Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Other Books
Map of Neuges
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Thank You
About the Author
Crossroad
Meanwhile...
Destiny
Book Three of
Heroes by Necessity
Riley S. Keene
Copyright © 2018 by Riley S. Keene
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
Riley S. Keene
1271 NE Hwy 99W #271
McMinnville, Oregon 97128
www.rileyskeene.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Cover by James at GoOnWrite.com
Book Layout © 2017 BookDesignTemplates.com
Map Design by Jessica Khoury of Lizard Ink Maps
Symbol Design Elements by Sita “GeckosArt” Duncan @Sitaart
To Garrett for being a fantastic mentor and for cheering us across that finish line.
To Jess and Elba for their tireless help with turning our words into a book. We are eternally grateful.
To supportive friends and family too numerous to name here, but especially to our mothers and grandmothers for giving us the strength and will to try.
And to you, reader, for taking a chance.
From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.
Other Books by Riley S. Keene
Heroes by Necessity Series
Ancients
Bargain
Destiny
Crossroad - coming November 2018!
Underrealm
Chasing Moonslight, a Chronicle of Underrealm
The Unbound God
Part One - Available on Patreon only!
Map of Neuges
Chapter One
Shadows stretched long and lean, turning the copse of trees from a delightful wood to something out of nightmares. It was still relatively early in the evening, and anywhere else on Neuges there would still be plenty of light left in the day. But the sun had dipped below the giant stone monolith of Grunith—the realm of the Gods—on the horizon, and so everything between it and the coast had been bathed in deepening darkness.
Ermolt was alone.
At last.
It had been so long since he’d been truly alone. There was no bustling city filled with thousands of southerners to judge him just for existing. No cramped beds cut to human heights, or doors that threatened to knock his head from his shoulders if he didn’t duck through them.
He was alone, and the feeling was both unnerving and welcome.
Logically, he knew his companions were less than a kren away on his right flank. He also knew the woods were alive with thousands of Dasis’ fauna, and they watched him cautiously from the long shadows. But after months in the crowded cities of the southern lands, he was alone enough that a knot of tension between his shoulders finally released.
He breathed a quiet sigh of relief, basking in the new chill of the evening while he waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. The scent of trees and sap and dirt filled his nostrils with their intoxicating smell. It was like returning home.
For the most part, Ermolt enjoyed his new-found life, especially the part that allowed him to slay dragons and be the hero he always wanted to be. But a part of him missed home. He hadn’t returned since his youth, and he wondered how Klav fared these days. Eventually, he and his companions would travel to the city on their quest to bring about the Age of Mortals.
Whatever that meant.
He assumed he’d have to fight and kill Airael, the green-scaled Dragon of Dasis, but he wasn’t sure. And Athala and Elise avoided his questions as if they hid some sort of secret.
Perhaps it was partially the source of their arguing.
Ermolt observed the trees around him. Everything was a shade of gray, from the deep near-black of the trunks of the trees, to the lighter shades of the leaves. It wasn’t full dark yet, but it was getting there rapidly.
Time to hunt.
They had brought more than enough food from Jalova to get them to Lublis, the halfway point to their destination in Jirda. But as they approached the massive capital of Neuges, Athala had wavered in her determination to enter the city. Elise had eventually convinced her to set up camp outside of town while one of them undertook the trip to the floating market to resupply. But as soon as the Rises appeared on the horizon like miniature versions of Grunith confined to the city limits, she started to panic.
Athala’s panic attacks were usually pretty subdued, and Elise or Ermolt were able to talk her through them. But her panic this time had been something deeper. Something more primal. He knew she feared her brother, but this seemed above and beyond normal fear.
In the end, Elise and Ermolt had decided a trip to the city just wasn’t worth the hassle. They gave Lublis a wide berth, even avoiding the road to travel through farmlands and eventually along logging paths just to keep the wizard calm.
And so, as their food supply dwindled to a few crusts of five-day-old bread and a handful of dried fruit, Ermolt hunted.
Ermolt had followed an old logging trail from their camp down into a swampy area of the forest. The soil was slick but not quite mud. It sucked at his boots as he crept through. Another month and the ground would be frozen enough for even him to walk through the reeds without disturbing the muck.
The most obvious sign of life in the woods was the high-pitched whine of nearby dilray. The deeper he got into the swamp, the louder their mating call became. The purple amphibian was slimy on the outside and wasn’t terribly appetizing, but they were relatively easy to prepare for eating, if all other attempts at hunting failed. The dilray had an internal carapace, a chitinous endoskeleton that was the source of its whining mating call. It protected the creature’s organs from damage, but also let them be gutted and cleaned for cooking with very little effort.
