Chosen (The Last Guardians Book 1)

by C. V. Gregorchuk

  Breahn’s mouth turned down in the corner, a deep groove forming between her dark brows as she listened. “I don’t know how to help ye.” She said, and Mia saw how much it bothered her to admit it. “Da is-”

  “A jerk?”

  “That doesn’t sound at all complimentary.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Difficult. Is what I was going to say.” Breahn said with a stern look. If Mia had chosen that moment to blink she would have missed the twitch in the other girl’s lip.

  “That’s putting it nicely.”

  Breahn’s expression changed, all humor went from her face as she said, “Enough now.”

  Mia stiffened. “Sorry.”

  The other girl shook her head, the hard set of her mouth softening a little. “Ye don’t understand.” Breahn said in a quiet voice. “Orden has had to endure more pain and loss than you or I could ever imagine.”

  Mia’s first instinct was to argue. What Breahn had said couldn’t be true. Orden wasn’t allowed to have a tortured past, he wasn’t allowed to have some sad story that would make her regret every mean thing she’d ever thought about him. He couldn’t. It wasn’t fair. The niggling edge of curiosity, the need to know the details of that story was infuriating. Mia’s eyes followed the sound of scratching feet and fixed on the rooster. His golden plumes caught the light of the sun hanging directly overhead and glistened like precious metal. He walked around and between the fluffy white hens, pecking and scratching in the damp earth, searching for morsels.

  She could smell the compost heap from here. The combination of heat and damp had the disgusting effect of amplifying the already terrible smell of decomposing horse waste and straw. The porridge she’d eaten for breakfast earlier turned unpleasantly in her belly. Mia breathed through her nose. “What do you mean?” She asked, succumbing to her own curiosity as gracefully as possible.

  Chapter 39

  Breahn held her stare for a long second then looked away, pressing her lips together. Mia was starting to think she wouldn’t answer when the other girl spoke. “What do ye know about the Oluan War?”

  Mia frowned, “Um-”

  “Nothing?” Breahn twisted in her seat, her eyes wide beneath raised brows. “Da hasn’t made any mention of it?” A shake of her head, “And ye haven’t read about it?”

  “I haven’t gotten that far yet.”

  Breahn sucked in a breath, “What have ye been doing?”

  Mia spluttered, “Training! What else?”

  “Reading is part of your training.”

  “I know that!” The outer edges of Breahn’s eyes were a blue so dark they were almost black as she narrowed them in Mia’s direction. “Well, by the time I get into bed I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open so, yeah, I haven’t read as much,” Mia said, crossing her arms over her chest. She tilted her chin up and held Breahn’s gaze, daring the other girl to say more. Breahn made a sound in the back of her throat and looked away.

  “I don’t know that it’s my place to tell ye this,” Breahn said with a sidelong look. “I don’t know enough about it.”

  “But you’re going to tell me anyway because you know how much I don’t want to have to ask Orden.”

  Breahn grunted, but she wasn’t able to keep her mouth from twitching up in the corner. “Fine.” She said, shaking her head, “But no questions. I only know what I’ve heard, and it’s not much.”

  “Good enough for me.”

  A long steady look and then Breahn turned her face away. Mia settled her hands on her lap. “There was a war,” Breahn said, “a long bloody war between Dragons, Oluan, and humans.” This was going to be more difficult than she’d thought, Mia realized, already struggling with a question sparked by the other girl’s words. She’d read about the Oluan in her books. They were the first beings to live in Nethea, the root of all races, or so the person who had spent so much time carefully recording every detail had believed. Mia understood the term to be another way of saying Dragon, but Breahn had made a clear distinction between the two. Fearful of missing some key point Mia risked Breahn’s annoyance and asked the other girl to clarify.

  “They were all called Oluan in the beginning. The separation only came about when one group decided they should rule over humans and the other disagreed. The Oluan called the human supporters Dragons as an insult, that is how we know them now.” Breahn tilted her head to the side, an invitation and a warning. Mia kept her mouth shut. Breahn took a deep breath.

