Emergence
Return of Magic Book 1
Author: D. R. Rosier
Copyright 2016. This is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, Places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Katie
Chapter 2 – Sean
Chapter 3 – Kurien
Chapter 4 – Tarrock
Chapter 5 – Katie
Chapter 6 - Sean
Chapter 7 – Kurien
Chapter 8 – Tarrock
Chapter 9 – Katie
Chapter 10 – Sean
Chapter 11 – Kurien
Chapter 12 – Tarrock
Chapter 13 – Katie
Chapter 14 – Sean
Chapter 15 – Kurien
Chapter 16 – Tarrock
Chapter 17 – Katie
Chapter 18 – Sean
Chapter 19 – Kurien
Chapter 20 – Tarrock
Chapter 21 – Katie
Chapter 22 – Sean
Chapter 23 – Kurien
Chapter 24 – Tarrock
Chapter 25 – Katie
Chapter 26 – Battle
Epilogue – Sean
Afterword:
About the Author
Other erotic fantasies by D. R. Rosier:
Non-erotic Fantasy titles:
Book Description
Chapter 1 - Katie
Katie stood in the field at twilight. The sky was mostly clear and as the sun lowered down to the horizon, and she could see the beautiful pinks and different shades of sunset. There was light breeze that took the edge off the heat of the summer day. It was a beautiful clear night, or it would be, if the scent of the dying crops around her hadn’t filled her nose. She looked to the trees at the edge of the field, losing their leaves and looking sick while the ones beyond looked healthy.
The world was dying and she suppressed the sob before it could leave her throat. She felt helpless at the insanity of the last few weeks. She was never really sure if aliens existed, but she’d always been of the opinion if they ever came they would come in peace. They hadn’t. Come in peace that is.
It had been a mere few weeks ago when they came from the sky. It had just been her father and herself on the farm, her mother had died years ago. It hadn’t taken long for her father’s military service to be reactivated and she found herself alone. The first thing the aliens had done was attack the large populations of the cities. They didn’t nuke the cities, or bomb them. It had been a kind of ray that simply killed anything alive. Trees, bushes, plants, pets, and humans, they all died.
The radio news had speculated that it was probably some kind of radiation, the deaths had not been quick or clean, it had taken hours. There was no fallout, but entering any of those cities was still a death sentence. After that the aliens had gone after the smaller cities, and now they were going after the food, the farms, and the small towns. They hadn’t done as thorough a job yet, there was a lot of land to cover.
She looked down at the dying crops and wondered what was happening to her body as she stood in the field. The radio had gone silent days ago, and she knew her father was dead although she didn’t know how she knew. She felt hopeless, but at the same time she turned and quickly left the field and walked back into the house. She was pretty sure they were targeting the food crops only out on the empty plains, because she had several plants in the house that were still fine.
As far as she knew there had been no landings, no way to fight back. Before the radio had gone out there had been a lot of speculation. The invasion was simply eradication from orbit, of that there was no argument over, it had been the why of it they had incessantly harped on. Perhaps they would land, but they seemed to be content to wait until all the humans were dead before doing so.
She shivered and ran upstairs, a part of her mind was in shock, not really understanding what was going on, not knowing why was a poison in her mind. There was no fighting back, she was powerless. She took a long shower and scrubbed her skin, a part of her angry for going out into the field, wondering what she just did to herself, another part wondering why it even mattered at this point.
Maybe she should have just stayed out there.
When she got out she wrapped a towel around herself and looked in the mirror. She didn’t notice any changes. Her eyes were a warm hazel, her tanned skin from working in the sun most days was still smooth and healthy. Her long light brown hair still looked lustrous. She was just twenty years old, back home for the summer before returning to college for her junior year. Her closest neighbor was miles away and she felt alone.
Not just felt, she was alone.
She got dressed and had eggs for dinner. As she ate it finally hit her, there would be no junior year of college. Her roommate Stacey lived… had lived, in Chicago, and had no doubt died with her city. She would never see her again. Her father, everything she knew, was simply gone. She felt anger grow in her chest, but it was impotent, there was no target she could reach.
She tried the radio again, but it was still off the air. It made her wonder how long things would last, when would it all break down? She still had running water, electricity, heat. How long would those things take to break down with no one to monitor and maintain things? She also wondered how many humans were left. There were potentially millions in suburban neighborhoods and small towns across the country and the world, but billions had already died worldwide in the cities.
She went upstairs and crawled into bed, and tried to get some sleep. She choked off another sob, the false hope and yearning to see her father and her friends was too much. She seemed to bounce back and forth between listlessness, and heart wrenching sobbing jags. The only time she felt normal lately, was when she was doing the chores around the farm… it was one thing she could still do. Or at least, until she ran out of feed for the chickens, and oats and hay for the horses. She wasn’t sure just how long she laid there staring at the wall through a sheen of tears before she fell asleep.
