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)
Or the long life he will lead because I have made it so by giving him what has hidden me for millennia—
A lingering tingle makes me pull up my sleeve and I frown.
My skin is a different color, far darker, and as I pull a lock of hair over my shoulder, the waves are no longer white. They’re jet-black, just like Merc’s.
I did not have freckles, after all. The masking magic deposited a pale pattern onto my skin and leached the color of my hair out.
Given that I’m someone other than the person I knew, it seems right that I look like somebody altogether different—and that’s when I see my own marking. The SP on the insides of both my wrists.
Claimed, by the Dark King himself. The whole time.
As this all resonates deep within my soul, I become one with the shadows, just another among the congregation that forms the night and dims the landscape.
Except I am more than shadow. I am demon, the thing all people fear, the soulless undead who roam the forests and mountains under the command of their master—
No, I’m even worse. I am my father’s powerful daughter, his next generation, finally vested with the dark magic into which I was born, from which I have been hidden.
And unto my destiny I must go.
As I walk forward and step off the shore, the pond before me does not give way underfoot. Now, the water rejects me, that which welcomed me into its sweet, cleansing cradle only moments before becoming as packed dirt. With the spell released from my skin, my true nature is no longer denied to the elements, and they identify me as unholy and unwanted.
With every stride, I feel myself becoming harder and harder, like molten steel losing its warmth and finding its permanent form. By the time the opposite shore arrives, I have been birthed in a new way, stripped of the lies and deceit that coated me along with my camouflage. And as with my truth, and my intrinsic nature, I am fully revealed as I step onto the ground once more, fully vested in my power.
I cast my hand out and split the forest before me, the trees and undergrowth commanded to bend away.
And that’s when I see the demons.
They are threaded throughout the trunks like ticks in a dog’s fur, black beasts that have the form of men, the hide of a balas, and the oblong eyes of a snake. The abrupt disappearance of their forest cover causes them to wheel about toward me.
They do not attack.
Instead, they fall to one knee and bow.
With my will, I freeze them thus, anchoring them to the ground as if I have staked their dead flesh into bedrock. Keeping them here in this location is not to protect Julion and whatever forces he will be bringing here to fight.
It’s to deny my father’s aims simply by thwarting the evil.
Two can play at control, can’t they.
The path I cut through the vast arboreal thicket stitches itself back up in my wake, further locking my father’s forces in, and my anger is such that I laugh at how easy it is to command my environment and subjugate that which I’d regarded with such terror.
It’s not the laugh I used to have, shy and timid.
The sound is aggressive and mean.
The roar of the Fulcrum reaches my ears first, and then I am before the great spinning sand, the contamination not just complete now, but being expelled, the black swirling, spitting barrier degrading to the point where it’s not even a door to be opened. It’s just a curtain to be pushed aside.
The ancient slab altar that marks where my father was supposedly sent into his prison, sits before the twirl like a forgotten relic, its tabletop of granite covered with drifts of sand, its support base all but buried in the detritus from the Fulcrum’s demise. I’d heard that for generations sacrifices were made here, animal bribes to the Dark King, small souls offered in hopes the human ones would be left alone. At some point, the practice was discontinued, perhaps because as the weather changed and food became more scarce, there were fewer domesticated meat sources that could be wasted.
The idea the evil would be placated by anything less than the total domination of Anathos is absurd.
Putting out my palm, I stop the swirl, stop it with every remaining sand particle freezing in the air, even the flakes that spin off halting in their descent.
I step through, into a landscape I already know in some deep crevice of my mind—
No, that’s not true. I recognize what’s before me because I’ve recently visited a very similar place.
It’s the red vista on the far side of that maze of spires after the Crystal Gate, the one with the twisted, tortured trees and the fire holes, only here the flames are black. And here, the bleak panorama goes on for an eternity, the hills rising and falling out to no horizon ever because it does not end.