The Darkling Tide

by Travis Simmons

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  What Now?

  Sneak Peak of A Lament of Moonlight

  About Travis

  Copyright © October 2014 by Travis Simmons

  The Harbingers of Light Book Two:

  The Darkling Tide

  Published by: Wyrding Ways Press

  Edited by: Wyrding Ways Press

  Formatting by: Wyrding Ways Press

  Cover Design by: Najla Qamber Designs

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or in any means – by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without prior written permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual places, events, and people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  “How could they have killed the warrior?” Gorjugan asked. His hands were braced on either side of the black mirror, which revealed the twisted, burned remains of the darkling many miles away from where Gorjugan scryed. The warrior had been one of the strongest darklings he knew. That’s why he’d summoned it and sent it after those harboring the god slayer.

  The warrior had been killed.

  He let the image fade to black glass once more.

  He rubbed at the back of his neck where the muscles bunched.

  I have to do something, he thought. He needed the god slayer.

  Gorjugan studied his plagued reflection. The right half of his body scarred by shadows, his blue eyes shining like diamonds from the depths of his skin. His blond hair appeared ghostly white in the black depths of the scrying mirror he peered into.

  It had been this mirror that the god slayer had used to come into Agaranth. Gorjugan wasn’t able to decipher where it had come from. If he knew where it had come from, then Hilda and he would finally know where Olik had been hiding it all of these years.

  Hilda won’t be happy that I’ve failed, he thought. Thinking of his darkling sister chilled him to the bone. When she was angry...it was best not to think of her angry. They both had things to do, and if he failed in getting the god slayer, Anthros would forever be bound to the Tree at Eget Row, and not able to help them overcome the Gods that banned them from the Ever After.

  “Without Anthros,” Gorjugan said. He rubbed at his throat and winced at an oncoming headache. They all had their parts to play in the coming darkness, but Anthros was to keep them safe from the watching eyes of the All Father. Gorjugan cast his eyes up to the horizon where the sun bathed the tops of the Fey Forest in honeyed light. The Waking Eye was already rising, and those within the forest who kept the god slayer with them would soon be safe from the lesser darklings he’d sent after them.

  Gorjugan could feel that soon the god slayer would be with the harbingers of light, and he couldn’t let that happen. Once it was with them, it would be nearly impossible to get back. He had to do something.

  If the warrior didn’t work...Gorjugan didn’t like thinking of the alternative. The half-men darklings. They were called elle folk and were worse than the warrior. The warrior had owed him a debt since Gorjugan had saved him from the fires of the Waking Eye when the warrior was nothing but a weaker darkling, still a shadow of the power he’d grow into. The elle folk were different.

  But there was nothing for it. There was little he could do. The price the elle folk would exact would be hefty, but nothing compared to what Hilda would do if he should fail. He imagined his sister’s half rotten form staring down on him as she laid him to rest in the sick beds on her boat. Gorjugan had lain for decades in those beds plagued by any number of pestilence she felt a worthy punishment until Hilda deigned he had learned his lesson. The thought of the nightmares, and the demons that plagued him while he slept was enough to make him do his best in carrying out her wishes.

  He drew the silver dagger from his waist and slashed open his right palm. Polluted blood sprung to the surface, more shadows than scarlet. The shadowy blood oozed out of the wound and gathered on the floor before the mirror. He could see the mists gathering in the black surface of the scrying mirror, and felt the darkling wyrd within him call out to the elle folk.

  Abagail refused to open her eyes. It couldn’t be time to wake up. There were times when she was so comfortable that she didn’t want to move, and right then the bed beneath her was just right, and the warmth of the room was perfect, and she didn’t want to break the spell.

  She could hear movement in the room around her. Her sister Leona and their neighbor, and Abagail’s life-long friend Rorick were up and already planning for the next leg of their journey.

  And that was another reason she didn’t want to move. If she laid there and tried hard enough, maybe this would all be a dream. Maybe she wouldn’t be stuck on another world, so far from her home world of O, looking for an aunt she’d never met. Maybe the mishap she’d had with their hive of bees at home had just been a nightmare. Maybe she hadn’t been infected with the shadow plague, and maybe she wasn’t becoming a darkling.

  But she knew that was wrong. Even now she could hear the cold wind of Agaranth blowing against the abandoned elvish hut they overnighted in. Reality crashed down around her. Last night they’d fought a darkling like none she’d ever seen before. Just a couple days before they’d left her crippled father in a dangerous situation to find someone to help cure the shadow racing up Abagail’s arm. And just a couple days ago, a darkling had broken into Rorick’s home and killed his parents.

  Even now she could feel the shadow plague along her arm, spider webbing over her skin in veins of darkness. The plague that leeched all humanity from the afflicted person until they were nothing more than a walking shadow bent on the destruction of all things good. Her father, Dolan, had sent her from O to Agaranth thinking she could learn to control it with the help of her Aunt, but when they arrived here, their aunt wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

  Still, it’s better than being on O, she thought. That was true enough, on O, anyone with the shadow plague was automatically thrown to the fires, the light of the All Father’s Waking Eye, as it was called.

