Of Dark Things Waking
The Redemption Chronicle, Volume III
Adam J Nicolai
By Adam J Nicolai
Alex (Available Now)
Rebecca (Available Now)
Todd (Available Now)
The Redemption Chronicle
Children of a Broken Sky (Available Now)
A Season of Rendings (Available Now)
Of Dark Things Waking (Available Now)
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Of Dark Things Waking
The Redemption Chronicle, Volume III
by Adam J Nicolai
Published by Lone Road Publishing, LLC
Copyright © 2019 Adam J Nicolai
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from Adam J Nicolai, except for brief, properly credited quotations.
Original Artwork by Alana Fletcher
Map art by Cornelia Yoder, http://www.corneliayoder.com
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
For my wife, Joy, who always believed.
I love you.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
A Note From the Author
Also by Adam J Nicolai
Also by Adam J Nicolai
Also by Adam J Nicolai
Acknowledgments
About the Author
History. Yes, I know. You're all bored senseless. Here you are in the most advanced time any of us have ever seen, and your stodgy professors are insisting you look backward.
"The world has changed," you say. "Everything is different now." Certainly. I agree with you. But you're also completely wrong.
None of the changes Darnoth has seen in my lifetime have made history less relevant, because history is not just the study of dusty old books. It's the study of mortal nature. The study of strategy—political, military, or personal. If you're lucky, it's the study of beauty.
The scales may inflate, the stakes may rise, and the tools may become flashier, but the fundamentals rarely change. Study history and you'll see those fundamentals repeated time and again. You'll see the value of a peasantry's ignorance to a despot. Military tactics that succeed and those that fail. Even the seeds of plans laid that, with the aid of powers both arcane and miraculous, have yet to come to fruition.
And that's why it's so important. History doesn't just tell us what already happened.
It tells us what's going to happen next.
An excerpt from prepared remarks by Professor Angbar Shed’dei, delivered to a class at the Eldran Academy
Prologue
The Cauldron
Lar'atul raced through the foothills of Thakhan Dar, for at sunset the world would end.
The sun shimmered with blood, drifting toward the hills like sand in an hourglass. How much time was left? Hours, at most? Hours, and then . . .
The sky will rend. The clouds will turn to flame. Scree hissed down the slope behind him, a premonition of cataclysmic thunder that would shudder through his bones like the grinding of mountains.
He ignored it. Such rumination was pointless. He had no idea what the end would look like. None did, and the time when he could have taken precautions for his own safety was long past.
Now there were graver matters to consider, such as the snowflakes tumbling from the summer sky, every tiny spark of cold on his cheek igniting a scream of discord before vanishing in the heat.
Snow, at the height of summer. The omen disquieted him. In distant Tal'aden, a gathering of holy men and renegade sorcerers labored to create the Seal that would manifest at sunset, destroying everything he had ever known. Was the summer snow a sign that their work may finish early, that he had less time than he'd planned? Or a warning from the world itself, a kind of prescient outcry?
The form of the world's end. The time left until it came. Troubling questions, simmering in the cauldron of his mind alongside a hundred others. But not paramount.
If his mind was a cauldron, its sides were crusted over and its brim teeming with anxiety for the book he held.
The Seal would transform the world, leave it grey and devoid of wonder; countless millions would die and all mortalkind's creations would fall to ruin. But the world would survive. Its heartbeat, the Pulse which defined reality, would be left vastly weakened, nearly destroyed . . . but it would linger.
Driven by this belief, he had researched sorcery that could have left him mad. He had watched his last friend die. He had suffered, killed, and betrayed. All to fashion the great book that he now carried like a newborn child.
Only one task remained. Tonight, at the precise moment of the Sealing, he would secretly work his final enchantment on the book. The spell would create a minute flaw in the Seal, leaving a way for it to be undone after it saw its purpose fulfilled.
After it had killed Her.
A host of sudden clouds boiled across the sky from the west, choking off the sun's heat and thrusting the countryside into brutal dusk. In its wake the snowfall thickened to a wall of drifting white, drowning the hills' grass.
Lar'atul cursed. He had more to write before sunset, more that he wished to explain—but he dared not open the book in the growing blizzard, where the wind could tear the pages. An hour to seek shelter. He was in the foothills of Thakhan Dar, the tallest mountain in Darnoth. There would be an overhang or a cave where he could finish the key passages.
I have to describe the Safehold in more detail. My warning about the wise use of power must be more stringent. And I need to warn about the Mal'shedaal, in case they somehow survive. The thoughts tumbled into his mind's churning cauldron along with all the others.
