Captain Achard sighed and nodded at the man, then turned to Kate.
“We should let you rest and heal,” Phrixus Achard said. “We will discuss more later. There have been some…uh, changes, in the way the command structure here has been treating the Black. There is a war coming, Kate, and I don’t necessarily mean the one with the demons. Rest, heal, and prepare yourself. Something in my gut tells me that our trials have just begun. We’ll need you at your peak.”
Kate watched the captain and Bernar as they left the room. She let her head drop back to her pillow. She had survived her trip to Hell, and most of her team had survived with her. She wondered if she would be so lucky in the future.
Twisting her neck to scan the room, she let out a heavy breath. She had her friends, every one of them worth dying for. With that behind her, how could she fail?
Kate closed her eyes. Rest sounded nice. Whatever troubles there were, they could wait a few hours while she got some sleep. She had a feeling she was going to need all the rest she could get.
Letter to the Reader
Dear Reader,
Well, Kate is developing into a proper hero, isn’t she? There’s no doubt that she deserves every bit of credit she may get, and in the Black, she gets much more than she ever did when in the Red or Blue.
But what about those troubling issues she uncovered during her adventure? How did the demons know she had gone into Hell? How did those Black brothers suddenly die? What changes was Captain Achard talking about that were taking place in the Order? And just what information did Bernar Giron bring to the captain at the very end there?
It’s clear that Kate is not finished with her heroic tasks, not yet. She has survived another set of trials, but the ones she faces next may just be the greatest yet. Hint: I can tell you with certainty that they are. I’m already waist-deep in writing the third book.
Speaking of the third book, I’m aiming to have it launched within a month or so of when this one goes live. It should be on preorder by the time you can read this, or shortly thereafter. You won’t have to wait long for the conclusion of the Order of the Fire trilogy. You can find it at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Q4KS323
If I could be so bold as to ask for your help, may I suggest leaving a review for Hero of Fire? Reviews help me to know how the book is received and help other readers get further information on the book so they can judge whether they might like it as well. It only takes a moment to leave a review and it is much appreciated. Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed sharing Kate’s adventures.
P.E. Padilla
p.s. If you would like to get information on upcoming books, please visit my web site at pepadilla.com and join my PEP Talk newsletter. I have big plans this year for several books that will be available to my subscribers for free, some of them exclusively available through my newsletter.
I also appreciate any comments I receive, so please feel free stop by my web site and comment on the site itself or to send me an e-mail at [email protected].
Author Notes
Author Notes
This book was a difficult write for me. I’m not sure exactly why, but part of it is how hectic the last several months have been and how my process is changing. Let me explain.
I have always been what authors call a plotter. That is someone who plans out their stories, building progressively more complex outlines or other type of structure, and then writes to those guidelines. The other type of writer is affectionately called a pantser, a reference to how they write by the “seat of their pants.”
I have my own method for planning and structuring books, but in this last year, I have been wanting to make it better, more efficient. I have gathered ideas from many different sources and tried to consolidate the best aspects of them and apply it to my own writing.
I succeeded in overwhelming myself and throwing chaos into my works.
Not only that, but I am in the process of leaving my job as an engineer for good. In fact, at the time I’m writing this, I have less than two weeks left until I will be done with work and then will be moving out of state to a house on a nicely wooded piece of property where I can write full time.
This means for at least the last several months, I have been preoccupied with logistics for the impending end of my employment and future move. All of that makes it very hard to eke out the time necessary for planning, structuring, and writing.
I find that though I still write every day, I can’t achieve the flow I should. Just about the time I would fully immerse myself in the world in which I’m writing, I would have to stop and take care of mundane responsibilities.
All of that is to say that I had a difficult time writing this book.
Don’t even get me started on how I had to rearrange things completely during my initial self-edits. I don’t usually do that. It was just plain ugly.
Suffice it to say, I was not feeling great about the book when I finished it. During my self-edits, as I tried to massage and polish it, a few little rays of light shone through, making me feel less horrible, but not giving me too much hope.
On my last self-edit (just before I sent it to my editor for her first pass), I was thinking that maybe the book was mildly entertaining, if not still full of bad prose and ineffective story decisions.
When I got the first of my editor’s comments back, though, she said how she thought I had hit a sweet spot and that she hoped I was going to write more books in this world.
What? I mean, ok, it may not be as bad as I thought it was, but write more books? In this world?
I enjoy complex worlds, as anyone who has read my Harmonic Magic series or the first book in my Song of Prophecy series can attest. Telusium, the world in which the Order of the Fire series is set, is not complex at all. I didn’t invent any languages for it, there are no histories spanning thousands of years, no real mythology or pantheons of gods, none of the really cool stuff I like.
But she liked the world and the story. And she has read (and edited) more books than I have probably ever seen, in many genres. I respect her opinion.