  It was evident that Abagail wasn’t going to get back to sleep no matter how much she wanted. Her mind was racing too fast over the events of the past few days, and there was no way her thoughts were going to let her get back to sleep.

  The more she laid there and thought, the more she wondered what the next day would bring. That wasn’t a good train of thought to follow because she would realize just how out of her element she was. It made her think of how far from home she was, and how Dolan really wasn’t around. Abagail had grown up providing for her family, but Dolan had always been there to comfort her and make her truly feel safe.

  Now, nothing made her feel that way.

  She yawned and lengthened herself into the best stretch she’d ever stretched, and allowed her eyes to open and stare up at the rough wooden ceiling.

  For an elf village she thought the structures in Landanten could have been a little more sophisticated. Granted, two days ago when she’d met Celeste, the elf, she didn’t even know that elves were anything more than myth and legend. And now they were staying in an abandoned elven village.

  “Does that mean you are finally admitting you’re aw
ake?” Rorick asked from the table set before the window.

  Abagail groaned and pulled the pillow over her head. “No,” was her muffled response.

  “We need to head out soon anyway,” Leona said. “What if more darklings come after us?”

  And there it was, the reality she was trying to avoid. Darklings were hunting her because Abagail was a harbinger. Harbingers were stronger than regular people and able to control the plague, but they had to choose the light or the dark. The darklings were always tempting harbingers to join their ranks, and Abagail was afraid that she would eventually do just that.

  “I don’t know if they can,” Abagail said. “They aren’t supposed to be able to get on Singer’s Trail, and we are in the center of it.”

  “How do you explain the thing we fought last night?” Leona asked.

  “I can’t,” Abagail admitted.

  “So then we can assume they can get on Singer’s Trail,” Rorick said.

  “At least the powerful ones,” Leona agreed.

  “I don’t think that’s exactly it, but since I don’t have any other explanation on how we fought darklings while safe inside the wardings of Singer’s Trail, we will go with that.” Abagail sat up in bed and let the blanket fall into her lap. She put the pillow in place behind her and looked out the window. Agaranth had been in three years of winter already. Technically they’d been told this was summer, but the weather said differently.

  A storm had kicked up the night before full of lightning, thunder, that dumped several feet of snow through the clearing. Outside the clearing the forest was so thick that the ground was largely barren of snow, but they still had to make it back to the forest.

  “Leo!” Abagail said. “What happened to your hair?”

  Her sister beamed at her. Where once she’d had long blond hair it was now all chopped off short like Abagail’s. It had been done roughly, so it wasn’t pretty in the slightest being made of all angles with some locks shorter than others.

  “She noticed,” Leona said.

  “How would I miss that?”

  “Rorick did it for me,” Leona said. “Do you like it?”

  “No, but I can fix that,” Abagail said. The first time she’d cut her own dark hair short it had turned out similar. Now she was used to getting it to look orderly. She padded over the straw covered floor to where her sister sat. She tested the edge of the knife, determined that it was sharp enough and started mending her sister’s hair.

  “The storm has passed,” Rorick said after a few moments. He placed a seed between his teeth and chewed, casting his blue eyes up to her.

  “Good, it will make traveling easier,” Abagail said, the knife clumsy in her gloved hand. She wished she could take the glove off, but then there was the problem of accidentally touching someone with her infected hand and spreading the shadow to them.

  “What am I going to do about a weapon?” Leona asked.

  “This knife is yours,” Abagail said, brandishing the knife she was using to fix Leona’s hair.

  “I need something else,” Leona said with a frown. “Maybe I can take one of his swords.” Leona sat up straighter to look out the window to the lump of the darkling they’d killed hours ago.

  “Leo, hold still,” Abagail admonished.

  Leona sighed and slumped back down in the chair.

  The darkling they faced the night before still rested in the trail outside. It was strange to see such a macabre sight with the splendor of the sun bathing everything in gold. But the darkling lay there, a mass of charred flesh and bones. The snow beneath it had given way to bare ground stained pink with blood and other juices that had melted off the body in the unrelenting fire that had killed it.

  Rorick’s booming laughter startled Abagail and she nearly cut herself. She frowned at the burly man, the mirth an odd sight on his bearded face. He was nineteen, only a year older than her, but he appeared in his mid-twenties.

  “Leona,” he said, tucking a strand of dirty-blond hair behind his ear. “You’re fourteen with the build of a ten-year old boy, there’s no way you could probably even drag one of his swords, let alone use it.”

  “What about your short sword,” Leona asked Abagail.

  “Then what am I going to use?” She asked.

  “The shadow plague,” Leona murmured.

