Exiles & Empire

by Cheryl S Mackey

  THE IMMORTALS

  PART THREE: EXILES & EMPIRE

  Cheryl S. Mackey

  Copyright © 2019 Cheryl S. Mackey

  License Notes: This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  DEDICATION AND AUTHOR’S NOTE:

  This book is dedicated to my husband and my sons. Without them I could never have dreamed so big and accomplished so much. I am eternally grateful for their love, support, and understanding.

  Inspiration for the main characters goes to my friends, Jessica, Neal, and my husband, David. Without them there would be no adventures in Ein-Aral. Thank you so much my dear friends!

  Special thanks to Daniel Schofield, owner of the cover image, who gave me special written license to use his magnificent artwork as the cover of this novel. Please check out his amazing work here: http://scoffsart.deviantart.com. Huge thanks as well to my cover artist Victoria for the awe- inspiring lettering and detail work to make the cover perfect! Her work can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/whitandware.

  I also give special thanks to my beta readers, for security purposes you shall remain anonymous, but you know who you are and I thank you with all my heart for your honest and sincere contributions to the shaping of my book.

  Sincere and grateful thanks to my amazing editor Natasha Larry. You rock!

  This book series is intended as a prequel to another set of works currently in progress. The first book of that trilogy, THE UNKNOWN SUN, is available now. As a prequel series, THE IMMORTALS contains events and characters relevant to THE UNKNOWN SUN. However, this book is part 3 and should be read after reading parts 1 and 2. The entire series is quite readily a standalone, and can be enjoyed as it is without having read THE UNKNOWN SUN. Please note that the events in this book and the rest of the upcoming prequels occur long before the events in THE UNKNOWN SUN.

  Chapter One

  Lureg’s Camp, Burning Desert, Ein-Aral

  Gabaran’s broad knuckles collided with the energy shield arcing over the plateau. It rippled, sending sparks of light into the midnight sky. His roar of rage and grief merged with the deep vibrations. His heart twisted in time with the flares of static. The shield absorbed the force; the brute strength of a mortal elf no more damaging than a fly is to a rock. He reared back and struck until skin cracked and blood smeared. A cry curdled deep within his chest with each blow. The sounds were animalistic, wild. Sounds only someone broken by wrath and anguish could make.

  He blamed the sweat blurring his vision for masking the movement to his right. He lashed out again and his knuckles slammed into the palm of a smaller, darker hand. Long fingers curled around his large fist and shoved. Caught off guard, Gabaran stumbled back a few paces, but he remained upright, fists raised. Bathed in the glow of the shield, the shadowed figure was familiar. Jet black hair hid a narrow face that he knew all too well.

  “Dehil,” he growled. A flash of fury burned the world white for a split second. “Get out of my way, traitor!”

  “Fool, break the shield and you’ll unleash time,” Dehil snapped. “It’s the only thing standing between us and death right now.”

  Gabaran studied the dome that covered half the plateau and several miles of the desert floor below. Crackling with static, and made of energy, it held time to a standstill within it. That standstill had saved their friends from a guaranteed death. Barely.

  “Death? You dare speak of death to me?” Gabaran roared. His fingers closed around Dehil’s throat. He slammed the smaller elf against the shield. The force sent a shockwave rippling in all directions.

  A blistering wind snagged the white-streaked strands of Gabaran’s long black hair and dragged them across his vision. Flashes of Dehil’s dark face, bisected with a snaking scar from his left temple to his right jaw line, caught his attention. His grip loosened a fraction.

  “You need to listen,” Dehil snapped. “We have little time.”

  Gabaran staggered, startled by the depth of pain in his friend’s words. His grip slackened and the smaller elf dropped to the ground.

  “Listen? Why?” Gabaran asked. His shoulders twitched. “Why should I listen to someone who led his friends into a trap?”

  “Trap? I had no idea this would happen. It was no plan of mine.”