So it got me thinking. I’m still not committed to writing more than the one trilogy, and probably a novel or novella in the world to give to my newsletter subscribers, but I’ll keep the idea in the back of my head and see how the books are received.
At this point, book 1 has only been out for a week, so it’s too soon to tell if a lot of people like it.
One thing I can say is that after reading through it completely again, addressing all the comments my editor made, and changing some things around, I’m actually pretty happy with the book. I usually find all the faults with everything I write, never really happy with how the books turned out. I still see many faults in this one, but I can say that it’s one I’d be proud to recommend for anyone who likes sword & sorcery books and a strong, heroic, kick-ass female main character.
When it comes down to it, I’m pretty sure I’d be happy with this read if someone else had penned it and I found it as a reader.
I can’t really ask for anything better than that.
1
The demon lord Thozrixith stared wide-eyed at the human in front of him. His foe’s sword was angled down into his chest, nearly the entire blade sheathed within his body. He opened his mouth, ostensibly to speak, but the blood flooding his throat sprayed out instead.
Kate Courtenay kept her eyes locked on the demon’s as the light of life went from them. Thozrixith’s body slumped, threatening to tear the sword from her grasp. She couldn’t allow that.
She would need it very soon, if she didn’t miss her guess.
With a grunt, she pushed the demon lord’s body away with her shield and withdrew the blade. She had forced it in near the neck, and it had sliced down to her opponent’s heart. The black heart that it was.
After she pulled her sword free, Kate’s knees tried to buckle, but she couldn’t afford to tumble to the ground. With sheer force of will, she kept her feet, tottering dangerousl
y, but not going down.
She looked around and saw the hopelessness of her situation. Demons surrounded her, some of them of the towering commander class. She’d fight as well as she could, but she was in no condition for combat.
So be it. If she was to die, she would do so with honor, taking as many of the bastards with her as possible.
Time skipped. Kate knew what was happening: her team had come back and saved her from certain death, and then they were in turn saved by the shield wall itself; the Red had gone through the gate into Hell for the first time in history. All to rescue Kate and her team.
Her recollection landed on the moment she stood on the small platform, observing the battle. She was behind the human lines, not in danger any longer, but she could almost feel every slash and bite and death her companions suffered.
There, in one corner of the battlefield, a Black brother. He had finished off the small group of demons who had threatened to break through the shield wall, and he was striding toward another hot spot. No demons were around him as he prepared to charge.
Then he simply collapsed, fell to the ground as if someone had hit him in the back of the head with a club. Was that blood coming from his neck? It was too far to see, the black clothing too dark to tell.
But if it was…
The demons nearby took advantage of the situation. She would have expected no less. They piled onto the Black and literally tore his body apart with teeth and claws. Kate’s mouth dropped open and the breath caught in her throat. To see a brother die was bad enough, but there seemed no reason for this. What exactly had happened?
Kate jerked awake, twisting and bending at the waist. The pain in her ribs ripped the breath out of her body and she froze, afraid to move and do more damage.
She sipped air, trying her hardest not to expand her chest more than necessary. Tears dripped from beneath her tightly clamped eyelids as the air hissed through her teeth.
When the pain had passed, she relaxed her stomach muscles and slumped back into the bed. Her sick bed.
“Are you okay, Kate?” Koren Merklen asked.
Koren Merklen was probably the most famous of all the living members of the Black, the special forces of the Order of the Fire. It was still surreal to Kate that they had worked together and, of all things, that he seemed to respect her.
His grizzled face came into view as she swung her head toward him. There was concern in his steel-grey eyes. The dark hair covering his head and face was streaked with white, but the healers had apparently trimmed it and washed him, because she could actually identify a person under all that beard and hair.
He had been a prisoner of the demons for months, so he was unkempt and in less-than-ideal condition when she and her team had found him. After he joined her team, they had suffered through rough times as they made their way back to their own world. She noticed she had been cleaned as well. She appreciated it.
“I’m…fine.”
“Reliving some of the battles?” he asked. “It’s normal, once you are able to get back into the normal world.”
Kate fidgeted on her bed to sit more upright without all her wounds punishing her for it. “It’s not that. Koren, did you see anything…strange during the battle?”
“Strange? You mean like a wisp of a girl attacking a demon commander, demon mage, and demon lord at the same time, all while in the midst of hundreds of other demons? Uh, no. Can’t say that I did.”
Kate smiled but knew better than to chuckle. She had finally settled in so she wasn’t feeling as much pain. “I’m being serious.”
His face grew stony. “I know you are. Do you mean what you told the captain? About Thoumas Cristall appearing to be attacked somehow without an enemy nearby?”
“Yes.”
“Honestly, girl, I didn’t see anything like that. I was too focused on trying to get to you, and then once we all got back behind lines, trying to stay on my feet. If you and Phrixus both say you saw the same type of thing, though, I believe it.”