  The war between the Dragons and the Oluan had raged for many years before Breahn was born and continued for many more after. As a little girl Breahn had seen the horror of Dragon fire and known the utter terror inspired by the beating of great wings. “When ye heard those wings,” Breahn said and shuddered, “ye wouldn’t know if they belonged to Oluan or Dragon,” Friend or Foe. “In the end, it stopped mattering.” Because they both meant death was coming.

  For the first twelve years of her life, Breahn had lived in constant fear, one more child among hundreds in the shoddy camps that trailed after the army her father fought in. Never knowing for certain if she would survive from one day to the next, sometimes even through the night. By the grace of Eldhor she and Hanna had managed to escape when so many others like them- women and children left behind by husbands called to fight in the Kings’ armies- died in droves from starvation, sickness or fire.

  In the camps, it was easy to fall into despair. Breahn had seen it often; the hollow faces with eyes that stared and stared and saw nothing. The same in life as in death. To survive, one couldn’t think about it. The babies whose mothers were too starved to produce the milk to feed them, the screaming of young men as their flesh melted from their bones. The ash falling from the darkened skies like snow to mute the world below in grey. Hanna kept them alive, earning what provisions she could by tending the wounded, trading for the rest in the camps. Breahn wouldn’t be separated from her mother, so she too was put to work.

  Too young to do much else, Breahn had spent her days in the camps fetching water and hunting for scraps of fabric to boil for bandages. As she grew, so too did her responsibilities, only at a faster pace. She kept the fires burning all hours of the day and night, providing Hanna with clean linens and tools. She alternated between holding the hands of boys barely older than she was, injured in the fighting; sometimes fatally and pinning them down while her mother did her best to save them. She learned how to clean wounds and make the poultices for burns. To set bones and remove limbs.

  The war raged on, fire and blood and ash reigning over a dying earth.

  Blood choked the life from rivers and turned the once sweet waters of the lakes to red and rotting while the ashes of the great forests carpeted battlefields strewn with corpses both human and Oluan. What Breahn told her went against the little Mia had come to know about the Oluan from her reading. These were meant to be beings, people with a deep connection and love for the earth. Protectors and caretakers of Eldhor’s Creation. That they could allow such destruction...

  The eldest of their race, the Oluanvi could no longer ignore the truth; the fighting could not continue. Kairos, leader of the Oluan legions, proved incapable of reason. His ambition and lust for Power had become insatiable, and neither he nor those who followed him would be swayed from their vision; the enslavement of all humans and those who protected them. No, the fighting could not continue, but neither could the Dragons surrender to the fate awaiting them and the humans at Kairos’ hands. The answer: for the survival of Nethea and the humans, Oluan and Dragons could not be permitted to remain.

  “I’ll never forget it.” Breahn murmured. Her eyes were closed, and her hand had migrated to her throat. “It happened in one of those rare moments of peace. I’d just filled the pot with water and was waiting for it to boil. One moment I was sitting there listening to the sounds of camp, the next everything went still.” A sound unlike anything Breahn had ever heard before had shattered the silence, terrible and unfamiliar and so loud she’d co
vered her ears and fallen to the ground in panic. Not seconds later a wall of solid air had torn through the camp, scattering tents and embers and still, it was not over. Even as people rushed to put out the fires blazing in the aftermath, the earth began to shake and tremble beneath their feet. When the dust had settled, and the screaming quieted, Breahn had gotten to her feet, wiping the dirt from her eyes and beheld a world in ruins.

  Great rifts split the earth stretching strides into the distance, as far as the eye could see. One had opened beside her, and she’d gazed into the unfathomable depths of the earth until Hanna found her. “And just like that, it was over.” Seventeen years of war. Twelve years of her life, over in a single moment. The Great Sacrifice.