  “You had no choice? Then who?” Gabaran sneered. “That’s not the view from my seat here, on the other side of a world gone still, Dehil. What happened?”

  “I was given a task I could not refuse. It didn’t matter,” Dehil whispered. His fingers traced the gruesome scar halving his once unmarked face. “In the end I failed.”

  “Liar,” Gabaran said. Pain tightened his face into a mask of anguish. “Who would give you such a task? Your master?”

  “No, but another you revere,” Dehil said. “Gabaran, please tell me Tanari gave you the map.”

  Gabaran turned aside. Lines etched at the corners of his eyes deepened and his long left ear twitched.

  “Why am I not surprised that you know that name? What does a map matter now? She’s dead,” Gabaran said. “She is gone.”

  Dehil swore. “She’s no more gone than I ever was. Time kneels before her. Her death would have been for nothing and will still be if we can’t save them. To save her, and Ein-Aral, we need them.” He flung an arm out at the unmoving figures inside the dome.

  “You speak riddles, fool. How did you know that Tanari had the map?”

  Dehil closed his eyes. His head dropped with a light thud against the energy shield. Static flickered, then faded. Frustration roughened his voice into a weary croak.

  “I know because I’m the one who told her about it. She travelled from the future, ransacked the tent, and returned to the future to keep it safe. I’m the one who told her to give it to you when the time was right, Gabaran. I did not die last night because of Her. She has a plan and I am an agent of her will, no more.”

  Stunned, Gabaran stepped away from his old friend, staggered.

  His vision blurred. “What?” he asked. His heart pounded in his ears, the squishy thud of pumping blood was all he could hear for a long moment. Each thump ached sharper than the next. “No. That’s not possible, Dehil.”

  “I’m sorry, old friend,” Dehil said. His mouth tightened into a thin line that matched the stark white scar. “I wish this was a lie but we both see the truth now.”

  Gabaran’s gaze honed in on the scar and saw the proof that he had been determined to ignore. Such a nasty wound would have taken months to heal. A healer like Jadeth could have erased it.

  Time kneels before her.

  “How did you get that scar? What happened?” he asked between gritted teeth. His stomach rolled at the thought of such a wound, and of the age lines he could now see creasing the corners of his friend’s eyes. Immortals couldn’t age, could they? He had always believed such. Unless so much time had passed that the years had added up. Was such a thing possible? What was immortality then?

  “There will be wars. Terrible ones that we cannot avoid. We must do everything we can to save what’s left of what and who we hold dear,” Dehil said. He swallowed and a grim look of remembrance etched stark lines of anguish on his dark skin.

  Gabaran’s heart sank. He didn’t dare ask more. The raw grief, rage, and pain burning in Dehil’s expression quelled his own. For the moment.

  He ran a shaking hand over his face at the mention of her real name. A name he had learn
ed only at her deathbed. A deathbed as malleable as the clay of the earth below his feet, if his Eideili friend could be believed.

  His Light.

  His Tanari.

  The woman he had followed with his heart and soul ever since that fateful day almost four hundred years ago. He had rallied the exiles behind his cause and behind her as a result. She became the light in a world made of dark. It was an easy thing to do. Godless and lost, his people had taken refuge in the abandoned Windwalker Citadel in the far north after The Fall. Cold and brutal, it mirrored its inhabitants and their forsaken hearts.

  Light had changed that.

  She had become their god.

  “What do we do now?” he asked in a shaky voice. “How do we change the future?”

  “We fight. We don’t give up.” Dehil gripped Gabaran’s shoulder. “We save them.”

  Gabaran glanced up at the crackling dome shielding his friends. He swallowed.

  “How?”

  Dehil’s gaze fell. “With a whole lot of luck, because fate is in our hands right now, and not hers.”

  Gabaran sank to his knees before the once young elf and ground the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. He roared, the rage, pain, and frustration shaking the ground beneath them.