Kate’s eyes grew liquid. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe the trauma she had been through was affecting her emotions, making his trust in her seem more sentimental than it normally would have.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You can tell a lot about a person from going through danger with them. I’d put you up against any other warrior I’ve ever worked with. I’m a harsh man, not easily impressed, but when I am, it sticks. If you say something is amiss, then we better try to get to the bottom of it. I’d not like it if the demons have a way of incapacitating a man—or woman—from a distance. That’s the stuff of nightmares, right there.”
“Exactly. Thank you, Koren. As soon as we get out of here, maybe we can find out about it.”
“Sounds good,” he said. “Just rest now. Take care of yourself and heal up. There’s trouble coming, I’m thinking. Trouble to make the battle yesterday look like a mock skirmish.”
Taking Koren’s advice, Kate drifted back to sleep. This time she didn’t dream, though the thought did occur to her as she dozed: what was scarier, her nightmares or what had become her reality?
2
Kate woke again a few hours later, determined to leave the bed. She’d already spent too much time lying around and healing since she joined the Order and wanted to be done with it.
“Pretty Kate,” a familiar voice said as she did her best to swing her legs over the edge of the bed toward the floor. “You should stay abed and heal. It will be better.”
Kate’s face broke into a smile as she turned her head toward the sound. Aurel’s dark face peered at her from another bed several feet away. He had some vicious scratches across his forehead and cheek and a bandage around his head. He also sported bandages on his chest, almost his entire left arm, and around his waist. He looked a mess.
“Oh, Aurel,” she said, “how badly are you hurt?”
He flexed a massive arm to scratch at his nose as a confused look clouded his eyes. “Hurt? No, I feel fine. I have a few scratches the demons gave me while I carried Jurdan through the gate. Once I gave him to the Blues, though, I started to hit them back. I didn’t get scratched much after that.”
Kate imagined not. He was the biggest man she had ever seen, but he was also the gentlest person she knew. He had all but adopted her as his daughter or younger sister and he was fiercely protective.
“It’s good that Koren told us we could go back and help you,” he continued. “I don’t like to disobey orders, but I would have gone to you. I think you got yourself into trouble there, trying to kill both the demon lord and the mage.” His expression had turned serious as he spoke, but now a smile jumped onto his face. “And you did it. The demon lord, the mage, a commander, all of them. It was something to see. But there were too many, so we came.”
“You did,” she agreed. “You saved my life, you and the others. Thank you for that. I hope you didn’t get too hurt because of it.”
“We’ll heal,” Koren said from her other side. “After a time, we will.”
“It’s like a regular reunion,” Kate said, her eyes sparkling despite the discomfort. Her team was here with her, and that made up for a lot of pain and disappointment.
But not all her team was with her.
She had been told that the others survived, all but Jurdan Vora, who had nearly succumbed to demon poison during their mission and sacrificed himself for them…for her…during a battle. She knew he probably would have died before they were able to leave Hell, but it didn’t make watching demons kill him any easier.
Kate scanned the room, which had been set aside for the Black. She picked out her team from among those within the chamber, like seeing family members after having been away for a time. She had just been fighting with them yesterday—she thought it was yesterday—but somehow it felt like much more time had passed.
She considered her friends. Aurel, huge and intimidating. He was a solid rock of reassurance and safety. Sometimes Kate almost believed nothing could harm her if
her friend was near.
Koren had been a heap of rags and matted hair when they found him prisoner in a demon jail. Now that his hair had been cut and he had been cleaned up—not to mention put into a clean medic gown—he looked less like some kind of wild animal and more a man, again until one looked into his steel grey eyes. They left no doubt he was a predator. She figured that maybe spending more time in Hell than anyone else would do that to a man.
Yet she trusted him, too. With her life. He was one of the heroes of the Black she had heard so many stories about. It had seemed she would never meet him because he had been declared dead after disappearing for months during a mission into Hell. But they had found him, and his unique knowledge of how the firestones worked had saved their lives.
Peiros Cressa, the man from Salornum, who could intercept the demons’ telepathic communication and somehow understand their rough, guttural verbal language as well. His black, curly hair was washed clean and his handsome face lacked the dirt and blood she had grown accustomed to seeing. He was sleeping still, his chest rising and falling with heavy breaths, though he seemed to be less injured than most of the team, including Kate.
In beds right next to each other were Benedict Dressen and Visimar Torten. The two friends were chatting quietly. Kate smiled at that. They had only recently dispensed with the unfounded hatred they had expressed for each other for years.
The last member of their squad was Jurdan Vora. She missed him and his long, elaborate descriptions of everything. He had almost always had a smile on his face, and he had been kind to Kate since the first day she had joined the Black. She knew being in the Order was dangerous, and even more so for the Black, but the thought of the blond-haired man still shot daggers through her heart. She had seen death before, and would again, but Jurdan’s death hurt. And not just because he died under her command.
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