He veered toward a high ridge where he could scan his surroundings, but his eyes snagged on an agitation in the air. About ten feet above him the falling snow shunted aside, parting around a disturbance. He squinted, but as he fought for a better look it shifted. The snow next to him suddenly dimpled into a pair of holes, almost like—
Footprints.
He dropped the book, tore his sword loose, and jerked it upward in a wide, wild parry. The jarring clang of steel reverberated through the hills; the holes in the snow tore backward as his invisible attacker staggered.
The cauldron flared empty, then refilled with frothing calculations. Vhesus lacks such subtlety. Faerloss is pinned to Thakhan Dar. It must be D'haan. Memories flashed of mock battles in the schoolyard. A high strike, then a gut stab, he had taunted his peer in a time so far gone it felt now like a dream. Must you always be so predictable?
He twisted aside, his b
ody acting on the memory. He felt the air shift with the strike he had just avoided, saw the snow flutter as if the invisible thrust had been a child's sigh.
As he came out of the dodge he chanted. Two sharp, staccato syllables leapt from his tongue, wrenching the attacker out of his illusion. The falling snow blackened to the greasy color of coal, beaded like curdled milk, and coalesced into a man.
A black vest of simple chain mail and a midnight cloak: the figure formed a dark hole in the shimmering white of the hills. The desiccated flesh of his dead mouth lurked just behind his cowl.
He was sweeping a strike at Lar'atul's neck.
Lar'atul ducked, the black blade whistling over his head like the whispering of ravens. The maneuver gave him a perfect opening for a counterattack, but in the one instant his enemy wouldn't see his eyes, he cast about for the book instead.
Snow already marred its cover. The brief dance of combat that had saved his life had left it behind his attacker.
A shout of alarm rose to Lar'atul's lips. He would suffer any cost to retrieve the book, even death; its loss hurt him as keenly as an amputation. But he strangled his dismay, locked eyes on his enemy, and darted backwards. He began to circle, to close with the tome under the guise of positioning to strike, when his opponent's laughter—wind shivering through a skull—drew him up short.
"Well played, Lars." His voice was the waking echo of a nightmare's shriek. "You're harder to fool than you once were."
Definitely D'haan, then. The Queen of Dawn had three immortal servants, identical in appearance, known as the Mal'shedaal. Of them, D'haan was the most likely to parley, for he was the most devious; he would use the words like mirrors, to trick his opponent into dropping his guard.
Lar'atul resumed his slow circle, and the cauldron churned anew.
Don't look at the book.
The storm strengthens. Time may be short.
Three steps to my right, I can gain a slight height advantage.
Keep him focused on me; keep him talking. "How did you find me?"
D'haan rasped a chuckle. "Our Queen sent me. You do remember Her, I trust?"
Yes, he remembered Her. One did not forget the Queen of Dawn. Even now he still loved Her; even now his betrayal of Her wracked him with guilt, threatened to undo his convictions and invalidate all the long, terrible consequences of his choices. But the barb had been meant to invoke exactly such weakness, so Lar'atul ignored it.
D'haan took a step backward, then another. "She has taken an interest in your work once more, though I can't fathom what a worm like yourself could possibly achieve for Her. A book, She said."
Lar'atul froze. This time he could not keep the shock from his face.
"This book, I believe," D'haan finished as he pressed one booted foot onto the tome. His dead lips creaked into a smile; his next words dripped with mockery. "Fear not, Lars. She wants only to ensure your success. She shares your purpose."
Horror bloomed in Lar'atul's mind, raw and poisonous. Shares . . . ?
No. He's bluffing. He must be. She doesn't know everything. It's impossible.
But beneath his reflexive denial lay a sick certainty of the truth. Nothing was impossible for Her, not anymore. Her power was too great, and none knew that better than he.
He had slaughtered innocents to keep his task a secret; had surrendered his conscience to achieve his aims. He had gone to such bitter, malignant lengths that in his fevered dreams he wondered if he was still human.
It had not been enough. It was over. She had won.
As if sensing weakened prey, D'haan struck.
His form frayed into a long, ragged shadow; with a single step he closed the ten feet to his enemy and impaled him. The blade screeched through steel and bone, showering sparks into the snow. An exquisite, blinding pain erupted deep in Lars' chest.
"Pathetic," D'haan hissed as Lar'atul sank to his knees. The word glistened with disdain. "At the last, even your defiance fails. You disappoint me, Lars. I'd hoped for more." He jerked his blade clear to deliver the death blow. Lar'atul dropped his weapon and crumpled forward onto his hands, crouched like a supplicant in the crimson snow. The wind's groan in his ears bore the timbre of apocalypse.