  “Here, take it,” Gabaran choked out. His dug into his traveling cloak and pulled out the scrap of parchment. The sight of the dried blood and the swirls of dainty fingertips imprinted on the browned paper, twisted his heart until the ache alone might have killed him. “Save them. Save her. Just tell me what to do and I will do it.”

  Dehil pried the paper from the elf ’s hand. Without looking at the image scrawled on it, he offered it back.

  “Gabaran, she gave this to you and you alone,” he said. His voice cracked on the last word. “I know she loves you. She always has and she always will. You will see her again before the end. I swear it.”

  Gabaran accepted the fragile document. His gaze brightened until the pupils glowed like the stars at first twilight. He stood, his towering form imposing.

  “Why me? I am not worthy, Dehil. It was a mere chance that I stumbled upon Emaranthe and Light that day.”

  Dehil smiled and the scar twisted. “Was it, old man? I somehow doubt you and chance are brothers. Fate may not be kind to us, but it is our guide in a world gone dark.”

  “Perhaps,” Gabaran grunted. A crackle of static drowned out the sound and both males turned their thoughts and gazes to the dome. Fear, ugly and sour, settled low in Gabaran’s gut.

  He added. “We need to free them, but how? Who or what caused this? An Immortal? I know so little of your kind.”

  Dehil’s gaze shuttered. His smile waned.

  “My master,” he explained. “He is the only one strong enough to work such a spell. He is here, waiting.”

  “Who?”

  “Me,” an unknown voice intruded and Gabaran stiffened.

  He turned to face the speaker who had slipped behind them, unnoticed. Massive brown wings snapped shut. Well muscled, but whip thin, the Windwalker stood still. Stringy brown strands of hair stirred in a gust of wind. Empty eye sockets stared back from a gaunt face made ashen by a hard life. A Windwalker. The last Windwalker, in fact, if he remembered his legends right, and one of the three Lords of The Unknown Sun.

  “Who are you?” Gabaran asked. He’d never bothered to learn the Windwalker Lord’s name despite all that he and his people, the Tevu-Anat, owed to the Windwalkers.

  The living needed the citadel more than the dead did.

  To Gabaran’s surprise, the Windwalker turned his empty gaze on him. His skin crawled.

  He resisted the urge to wave a hand before the Windwalker’s face to test a terrible theory. As if reading his mind, again, the winged male snorted in grim amusement. Gabaran got the disturbing impression of eyes rolling in disgust.

  “I am Atil, the last Windwalker left in this cursed world.” He tilted his head. Strands of long brown hair whipped on the wind and fluttered into the hollow eye sockets. A sneer twisted one lip up.

  He stalked closer, his movements quick and birdlike. Tall and leanly muscled, easily a few hundred years old, he appeared older than any mortal Earthlander, but much less than Gabaran’s own age. From his limited knowledge, the Windwalkers life spans were three to five hundred years. Those years had obviously been long and hard even before immortality had frozen his body.

  He turned to Dehil and appraised his best spy. He winced at the disfigurement.

  “You have seen much more than I have now, friend. Is it worth it?”

  Dehil scowled at the arbitrarily blind spymaster, but conceded. “Worth it? Yes. But we must change the future. What I saw cannot come to pass.”

  Atil said, “This is the only time we have left, Dehil. May our world return to the light at the feet of The Four.”

  Dehil swallowed and nodded.

  Atil turned to the shield stretched over both ally and enemy. His placed his palms on it. Flashes of light crackled beneath his splayed fingers. He tilted his head and somehow seemed to watch the threads of energy arc along its slope. Another nod and he backed away.

  Dehil shifted, his gaze shooting between the shield and his master.

  “Can you free them safely?” he asked. “What will happen?”

  “Free them? Certainly,” Atil replied. His wings shifted in an avian shrug. “Safely is up for debate, I’m afraid. I can remove the spell, time will resume, and your friends will have no chance but to trust their immortality to save them once more.”

  “Do you trust it, then?” Dehil asked. His gaze sharpened on the winged leader of a people who were now no more than myth in their world. “An immortality cursed on the innocent and unwilling by absent gods?”