Katie felt the pounding of the hooves as the horse raced down an unfamiliar road. She panicked for a moment, she couldn’t move. She held the reigns in her left hand, a staff in the right. She tried to gain control of her body and still couldn’t move, she almost tried to scream when she noticed the large hand holding the staff was old and wizened. She could see the long white hair bouncing in her peripheral vision.
She suddenly felt calm, she was still confused but Katie knew she was in a dream of some kind. She was seeing things from this old man’s point of view, she could even feel his implacable determination as he cantered through the woods. The forest around the dirt road looked different than anything she’d ever seen before. The trees looked more like towers, the trunks much larger than she’d ever seen before. Some were easily fifty feet in circumference and grew wider still as the path continued on.
She wondered where she was, where the man was rather, and for some reason she thought of Colorado, as if in answer to her thoughts. But that was… absurd.
The old man stopped in the path and dismounted, although she didn’t see why, until the old man looked up, he was standing in the center of a city, elevated off the ground, high in the trees. There was a flash of light, and she blinked to clear her vision, or tried to, when her sight came back the old man was in a room, quite clearly a room in that city that had been above her.
He stood in front of an ornate wooden table, three people sat behind the
table in chairs that looked more like branches, but shaped perfectly for those who sat upon them. There was a man with golden hair and bright yellow eyes on the right, he looked human, but she knew immediately he wasn’t. On the left was a woman in a white flowing robe, she was willowy, and had very high cheekbones, and an attractive thin face, yet Katie knew this one wasn’t human either.
In the middle sat another one that was not human.
She looked like the woman on the left, but wore green armor, and a slight scowl on her face. She also didn’t have her head covered, and Katie could make out the slightly pointed ears. She sounded angry but also afraid when she spoke.
“News of Europe?”
The old man shook his head grimly, “I’m sorry queen Brielle, the Elven lands in England and Ireland have been overrun. I’m afraid your people there are scattered, what is left of them.”
She spat out the word like a curse, “Humans.”
The room went dark, and she got worried for a moment, but then she realized the old man had closed his eyes, she could feel his grief and regret, and a deep sense of personal failure. Yet, she sensed hope in him as well, tied in with that implacable determination. If only he could get the queen to listen.
“Will you allow my plan, before they destroy everything? One day you can return, after your peoples recover, and the humans grow up a bit.”
He said the last with irony, since the old man was human himself… mostly.
She laughed darkly, “Do you think that’s possible?”
He nodded slowly, “They know not, that to destroy you would irreparably harm and eventually doom the very Earth itself. They act out of fear, and hatred of what they don’t understand. Foolish, but they are too many, no matter your power… As for me, they no longer listen to my council.”
The man with yellow eyes spoke, and his voice was deep, “I do not think we have a choice my queen, if we don’t we may all perish, the humans simply following later on, dying in a whimper.”
The woman in white spoke with a certainty, “The goddess Charites agrees, we could fight, but it would just be slow suicide, they outnumber us by too many, despite being weaker than us.”
Katie was fascinated, the dream had grabbed her attention in a way that her life had failed to the last week or so. The woman was some kind of… High priestess. If she remembered her mythology right, Charites was one of the lesser goddesses of nature and… a few other things she couldn’t recall. This seemed like a very odd dream though, she’d never been into fantasy books, and the idea of Elves was ridiculous.
So why this dream? Maybe standing in the middle of the field had fried her brain a bit after all.
The woman in the middle, the queen shut her eyes tightly as if wrestling with herself, and then reopened them. A tear fell down her cheek as she looked up at the old man, but it was the only sign of emotion on her hardened visage. Her voice was strong, and revealed nothing of her inner turmoil.
“Very well, what must we do Merlin?”
CRACK! A loud boom of thunder made Katie jump out of the bed like she was on fire, her heart beat raced as the rain pounded down onto the roof. She touched her chest and took a deep breath. She felt a surge of adrenaline racing through her body, but there was also more, something she’d never felt before. It surrounded her and seemed to suffuse the very air.
A line of lightning fell from the sky in her peripheral vision, and less than a second later, another loud crack of thunder reverberated through her body, it almost felt as if the house shook.
There’d been no tornado siren, but the storm looked nasty and with the way things were now, she certainly couldn’t count on one. So she pulled on a pair of sweat shorts and a t-shirt, and moved to head downstairs, intending to go to the cellar. She stopped dead however, at her door. There was a long staff leaning against the wall next to her doorframe. She couldn’t move for the longest moment, because she recognized it. It was the staff in the dream, that the old man had held in his hands.
She was frozen, she didn’t want to touch it, but she literally couldn’t walk away from it, her body was ignoring her mind’s insistence to move her ass and get downstairs. She wondered if this was what it felt like to have a psychotic break. That same strange energy that she felt in the air around her, she could feel that it was much stronger in the staff, she was afraid to touch it. For a moment longer she stared at it in disbelief, and then a sudden silence fell as the wind outside died and the patter of rain against the roof and her window ceased.
