Dawn of Chaos
Page 1
Dawn of Chaos
Book One of the
Sanctum of the Archmage Saga
by Tony Donadio
Illustrations by Charles Imbro
Copyright © 2017 by Tony Donadio
Illustrations Copyright © 2017 by Charles Imbro
First Edition, April 2017
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction, and all characters appearing herein are used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any manner without written permission from the author.
The Author and Illustrator assert the moral right to be identified as the creators of their respective works.
Andarian Publishing
P.O. Box 650402
Sterling, VA 20165
To Stacey, my soul-mate and the love of my life
Contents
Map of Eastern Kalara
Prologue
Chapter 1 - The City of Rainbows
Chapter 2 - The High Council
Chapter 3 - The Calm Before the Storm
Chapter 4 - The Return of the Horde
Chapter 5 - The King's Magic
Chapter 6 - The Better Part of Valor
Chapter 7 - The Hunt Begins
Chapter 8 - A Brief Respite
Chapter 9 - The Ring of the Killravens
Chapter 10 - Quest of the Archmage
Chapter 11 - A Hope of Escape
Chapter 12 - The Hammer Falls
Chapter 13 - The Diaspora
Chapter 14 - Treason in the Palace
Chapter 15 - The Massacre of Lannamon
Chapter 16 - Hero's Refrain
Chapter 17 - A Fight for Their Lives
Chapter 18 - Last Hope
Chapter 19 - The End of the Beginning
Chapter 20 - Heart of Steel
Chapter 21 - The Terrible Truth
Chapter 22 - The Last Stand
Chapter 23 - The New Order
Chapter 24 - Homecomings
Chapter 25 - The Seeds of the Rebellion
Chapter 26 - The Headmaster's Last Student
Glossary
About the Author
Preview: Wrath of the Peregrine King
Eastern Kalara: The Realms of Elde and Carlissa
Prologue
The prequel to Dawn of Chaos is Prologue to Chaos. It is available here on the Amazon Kindle Store. The following is a brief synopsis of its events.
The two princess of Carlissa, Aron and Gerard Killraven, met to discuss a developing crisis in the kingdom. The High Inquisitor had arrested several professors at the Grand Academy for heresy. He was also accusing their colleague, Lord Zomoran of Westreach, of demon worship.
Aron and Gerard saw the flash of an explosion at the Cathedral prison. Zomoran — a powerful magus — was storming the Church compound to rescue his fellow academics. The two princes raced from the palace to rally the guards, trying to stop his rampage.
When they confronted their old professor they learned that he had turned against the kingdom. Promising to purge Carlissa in fire and rebuild it from the ashes, he summoned a dragon to attack them. The magus and his colleagues escaped, carried away by the monster. The princes were saved from its fiery breath only by the magic of Aron's sword, Flamebane.
Prologue to Chaos includes a map and a brief description of Kalara, the world of the Sanctum saga. It also tells the Legend of the Defender — an ancient tale from the dawn of the world's pre-history about an invasion of demons that were defeated in a great war.
Chapter 1 - The City of Rainbows
Randia’s View
Randia Killraven looked down with a mischievous smile on the City of Rainbows.
She stood, naked, at the edge of the mountain bluff. The cliffs around her ran like a pair of great arms thrust down from the feet of the Eldar Mountains to the west. The city seemed to nestle between them in the valley below, as though held in their protective embrace.
A stiff wind blew across the ledge. Usually, her hair was a cascade of loose locks — gold, with just a hint of red — that reached past her shoulders. Now those locks seemed to float, like shining wisps, hovering around her head in the moving airs. She brushed them back impatiently with a slender hand as her blue eyes gazed eagerly at the vista before her. This was a magnificent morning to see the city, with the sun shining brightly in a nearly cloudless azure sky, and she didn’t want to miss any of it.
She looked across the valley. Hills ascended from the docks and ports around the tip of the long Firth of Fajang. The hills were terraced, cut into the arms of the bluff like steps for an enormous giant. They rose in levels, connected by ramped streets and staired walkways, until they met the sheer face of the cliff-wall that shielded the city to the north. The southern side below her looked much the same, nearly a mirror image of its northern partner.
She looked to her right, to the east. There the ring of cliffs was finally broken by the narrow waters of the firth. The bluffs descended gradually from the mountains to surround the great inlet, eventually disappearing into the plains of northern Carlissa. The shining water continued into the distance toward the Nyan Sea, many leagues away.
She turned a little further to glance along the line of cliffs to her right. There she saw the terraces of the southern arm of the Upper City come to a sudden end. Where they did, the halls and tower of the Silver Star Adventurer’s Academy shone brightly in the mid-morning sun.
The sun. That reminded her of why she had wanted to come here today. OK, one of the reasons, she amended quickly, thinking with a smile of Stefan as he set out blankets by the pool for their swim in the little glade behind her. The light was rising at her back to shine over the cliffs’ southern wall, and she knew that the time was finally right.
