The other slave's pathetic cries, the burning pain in my shoulder and my own abject humiliation over what had happened to me threatened to drive me mad. And in someways I suppose it had.
My one burning life's desire from that moment onward had been to exact revenge and have control over my own fate once more.
Time had passed into months and months became years and I wondered why the Great Creator that my mother had prayed to kept me alive, for there could be no other reason, other than a Divine one that could explain how I had been delivered from death so many times. There were just too many coincidences that just seemed to happen at the right time, which always led to my survival and another day in the arena before my adoring crowds. They called me Zeventhal, which in the Zoarinian language interprets simply as 'Storm Maker'.
The average life expectancy in the arena world was marked by being violently brief. I was an exception to that, as I had already lived and fought for almost nine years in the arena. That's how long it took for the opportunity of escape to occur.
I had done the most with the time and resources provided to me over the years. I had learned and mastered dozens of fighting styles and weapon proficiencies. But most valuable of all I befriended the men around me.
We all knew that we could die from each other's hand, as easy as that of a rival school's fighter, because of the whims of our masters so why not be each other's friends and help each other as we could to make the short brutal days of our lives better. When I was forced to fight against my friends we fought with dignity not holding ourselves accountable for the death of either one of us, if it was required by the crowd or our masters.
Perhaps no one would understand how one could fight with a friend to the death, but my answer to them was that they hadn't been there so what did they know about it. In addition to fighting skills I had learned all that I could about the tactics of war. I even discussed the merits and lessons to be gleaned from the literary works of wisdom of our time, which I had known nothing of previously, but which many thrown into the arena dungeons did.
We thought of, dreamed of, and planned every day for a chance at acquiring freedom for ourselves once again and the vengeance we would bring down against our captors, but freedom eluded us. Then one day we got a lucky break.