Ermolt knew he’d need
to argue with Athala to get her to eat one. Their flesh was slimy, even after it was cooked, and it had a chew to it that would turn the stomach of even a starving man. He had seen Athala eat dilray before, but it was always pickled. They just didn’t have the time, or the supplies.
It also didn’t help that he couldn’t supplement them with vegetables.
If they were in the northern lands, he would have no issue pointing out the various types of edible plants, and perhaps even some herbal flora for Elise to restock her supplies. But the south was different, with its strange roping vines and bushes with brightly colored berries and flowers. He just didn’t know enough about them to feel safe feeding them to his companions.
But preoke. If he could find preoke, he knew he could convince Athala to eat a bit. Before the sun had set, Ermolt had seen some markings on trees to indicate that they were present in the area. The furry creatures were wily and quick, but they were large enough to provide a good meal for three, and their flesh was sweet and tender when roasted.
Ermolt crept out of the swamp, allowing the chittering of the dilray to fall behind him. He moved deftly through the woods now that his feet no longer sank in the boggy mud.
Two days ago he had seen sign of deer and boar. He had tried to hunt them, as the larger creatures would feed them for the entirety of their trip, but when he had no luck after a bell he gave up. That was when they still had rations, so there was no urgency. He regretted the choice now.
They were only a half-day from Jirda—maybe three-quarters-of-a-day if they continued a lagging pace driven by empty bellies and arguing. He had to hunt them down a good meal, or he risked them arriving in Jirda in two days as husks of their former selves.
A marking on a nearby tree caught Ermolt’s eye and he paused. Near it lay a pile of droppings, too small to be from a deer, and not the right consistency for a predator. Another tree to the right was covered in similar scratches, and so Ermolt turned that way, moving forward in a crouch.
Preokes’ only real defenses were their fur coloration and speed. In the gloom of the evening they would just be another gray lump among gray lumps. Their extra appendages made running and climbing a breeze. They could be a half a kren away in the time it took a hunter to realize it was missing from the brush at their feet.
Ermolt felt the presence of something nearby before he saw it. It was like fingers along the hairs on his neck.
He couldn’t see anything standing out against the terrain due to the dark shadows of Grunith. Frustration boiled but Ermolt turned away from the useless emotion. Instead, he focused. Something was here. If it saw him first, it would run before he could react.
But if he saw it first, it was dinner.
There was a long moment of stillness as Ermolt surveyed the small area before him. An insect landed on his exposed neck, likely supping on his sweat and blood, but Ermolt suppressed the urge to slap it away.
A trilling noise above him caught Ermolt’s attention and he snapped his head up sharply. Two eyes stared down at him from a nearby branch. The dark owl ruffled its feathers and filled its tiny lungs for another call. Ermolt rolled a sling bullet between his fingers for a moment, considering it as a target. Owls were more feather than meat. And he’d never eaten one before, so he questioned his ability to convince his friends it would be a meal worth ingesting.
Ermolt turned away from the bird and took a deep breath.
Movement.
His eyes snapped to the spot, just ahead and to his left. The bushes still swayed with the aftereffects of the creature that had disturbed it. Against the darkness he spotted a tuft of lighter fur, twitching as it observed the crouching barbarian.
Neither moved.
Ermolt didn’t even breathe.
He met the round, dark eyes that stood out sharply against the lighter fur. Its nose danced, sniffing the air to ascertain the threat.
His sigh had alerted it, but not startled it enough to run.
Good.
Ermolt moved so slowly, he wasn’t even sure he was actually moving. His arms screamed with the effort. He slipped the metal sphere of his bullet into the pouch of the leather sling. Drawing the sling would be a mistake, as the leather would creak and spook his quarry.
So instead he waited. Waiting for it to move first, either to return to what it was doing before he’d spooked it, or for it to look in another direction.
One clear shot was all he needed.
Silence hung between them. Nearby, the owl trilled again, filling the night air with a song. Ermolt allowed himself to breathe again.
The preoke jerked and fled into the forest.
Ermolt swore and took off after it.
Chapter Two
The abandoned logging camp was huge. Nearly half a kren wide in all directions, the forest had been cleared in a near perfect circle to accommodate the temporary homes of the loggers who had once stayed here. At the edges of the camp, the wood was trying to retake it. Thick brambles of brush and undergrowth threatened to move in on the trampled and smoothed dirt floor, but the area was still large enough for at least thirty humans to live comfortably.