  The transition from a life of war to one of peace was long and difficult. Not knowing whether her husband had survived the fighting, Hanna had taken Breahn and set out for the region where she and her man first met and married. There she reclaimed the property her husband had once rented from the local lord and the two of them, mother and daughter had set about piecing their lives back together. A season of hardship and small victories went by and then one day a man came walking into the yard, rail thin and limping. Breahn’s father was alive and unhurt save for the limp, a true miracle when so many others had lost their lives. And for the first time in her life, Breahn’s family was whole.

  “Ye know what happened after that.”

  Mia nodded. The very first conversation she and Breahn had ever had the other girl had admitted to her that Orden was not her real father. Her own father had been killed when creatures known only as Selk attacked their village and surrounding farms. Still, in mourning of his death, they lost their family farm months later when they could no longer pay the property rent to the lord of the region. Hanna met Orden a year after when he came to Longford selling yearlings. It was purely by chance that he’d visited the inn where Hanna worked to support herself and her daughter. Another unprecedented miracle that he’d listened to her plight and offered the both of them a place on his small equine farm far removed from the rest of the world. How could they have known that the man who had saved them from a life of poverty was the Keeper?

  Breahn laughed, startling Mia with the breathy sound, and faced her. “And now I’ve told ye my story instead of the one ye wanted to hear. How silly of me.”

  “Not at all,” Mia grasped the other girl’s hand tightly, Breahn’s fingers sturdy and warm in her own. “I appreciate you telling me all this.” And she did. This knowledge, it was invaluable. To know what kind of people Breahn and Hanna were, the strength and perseverance they possessed. They had lived through countless horrors, had seen so much death and despair, and yet they had treated a girl who’s troubles paled in comparison to their own, with gentleness and kindness. Mia’s shame was like a puddle of slime in the pit of her stomach.

  Breahn’s braid slipped over her shoulder, the tightly woven black hair shining in the sun. She looked down at their joined hands and smiled. “Orden was an acolyte of the Pure, serving Ithrielle in the temple of Perilea when he was chosen as the Keeper. He grew up among the Oluan. They were his family. All he knew.” And then the Great Sacrifice had happened, and he was left alone.

  Shortly before that cataclysmic event, Orden had come here to this place and began building a home for himself and the young Dragons entrusted to him by the Oluanvi. Breahn did not know much about this time in Orden’s life, it was years before she and Hanna would join him at the homestead. He was the Keeper, charged with raising and training the Dragons and their Chosen to take up their roles as the Guardians of Nethea. By the time he’d saved Breahn and Hanna from their predicament, one pair of Guardians had already come and gone, and not long after they’d arrived news came that the other pair had been killed by a monster from Nethea’s dark past; Kairos.

  “But I thought-”

  “So did we all,” Breahn answered darkly. But somehow Kairos had escaped death and had hidden away in the mountains of the Northern Reaches. There, in the years following the Great Sacrifice, he’d gathered his Power anew, biding his time before he would show himself. The attack on Carmett and the death of the Northern King and the Guardians shook all of Nethea to its core. Here he was, the same monster responsible for the devastation the world had not even begun to recover from. Here was the scourge who would see all humans in chains. Not dead as he should have been. And powerful. “And with the other Guardians dead...”

  Mia was reeling, her guts tied in knots. She swallowed and choked on the bile rising in her throat and thought she might puke as those things Breahn left unsaid washed over her. With the other Guardians dead, there was only her; her and some guy, or Dragon, or whatever he was, to stand in Kairos’ way. She was actually going to puke. Mia tumbled off the chicken coop, falling to her knees a second before she was suddenly and violently sick in the dirt. Breahn appeared, kneeling beside her, one hand braced on Mia’s back, the other holding back her braid. She said nothing as Mia heaved and heaved until nothing but stinging bile came up.

  “Ugh-” Mia grunted. She tried to clear her throat and succeeded only in aggravating it more. Mia winced, arms shaking beneath her weight and spat into the puddle of puke between her hands.

