”
The strange, rustling laughter. “I’m sure you will, fast hands.”
Titus waited for the soldiers to draw near. They carried heavy shields before them, spears protruding over the top. They were wary, the spears jabbing out, testing the air in front of them, as though it too might prove to be a threat.
“Put down your sword!” one shouted.
But the grime-covered gladiator went on. “My name is Titus the Disgraced. Condemned to die by those who thought themselves above me. For cowardice. But look around you—I am no coward. I am lord of this arena. I soaked this sand in blood. I cut down all who stood before me. But I spared those who asked for mercy. I now offer this chance to you too.”
The soldiers edged forward, cautious, as though they approached a wild animal, but none backed down. The gladiator spoke again as they circled him. “I am Titus, exiled from my home. I am Titus, and I’m going to take godhood from the dead hands of anyone who opposes me.”
There was laughter at this. Harsh against the silence that had settled over the sand and empty seats. “Just throw away your sword, peasant. Why are you telling us this rubbish?”
Titus grinned. A slash of white through the viscera and sweat streaked across his face. “I just wanted you to know who was going to kill you.”
Seek Godhood through Struggle
Inspired to pursue your own path to greatness? Pick up the Borderlands starter set for everything you need to get started playing Godtear, including Titus the Disgraced and his glory-seeking followers!
Already a Godtear fan? Expand your warband with the newest Godtear champion, Durthax, Branchlord of the Weald!