It was still too small to Elise.
No matter where she turned, it always seemed like Athala was underfoot.
At first, it was innocent enough. When Ermolt had left to hunt for dinner, Elise had went about unpacking his travel bag to set up their tents. But Athala had decided that was the exact moment she needed to fetch fresh water from the nearby creek, and so the wizard had hovered over Elise as she struggled with retrieving the tent poles, sighing and shuffling her feet instead of speaking up for what she needed.
When Elise tried to fetch river rocks to use in setting up the campfire, Athala was there washing clothes and hanging them along bits of twine she’d strung between the nearby trees. The wizard only glared at her before Elise decided fighting brambles to go up stream would be much better than attempting to ask Athala to let her by to the south.
Their most recent argument was still too fresh. Elise was willing to talk—her temper was always a short-lived burst of anger—but Athala was still seething in a way that was confusing. Instead of trying to analyze the wizard’s behavior, Elise set about fetching kindling.
To avoid running into Athala once more, Elise went to the north side of the camp and picked along the brush. The sun had dipped behind Grunith sometime during the last half a bell, and the camp was shrouded in a false twilight that turned everything a shade of gray.
Elise hated the dark.
In Khule, there was always a light on somewhere. The city was a beacon to the God of Life and so if nothing else there was always a soft glow from the Temple. But there was always someone awake, even if they were just suffering from insomnia. There was always a light, and so the city was never dark.
Here it was different.
There was no campfire lit yet, and so the only light came from the still-dimming sky. It only helped to cast harsher shadows and make Elise’s eyes play tricks on her.
She tried to ignore the crawling sensation along her skin while she fetched the sticks she needed. It was a false panic, induced by the things her eyes swore they saw on the corners of her vision. They weren’t real—just a trick of the lack of light—but everything in Elise’s being screamed they were. She saw everything from a monstrous bear to pixies of legend with tiny sharpened spears, and from dragons to Detlev, all with murder in their eyes.
Elise worried about Athala.
The wizard was much like herself—she’d only grown up in cities and so wasn’t likely used to pure darkness. And she feared things in darkened corners much more since her time under Ingmar’s knives. Athala thought Elise and Ermolt were unable to see her fears, but they knew them well. They just didn’t know what to do about them. How to help.
Ingmar was dead. Ermolt had seen to that. But the ghosts of his knives lived on. Ermolt couldn’t kill ghostly knives, and Elise couldn’t heal the wounds they didn’t leave.
There was
no way for them to help her.
Sometimes Elise felt like Athala blamed them for the torture she had endured, but the wizard had never said such a thing aloud. Or perhaps that was Elise’s own guilt. She hadn’t been able to save Athala from the real knives, and so she was frustrated with not being able to save her from the memory of them either.
With an armful of kindling, Elise turned back to camp, her mind still full of panic, but also of worried thoughts for her friend. It was because of these thoughts, and the scattered twilight of the early evening, that Elise didn’t see Athala before the two of them collided.
Both women shouted in surprise. Elise’s carefully balanced pile of sticks flew from her hands, while Athala clutched her drying laundry close to her chest and spun to her right. The wizard clicked her tongue in frustration and stormed away, leaving Elise to pick up her kindling.
The urge to scream and shout after Athala, to stomp her feet and throw things in any and all directions, was strong. Elise ground her teeth together, trapping her sharp tongue in a prison so tight it made her jaw ache almost instantly. She set about picking up the sticks, trying to swallow the anger.
When it finally retreated and she had collected her kindling, she set about starting the fire.
Her anger returned, and this time it stayed.
The sticks she’d gathered didn’t want to catch. The leaves and twigs she’d collected for tinder were burning too fast. She couldn’t get them to ignite the larger kindling. If Ermolt were here, he’d have gotten the fire started in mere moments. He also would have talked to both Elise and Athala and gotten them to speak about the tension between them that threatened to burst and drown them all.
But he was fetching their dinner, a much more important task, and so Elise had to make do.
She examined the branches of kindling, trying her best to not snap them in half and tell Athala to just cast magic at the fire pit.
The problem wasn’t the leaves and twigs burning too fast, as she’d originally thought—it was the kindling itself. The thick bark of the branches made it withstand the heat of the quick flames before they burned themselves out.
Destiny (Heroes by Necessity Book 3) Page 1