  Abagail grimaced. “You know I can’t keep using that, the more I use it the more it spreads.”

  Leona let out a long, low sigh. “Alright, the knife then.”

  There had been a sudden change about her sister since the night before. It had been Leona who had killed the darkling. She had seemingly thrown all of her childishness out the window by lighting the wooden doll she carried with her and using it to ignite the darkling warrior. If it hadn’t been for Leona, Abagail and Rorick probably wouldn’t have made it out of the fight.

  Now Leona seemed bent on growing up as fast as she could. First the hair that looked like Abagail’s and now the need for a better weapon.

  Maybe she’s trying to fill the void? Leona had lost a lot, leaving their home and father behind and then losing the doll he’d gotten her as a child. Leona had long claimed the doll was a being named Skuld who would tell her the future. Abagail didn’t believe her until she caught the shadow plague and had seen the being beside her sister.

  But now that the doll was gone, Abagail hadn’t seen evidence of the figure, and she wondered if the being was gone for good.

  “There,” Abagail said, stepping away from her sister. “It’s shorter than mine, almost to the scalp in the back, but I had to cut it all that short to make it even.”

  “And, now you look even more like a ten-year old boy,” Rorick said, ruffling the short hair on the top of Leona’s head.

  “Better a boy than a bear,” she said, poking Rorick in the side.

  “Well, you certainly still hit like a girl,” Rorick chuckled, but when Leona looked away he rubbed his side and winced.

  “What are we going to do about supplies?” Abagail asked, slumping back down on her cot and pulling her boots on. They were cold, despite the fire, and that only served in making her entire body feel cold. What she wouldn’t give to curl back up on the cot and go to sleep, basking in the warmth of the hut. But the rest of her journey was outside, in the cold.

  She shivered.

  “We should probably take some wood,” Rorick said. “Without Celeste around, we won’t have the warmth of the sun scepter at night.”

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” Abagail said.

  “I have been, how much longer did she say it would take us to get to the harbingers?” Rorick asked.

  “She quoted us about two days, and we traveled all day yesterday, so it’s safe to say we will reach there tonight?” Abagail said. “But if that’s not the case, we should be prepared.”

  “We have enough seeds to last us for another day,” Leona said. “And I didn’t see much around here for food.”

  “There’s plenty of snow outside that we can eat so we don’t need water,” Abagail said.

  “So that leaves shelter,” Rorick said.

  “Yea,” Abagail said.

  “The porch was destroyed last night in the fight,” Leona said. “If there was just some way we could haul some of that wood with us.”

  “With luck I will be able to scout out some fallen wood on the trail, so really if I can make a pack out of some blankets we can take some of that wood with us,” Rorick said. He set out to do just that.

  The cold wind blew into the warmth of their shelter, setting Abagail’s teeth to chattering. To keep warm, she busied herself with gathering what few supplies she thought they’d need. There wasn’t much left in the hut, and besides the seeds they had brought with them, there was no food. She gathered up what blankets were left in the hut, and hoped that it would keep them warm enough through the night with the fire.

  At that moment she missed the blonde elf and the sun scepter. The stave had appeared crystalline, but it glowed as
if the sun itself were inside the scepter. It was warm, also, and had taken the place of their camp fire at one point.

  “Alright,” Rorick said, hefting the makeshift pack onto his wide shoulders. “I think that’s enough wood to keep us warm for a night.”

  Abagail observed the bulging pack and hoped that he didn’t fatigue from carrying it. He was the only one strong enough to wield the hammer her father, Dolan, had given them for protection. While Abagail had a short sword, as she’d seen last night, it took more than a blade to fight what was lurking just beyond the protection of the trail.

  Without a backwards glance, they left the hut armed with their supplies. The snow was so deep they struggled to break a trail.

  Leona lingered at the burned lump of the darkling she’d killed. Abagail pressed on, but slowed her pace so her sister could catch up. She wasn’t sure what Leona was looking at, maybe the darklings’ swords, maybe wondering how she’d actually managed to burn him.

  Maybe she’s wondering if she killed Skuld along with the darkling.

  Ahead of them Daphne fluttered lazily in the cold air. She no longer looked like the purple butterfly that Abagail had initially thought she was. Though she could change into the butterfly at will, since she’d fought the darklings with them the night before, Daphne remained in the winged humanoid shape. Her soft glow pulled them forth through the streets of the abandoned elf village of Landanten.

  “When do you think Celeste will be back?” Rorick asked.

  Abagail shrugged. “There’s no real way to tell,” she said. “She told us she’d be back as soon as she could, but then told us to follow the trail and Daphne in case she didn’t make it back that quickly.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Rorick said. He glanced back at Leona. “This is a strange place,” he said, appraising the trees.

  “No different than what O could be,” she said, indicating the home they’d just come from. “Given a few more hundred darklings and a long winter.”

  He nodded. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “I never thought I’d appreciate our home so much.”