Then she heard it, it sounded like a train, and when she looked away from the staff she could see nothing but darkness outside the window. She’d heard that sound before, it was a twister. She grabbed the staff, suddenly more frightened about being killed by nature than whatever that could mean for her. She almost dropped the staff from shock, she felt… something rushed through the staff and into her, but she couldn’t release it, her hands were frozen. To her frustration, her feet still wouldn’t obey, she couldn’t move and she needed to run for the basement.
Then she heard the loud creak and crack of wood from above, the roof was being torn off and she saw her window pane torn away and her room was filled with the strongest wind she’d ever felt. Then impossibly, she heard the old man’s voice from her dream, he spoke just one word, but along with that word also came the meaning of it. Fortify, protect, defend, and safeguard. Her roof tore off and she grabbed at the door frame with her only free hand. She knew she wouldn’t be able to hold on for long.
She’d been so listless, felt so helpless the last week. She’d hardly cared about life and couldn’t see the point of going on. But all that changed in that moment of terror, she didn’t really want to die, and she knew she was about to.
It was insane, but she was just terrified enough to try it. She closed her eyes and spoke under her breath, the word she’d heard from the old man, “Munio.”
She felt that… energy surge in the staff and encompass her as the storm ripped her from the doorframe and pulled her up into the sky…
Chapter 2 – Sean
Sean Anders thought of himself as a pretty average guy. He was in his mid-thirties, had a stable job in Los Angeles, and lived alone just south east of the city. That last part had saved his life when the invasion came. He’d been holed up in his apartment for weeks now, the power had gone out two days ago and he was running low on food. At least the water was still working, he hadn’t even needed to use the water bottles in the survival kits he’d bought last year.
Though he was starving, it wasn’t really safe out there, he’d heard a lot of gunfire since the aliens had arrived. So far he had resisted the urge to go out and find a store, to get his own share of the loot. The longer he resisted the hunger, the less there would be left for him to claim, but he didn’t want to die for a loaf of bread either.
He was pretty sure the aliens wanted the planet, and the humans on it were simply being… forcibly evicted. It was the only thing that made sense, they weren’t really harming the planet too much, just removing its current residents.
Sean wasn’t a big man, he was five foot nine, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds, and wasn’t much to look at. Which explained, at least to him, why he lived alone. He’d never had that much luck with woman in the past. Still, the point was he was alone, and was starting to go a little stir crazy as his stomach growled and tightened.
It was nighttime, there was a storm outside, and something felt… different. Ever since the storm had woken him an hour ago, he could feel… something in the walls, something that appealed to him. He’d been trying to figure out what the hell it could be, and the only conclusion he could come to was there were mice or rats in there, and somehow, he could feel their presence, their vitality.
He knew that was insane, yet he felt it. The knowledge of what he felt was… instinct. He was so hungry.
He went into the kitchen and grabbed a hammer, then went over to the wall where he could feel them, scurrying around. He aimed a foot or so abo
ve the floorboard, and tore into wall with the claw of his hammer, and pulled, creating a hole in the sheetrock wall of his apartment.
He felt the presence start to scurry away inside the wall, and in frustration he reached out to that vitality and pulled… with his mind. He gasped in a sick feeling pleasure at the same time he was revolted, as he felt the creature’s vitality being ripped away and pulled into his own body. His mind sparked, and he could remember gathering food, eating, hiding in the walls, all the things a rat might do. It was extremely vague though.
He felt… good, he was suddenly filled with energy, more awake and aware, and although his stomach was still tight, he wasn’t nearly as hungry.
The idea disgusted him, but he had to know for sure. He put his arm through the hole in the wall and reached down and over, even without the spark of vitality, he could still feel something. An emptiness. His hand found a tail and he made a face as he pinched the tail and pulled it out. It was a rat.
His mind spun, somehow he’d reached out and stolen this rat’s life, taken it into himself, he felt scared at the thought, what the hell had happened to him? He also felt guilty, he’d never killed anything in his life outside of the occasional spider. That rat had its own life, probably a better one than he had, maybe the poor guy had a mate. He wondered if it could be undone, and imagined filling that empty spot that he could still feel.
He screamed and dropped the rat as it started to squirm in his hand. It fell to the floor and landed on its feet, and turned to look up at him. He was frozen in horror as he stared back down at it. He could still feel the rats in the walls throughout the building, and this one felt… different. It still wasn’t alive, there was no spark of life, but he could feel the vitality, the energy in it, and it felt like… his.
He walked over to the sink and turned on the water, and washed his hands while he was lost in thought, and then filled the glass with water. He took a sip, and spat it out. He brought the glass closer to the candle, the water looked clean, pure, the same it always had. Yet, he could feel the small amount of life in it. Bacteria, virus, whatever it was, he could feel it.
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