Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
As I cover a choking sound with my hand, Merc curses. “We deviate.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but then he directs his horse into the ground cover along the road’s shoulder. Lavante is more than happy to avoid the carcass, and he bounces through the undergrowth as I try not to dwell on the desecration.
And then there’s another one seven lengths farther up. This time, without a head as well with that stomach.
“We must hurry,” I hear myself say.
And hurry we do.
The route we take is over flat land, with plenty of fresh streams to keep the horses and us properly watered. Though the sky overhead is blue and dotted with fair-weather clouds, the wind only the kind that keeps a rider in the sunshine comfortable and cool, I can feel a storm coming, every instinct in my body calling for me to take shelter and hunker down.
As noontime arrives, we are no longer in the Kingdom of the South, but I have no idea what territory we’ve entered. Merc checks his useless map and I confirm our trajectory with the compass, and that’s all we know because the former offers no name and the latter doesn’t speak. Whoever took care of the horses also packed us some food, so we stop briefly to eat and relieve ourselves. Then we take another pause at a river to water everybody, and we continue going. The road takes us over bridges that are ancient, and we pass by settlements that haven’t been lived in for eons. There are also so many fields that used to be tended, but have since reverted back to forestland, only the low stone walls indicating property lines left.
And still we press on, neither of us saying much. Merc, because he is hyperaware, his broadsword in his hand, his black and white gaze scanning everything we go by in search of threats. Me, because the sense that I’m heading into something on the horizon consumes my every heartbeat.
Going by the angle of the sun, I’m guessing it’s around three in the afternoon when I first hear the roar off in the distance. I’ve noticed that any mountains are strictly to our east and mind what Merc said about where this route takes us.
Some twenty lengths later, the forest to our left thins out, and not because some other kind of topography takes the place of the trees.
Everything is dying. The leaves on the branches have shriveled up and dropped off—and not on account of any change in season. Though fall is certainly coming as we continue north, and temperatures are dropping, it’s not enough to kill what grows. No, these leaves haven’t gone through their normal cycle. They’re blackened and deformed as they lay fallen on the ground, their crumpled twists mixing with strips of bark that have peeled off due to blight as well. Even the root systems are affected, the arboreal legs mangled and protruding from the dirt.
Which is riddled with black contamination.
That’s when I see it, off in the distance … the Fulcrum.
All of us stop, Merc, myself, and both of the horses.
The containment is nearly all black now, and the strange flakes that float off from its churning circumference swirl around as evil snow.
Beneath my saddle, Lavante churns at the ground with his hooves as if he’s looking for permission to bolt.
“We must keep going,” Merc says grimly.
And I agree, but I find myself hypnotized by the slowly turning mystery—
“Sorrel? What ails you?”
“Nothing. I just—” A tickle in my throat prevents me from going any further.
Putting my hand to my mouth, I taste grit and spit out black grains of sand—and that’s when it happens. The nightmare that’s been haunting me finally reveals itself.
Just as before, a face comes forward, pushing out of the Fulcrum’s swirling sand, the features at once completely foreign—and terrifyingly familiar: They’re not only what I know I have seen in my tortured sleep … they’re something I have stood in front of.
It’s the statue.
From outside the ruins. The man whose face was turned to the beautiful woman. The man who looked at her with possession.
“What is it, Sorrel?”
“Do you see that,” I moan helplessly.
“See what?”
And that’s when my inner village wall, the one that’s protected me all these years, the one that’s been crumbling and disintegrating with increasing decay, falls to the ground. Except instead of keeping things from getting at my mind and my marrow, it releases everything it’s been holding in.
I know this man. In my soul, I recognize who he is, and who he is to me. Though my conscious thoughts reject the shattering conclusion, my soul cannot deny it—
Hide.
The step-by-step journey from who I thought I was to who I have always truly been is suddenly completed. It started with the story of my birth, the one that I repeated as if it was programmed into me, the lie that I told others and believed myself … and continued with my ability to know and dance with death … and kept going with Mr. Lewis’s revelation … and then kindled further and further with the compass, the crown, my first sexual experience with Merc, and finally with the fire and the trees parting …