  Breahn helped haul Mia to her feet, holding on when she swayed and guided her into the shade of the barn wall. Mia rested against the cool wood, her eyes trained on a spot on the ground a few feet away. “Are ye alright?” Breahn asked her in a voice laced with concern. When Mia couldn’t say anything in response, the other girl swore softly. “I’m sorry. I’ve said more than I had any right to. I shouldn’t have-”

  “No,” Mia rasped, waving a hand weakly. Breahn made to go on, to argue. “No,” Mia said more firmly, raising unfocused eyes to Breahn’s face. “I’m glad you told me. It’s just- I wasn’t- I wasn’t expecting that.” Yes, she’d known she was a Guardian, had understood it meant she would have certain responsibilities but this... “Why didn’t he tell me?” Her breathing had turned labored, and Mia tried to get it back under control now.

  “What would ye have done if he had?” Breahn asked, her gentle tone not enough to hide the bluntness of the question.

  Mia looked down at her hands clasped in front of her body and whispered, “I don’t know.” A lie and not a very good one. She wouldn’t have stayed, that much was certain. She’d been so terrified, so desperate to get home- Mia would have run. She would have run into the woods thinking she might find a way out, find someone to help her get home. And she would have died. Whether by starvation or some other horrible way she couldn’t bring herself to think of. Mia knew she would have died and then that would have been the end of it. “He shouldn’t have lied to me.” She said.

  “He gave ye hope when he didn’t have to. He did not lie to you.”

  “Same difference.”

  Breahn sighed.

  Mia mustered what strength she could and pushed off the barn wall, her first few steps terribly shaky. “Where are ye going?” Breahn stepped after her only to be stopped by the over-the-shoulder look Mia gave her.

  “Tell Orden I need some time to think.” The other girl stared right back at her, knitted brows relaxing as she read whatever was written on Mia’s face. Breahn tilted her delicate chin upward, her expression softening. She nodded.

  Mia walked to the house.

  Chapter 40

  She’d come up here to think. To process everything Breahn had told her. To figure out what to do now that it seemed she had been brought here to die. Mia had started off lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling above the bed, silently contemplating what could only be described as the horrors of her future. After about ten minutes of that, she was reaching for the books piled high on the nightstand.

  Mia didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there with her legs crossed on the smooth hardwood floor, every book Orden had ever given her open and spread out in a chaotic circle with her at its center. The books she’d already read were designated to the outer rim a
fter a brief flipping of their withered pages failed to turn up any new information about Kairos or the Guardians. She hadn’t been hopeful. Those first three tomes, yellowing pages wrapped in aged leather, consisted mostly of long lists of names and family trees painstakingly recorded in faded bluish-black ink; generations upon generations of Oluan. Or was it Dragons? Both?

  The oldest of the books gave a brief and vaguely detailed account of how the seven Oluanvi were created and the birth of the Oluan race. Maybe Mia had hoped to find something, some small detail to explain how the Oluanvi had enough Power to banish not only the Oluan who followed Kairos but the Dragons as well. She didn’t know.

  Mia was in the middle of revisiting a rather frustrating bit about the genealogy of Oluan, and humans- she couldn’t wrap her head around the logistics of it- when a sharp knock startled her. Mia jumped and swore softly, her head whipping to face the closed door. She had been so immersed in the book between her hands that she hadn’t heard his step in the hall. “Who is it?” Mia asked. Unnecessary since she knew exactly who stood on the other side of the door.

  “Orden,” His voice was pitched low, his tone gruff. He must have talked to Breahn.

  Go away, the words formed on Mia’s lips, but she held back. “What do you want?” She asked instead.

  Mia imagined she could hear him grinding his teeth, “To talk.”

  “Really?” Mia unfolded her legs and got stiffly to her feet. Her knees groaned in protest after sitting cross-legged for so long. “And what would you like to talk about?” Mia bit off the end of each word, walking toward the door, anger fuelling each step she took. “Oh, I know! How about the fact that you lied to me? Let’s start there.”