She turned slowly to her left. She looked to where the sun’s rays now fell onto the spur of the mountains that formed the western end of the valley. And her breath caught at the sight.
This is why they call it the City of Rainbows, she thought in wonder. The shoulder of Mount Cascade loomed above the bluffs that encircled the city. Where their walls met the mountain came to a sudden end. Its heights descended rapidly in a jagged series of cliffs that formed its eastern face. And there, their courses as if severed by the stroke of a giant axe, the high waters that flowed through the last peak of the Eldar Mountains rushed over the brink and into the valley below.
Waterfalls too numerous to count fell from the mountain cliffs above Lannamon, City of Rainbows, capital of the Kingdom of Carlissa. A rainbow could always be seen in the mist from those falls on days when the sun shone, an enormous arc of color appearing high above the valley with the first rays of the morning sun. Often a secondary bow could be seen ringing it as well. They would sink slowly as the hours wore on, finally disappearing into the ground by the mid-morning bells. In the early light they crowned not only the High City, terraced into the foot of the mountain spur to the west, but the royal palace that rose above it.
Marvelous as the view could be from the city itself, though, Randia had never seen a better one than from her secret glade on the bluff. She had discovered it as a youth, playing truant from her tutors to explore the paths among the surrounding hills. She had started her search for it as a teenager, after asking her grandfather what caused the rainbows to appear as they did. He had delightedly given her a lesson on the spot, explaining in detail — as few others could — the geometric equations that governed their formation. She’d listened attentively, as she did at every chance she had to learn from the old Archmage. Then she’d stayed up most of the night doing calculations, and sketching the terrain around the city. The next day, using these to pinpoint the ideal spot from which to view the city’s famous rainbows, she began her se
arch.
It was the location’s height that made the difference, she knew, and the vantage it offered of the cascading falls, with the sun behind her. It wasn’t precisely the best spot — that lay in a rocky thicket a short distance to her right, and it moved with the calendar anyway — but it was close enough.
As usual, she wasn’t disappointed.
As the rays of the rising sun cleared the top of the cliffs behind her, she saw it as she had for the first time so many years ago. From here, and for only a few minutes, the rainbows appeared not just as arcs. They hovered above the ground as full rings encircling the westward cliffs. They framed the High City, the palace, and the waterfalls, like a picture set in an enormous locket of prismatic light.
She gazed for a long minute at the rainbow rings, savoring the view.
Her eyes moved to the palace, and she smiled fondly. She had grown up there, and knew it well. It was built into the shoulder of the mountain, surrounded by falling water on all sides. From the Lower City below a broad road wound up toward it like a snake, ending at its main gate.
It was above the palace that the terraced arms of the Upper City met. The palace itself nestled into the side of the westward cliff, a jewel of bluesteel and white stone that gleamed in the morning sun. Like a smaller version of the High City below it seemed mostly to be a work of steps and levels, of buttresses and stairs fitted together at different heights to form plazas, gardens, and streets. A great tower soared into the sky at its center. A scattering of lesser towers rose around its outer walls, and from the interior stonework where some of the levels met.
Her eyes followed the road from the palace as it ran east toward the firth and the docks. When it reached the great amphitheater, it forked into two busy streets. These continued in wide arcs into the north and south sides of the city, running along the base of the hills and parallel to the line of the cliffs. They separated the terraces of the Upper City above them from the bustle of the Lower City below.
Her gaze descended into the center of the valley. There, far beneath the waterfalls and between the paired arms of its surrounding cliffs and terraces, lay the heart of Lannamon. At least, she thought of it as its heart, and had for a long time.
Most of the highborn lived in the terraced levels of the Upper City. By contrast, the land around the tip of the firth was flat, the water ringed with great docks and shipyards. These were surrounded by a mazework of streets with shops, modest homes, and apartments. This was the Lower City, home to most of Lannamon’s people.
To her mind, it was also home to its best inns, taverns, and playhouses.
She found herself grinning at that thought. The theaters of the Upper City were magnificent, of course, and the Great Hall of the Bard’s College beyond compare in all the nations of the eastern continent. She still loved them, and relished attending when she had the chance. She had even had the honor of performing there a few times.
But for all their grandeur, they had become stale and formulaic. More and more she was seeing the creative energies of her art expressed, not by the court musicians of the Upper and High Cities, but in the makeshift venues of the Lower. The bards were freer there, not bound by the stuffy classical traditions that still dominated the halls of the nobles. She relished slipping away from the palace to perform with them, to the raucous cheering and earthy humor of the crowds — and not infrequently, the chagrin of the guards who would be sent out to find her.
A pair of strong arms encircled her waist, and she felt Stefan’s body press against her from behind. She leaned back contentedly into his embrace, feeling his lips nuzzle her neck as he looked over her shoulder.
“You weren’t exaggerating,” he murmured appreciatively into her ear. “Thank you for bringing me here. What a wonderful sight! A pair of circular rainbows, suspended like rings of color over the city. I will simply have to paint them.”
“Don’t you dare!” she cried.