  Atil croaked a bitter laugh. “Not in a thousand years. Not on the ghosts of my people long lost to time.”

  “Then there must be another way,” Dehil growled. “You said it yourself. They must be saved.”

  “Must and can are two separate concepts,” Atil sighed. “But I have an idea. It’s risky.”

  “How risky?” Gabaran asked.

  The blind Windwalker turned to him and once again Gabaran got the impression of being glared at. He shook the odd feeling off and returned the look.

  “Quite. I can dissolve the shield and restore it quickly, leaving your friends on the outside and returned to our time, while the enemy remains within,” Atil answered.

  “The problem?” Dehil asked. His frown stretched the grisly scar.

  “The problem is that for those few seconds your friends are at the mercy of a madman and an enslaved supernatural army, and,” Atil’s baritone faded into a whisper. “Such precise control will drain my power to the point of near death. If I fall, so does the shield. You’ll have to be quick. Neither it nor I will last long.”

  “By The Four, Atil,” Dehil bellowed. He threw his hands up. “That’s not a solution.”

  “It is the only one we have, Dehil,” he said. He grimaced. “Get to safety. Regroup. Use the map to find The Crown of Gods and stop him.”

  “Him?” Gabaran asked. “You mean Rodon the Traitor?”

  Atil laughed and both elves flinched at the hollow, ragged sound–a horrible laugh, one of bitterness and unspoken rage against a fate no one could have foreseen.

  “Yes, Rodon,” he sneered. “You call him Traitor, but he has other names within our world. He has sat upon that throne with his feet planted upon the broken wings of my people. We call him Murderer, the Slaughterer of Souls, and even the— ”

  Dehil glared at the Windwalker. “Atil.”

  Atil mock bowed to him and returned to inspecting the dome, his wings snapping wide and folding with each angry breath. All bitter humor gone, his empty eye sockets leveled on Gabaran.

  “Move fast. You’ll have mere moments to get everyone to safety.”

  “What about you?” Gabaran asked. He traded uneasy looks with Dehil. As much as the Windwalker spymaster seemed unfriendly and brash, G
abaran didn’t like leaving an ally to a bitter fate.

  “I am nobody.” Atil chuckled. The words washed over Gabaran, raising goose bumps and a feeling of déjà vu. “I am not missed by any but those long dust, and here and now does my purpose become clear. Now go! Hurry, I’ll wait until you are closest to them.”

  Dehil swore and traded panicked glares with Gabaran. They broke into a run, following the edge of the shield to the closest point they could go and not topple off the plateau and into an abyss. Breathing hard, both males struggled to form words when they halted, still a good 10 yards from their unmoving friends, the yawning drop to the desert floor at their heels.

  “This isn’t going to be pretty,” Gabaran wheezed. His right ear twitched. “What do we do now?”

  Dehil exhaled and gulped in a ragged breath before answering. “You get them moving, back toward Atil’s position. Keep everyone in contact with each other and I can keep us all invisible.”

  “What about those?” Gabaran pointed at the projectiles and tell-tale contrails of spells frozen midflight above them. “Those will most likely hit before he can get the shield up again.”

  “We run really fast and pray to The Four that they have terrible aim.”

  “Damn.”

  The dome flickered, pulsed, and disintegrated. Time resumed.

  Gabaran lurched forward. He leaped through the crackling threads of energy still clinging to the air. Sweat stung his eyes, blurring his vision. His chest burned with each inhale and exhale. His gaze didn’t waver from the four figures stumbling into confused motion.

  Chapter Two

  Ivo leaped to the side, the motion uncoordinated and clumsy. His fingers raked across the air and grabbed a handful of cloth as his momentum carried his weight toward the ground. The cloth pulled with it the arm it covered, before ripping beneath the abrupt force and baring fire bathed skin. Something broad and fast shoved him hard enough to dislodge his helm and send it bouncing into the chaos that had taken hold.