But the cauldron seethed with calculations inside the fog of his pain. He had considered D'haan's words in an instant that may have cost his life, and in that instant he had undergone two transformations. One of reason—
She may know of the book but not its purpose.
The Sealing will surely still destroy Her.
Even if She knows everything of my plan, the Pulse must not be lost forever.
—and one of passion.
Watching his plans fall to ruin should have cost him all hope of survival or victory—and perhaps it had. But in the desolation left by D'haan's words, he found no will to surrender. The notion that none of it had mattered drove him not into despair, but rage.
The cauldron spat and steamed, boiling over with daring. Mortally wounded at the world's final twilight, he chose to finish his task in the only way left to him.
Every sorcerer had touched the Pulse a thousand times, mimicking its call in order to work magic, but Lar'atul did not touch it now.
He hurled himself into it.
He felt the world's heartbeat like the booming of thunder, pounding in his veins with the fury of a stampede. It buffeted him, threatened to sweep him away, but he strove against its inexorable pull like a man dragging himself up a cliff side. While it fought to consume him, he drew upon it—used it to focus his wrath and fuse his shattered will, to obliterate his pain and allow him to fight.
D'haan sensed the wave of power at once. In his instant of surprise, Lar'atul called to his own lost sword.
The Mal'shedaal roared, slashing downward, and Lar'atul's weapon coalesced from nothing. He turned the strike like an avalanche sweeping a mountainside, and surged to his feet.
The Pulse ignited his weapon with blue fire. He hurtled forward, raining blows on his enemy, darting and spinning like a tempest of blades.
D'haan gave way, dancing backward in a flurry of parries, but somehow, incredibly, keeping pace with the attacks. He defeated them each in turn, chipping away at Lar'atul's momentum as if it were a pendulum swinging from center. Then, Lars made a single wrong step—a minute rotation of his blade that required a heartbeat's correction—and the pendulum crested.
He was forced a step back, then another. D'haan pressed into a steady advance. He didn't need to rush the fight; given enough time, the wound he'd already inflicted would complete his work for him. Despite Lar'atul's fury, he found himself slipping away from the book, and toward his inevitable failure.
I am routed, Lar'atul thought, but a blast of rage refused this notion.
NO.
He threw his soul open even further to the Pulse. Blood roared in his veins like fire, scorched him with power. The feeling was truth, clarity, absolution: a bonfire of righteousness he would gladly allow to consume him.
Though each breath rattled through his body like a death wind, his pain disappeared. His sword deflected D'haan's next strike, a blow meant to cleave his head, and reversed direction impossibly fast to shear off D'haan's leg. The Mal'shedaal moved to parry as if trapped in molasses, but the attack had been a feint. Lar'atul spun to his right, his sword streaking sapphire through the snowy air, and brought his blade across to decapitate. D'haan saw the attack too late. His sudden crouch cost him his balance and he slipped, collapsing into the snow. Lar'atul cut the strike off midway. With supernatural speed, he twirled his sword point down and impaled D'haan through the chest.
At the same moment, D'haan kicked Lar'atul's leg out, sending him sprawling to his knees.
With a look of disgust, D'haan yanked Lars's weapon from his chest and threw it aside. His unliving body did not bleed. As he regained his feet, the hurled sword formed in Lar'atul's hand again. He fended off a blow from D'haan, who was suddenly moving as fast as he was, and then leapt to his feet once more.
Now both fighters moved with inconceivable speed, striking and blocking with perfect fluidity. But Lar'atul was winning. He forced the Mal'shedaal to give ground even as he deflected every attack. I have him, the back of his mind whispered. At last, like a glimpse of a rising sun, he sensed victory.
Then the sky shattered.
A long groan of thunder split the air, a mournful cry like mountains grinding. A spasm of colors ignited across the heavens, blazing behind the blizzard in a rainbow of flames.
The Pulse, the heartbeat of the Earth, impossibly skipped a beat.
No! Lar'atul cried. You're too early! His fury, his moment of strength, evaporated. The pain of his torn lung exploded in him anew. He didn't see D'haan's last strike until it was nearly too late.
Again the Mal'shedaal's blade sought his neck. He ducked, but the movement was clumsy. Incomplete.
The black sword ripped through the top of his skull.
Blood and bone sprayed his face, dotting the snow before the blizzard devoured it. He staggered, fell backward.
His vision was the thick scarlet of blood, the violent white of the blizzard, the cacophony of colors in the sky that heralded the doom of the Earth.
He raised his hands to cast a spell at his attacker, but his thoughts would not congeal enough to form the chant.
He chanted anyway.
The spell came to him in pieces and ideas only. Blistering pain melted the incantation before he could speak it. The spell was water that he sought to sculpt as stone. Impossible. Impossible.
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