She spun in his arms to face him. He held her firmly against his lean body, faces inches apart and lips nearly touching.
Stefan Arokkan was a gifted artist and musician. The City of Rainbows was famous as a center of culture and learning, and the Bard’s College renowned as the finest of its kind in all the lands of the eastern continent. A prince of Thressa — though only a nephew of its King, and many times removed from the throne — he had nevertheless insisted on pursuing his studies in the capital of Carlissa.
Their relationship had begun with an intense rivalry. Charming and handsome, Stefan was a charismatic performer, and the two of them had quickly developed a reputation as the college’s most gifted students. They competed relentlessly with each other for awards and honors, and Randia quickly developed a stubborn obsession with besting him at everything they did.
She felt a rush of satisfaction whenever she won one of their competitions — and, strangely, an inexplicable pleasure when she lost as well. He had taken up their rivalry with an easy confidence and a knowing, mocking smile that maddened her, which had only driven her on to compete with him all the more fiercely.
Their rivalry, as everyone who knew them had expected, eventually gave way to an equally intense bond of love and admiration. They were to be married in the fall.
To her relief, their engagement had finally blunted the nobility’s disapproval of her attending the Bard’s College in the first place. That had been unseemly, many of them had thought, and too “common” an undertaking for a princess of the royal blood of Carlissa. They had frowned on her failure to attend to the many suitors that had sought the hand of the only daughter of King Danor Killraven and Queen Elena Starlight. Her lack of interest in receiving the noblest of Carlissa’s blue bloods had led to talk, and to raised eyebrows in the High City.
Even the most ambitious and calculating, though, were forced to concede that a prince of Vardan was a suitable consort — and that a marriage between the royal houses of Thressa and Carlissa was a ‘politically desirable union.’ Their gossip had shifted quickly to talk of new alliances and trade with the western kingdom, and to endless speculation about plans for their wedding.
Randia gave little thought to their politicking and machinations. She may have fallen in love with a man who met with the approval of the kingdom’s “high society,” but that was merely a happy accident. What mattered was that she was going to build a life with a charming and talented man she admired, who shared her life-consuming passion for music and the arts. She was still glad for the reprieve from the nobles’ frowns, though, even if she had always been inclined to dismiss them as foppish meddling.
Some of them might have reconsidered those frowns if they had seen the couple standing in naked embrace on the cliffs above the valley. Fortunately, they faced little risk of discovery. They were too high and too far to be visible from the city — at least not without a powerful seeing-glass and a knowledge of exactly where to point it.
“You’ll give away my secret glade!” she continued, pleading. “Any idiot will be able to figure out where it was painted from. They’ll come looking for it!”
Stefan smiled. “Perhaps I could be persuaded to imagine a different vantage point,” he mused. One of his hands roamed idly down to her hip, and the other slid around her back. She shivered at his touch, looking mischievously into his eyes. “That is, if milady were to offer a suitable incentive …”
“Why, you scoundrel!” she exclaimed indignantly. There was just a hint of mockery in her voice; she recognized the line from a comedy they had seen at a theater in the Lower City. She fell at once to playacting with him, as they would often do, and with the ease of slipping on a glove.
“Would you hold my secret ransom to satisfy your beastly desires, sirrah?”
“Not mine, milady — yours,” he quoted back to her with a grin.
Then, not waiting for a reply, he kissed her deeply as they stood together on the bluff overlooking the city. She kissed him back, her body pressed against his in helpless longing — their game, the rainbow, an
d everything else entirely forgotten.
He swept her into his arms. They both laughed as he carried her along the short path into the glade behind them. The entrance was little more than a crack among the rocks, completely hidden from view. In it lay a small lagoon, shrouded by stone and trees, but open to the sky above.
“Come, my love,” he said, setting her down on a blanket by the edge of the pool. His voice had a smoky tone as he looked deeply into her eyes. “We have water for our swim, and a comfortable spot for us to dally after.”
“Dally first, I think,” she replied. Then she kissed him again and drew him with her to the ground.
The Grand Academy
Orion Deneri strode briskly down the marbled corridor of the Hall of Philosophy. His face was calm, but beneath his carefully controlled expression he was thinking: This is going to be the start of something wonderful.
For the first time in his life, he was wearing the formal green of an instructor at the Grand Academy of Lannamon. He held a small writing book in his left hand, but carried nothing else. The book contained a set of carefully written notes and an outline for the class that he was to conduct that morning. He had gone over those notes a dozen times during the last few days, carefully editing them again and again, until he could see no way to improve them.
I’m sure I will after the first lesson, though, he thought wryly. His mind flashed back to his time as a student at the Silver Star Adventurer’s Academy. He saw the face of his instructor, and fondly remembered the old Archmage’s words. Nothing ever goes exactly as you plan. Adapting to that fact is the first rule of a successful adventurer.
Or a successful life. It was the same principle, he reflected. It just had a little more immediacy if you were fighting monsters in a ruin filled with ancient magic.