Embers of Empire

by Michaela Strauther

  The BookLogix Young Writers Collection

  Attack at Cyberwold

  Messages from the Breathless

  Rapunzel: Retold

  Nothing But Your Memories

  Thieves of the Flame

  The Girl I Never Met

  The Silver Key

  The History Makers

  Alpharetta, GA

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Michaela Strauther

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, address Lanier Press, c/o BookLogix Permissions Department, 1264 Old Alpharetta Rd., Alpharetta, GA 30005.

  eISBN: 978-1-61005-888-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946883

  0 6 1 2 1 8

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Embers of Empire isn’t my first book, nor will it be my last. I wrote this book over a year ago, and going back to read it now, I have found that so many things in terms of my writing and the way I tell a story have changed for the better. As cliché as it may sound, I think that I grow as a writer every day. With every book I read, I learn something new from it that I can apply to my own writing. I learn every day and I am still learning, so you can imagine how much I have learned since writing this book.

  This book is a time capsule. Though it isn’t the best one that I have written, it does prove to me that I keep getting better with each word I write. Regardless of anything else, I’m proud of this story, and I hope that with each book I continue to write, I can look back on this one and many preceding it and show myself what I have accomplished.

  Anyway, I wrote Embers of Empire for the same reason I write any other book—because I love creating. To me, being able to carve my own world with my own characters and my own story is not only a cool idea, but also an effective outlet. Whatever I may be thinking of or imagining may become a part of the story I write. This book is no different.

  Though I cannot tell you that Sathryn relates to me at some spiritual level, I will say that she is my own, and I intended to make her as much my own as possible. Creating my own world with my own rules helps to do that for me—I don’t have the barriers of researching the already-existing world to complete my characters. Embers of Empire is a way of proving that.

  My thanks are mainly aimed toward my family, all of whom acknowledge me every day as “the writer in the family.” They believe in my ability more than I do sometimes.

  My next thanks are to BookLogix, who has granted me the dream of publishing that I never thought would happen so early in my writing hobby, and to my editor, who has been very patient, understanding, and helpful.

  Lastly, I thank all the teachers who encouraged me, even at a young age, to write and keep writing.

  he snow-dusted mountaintops in the distance were so tall that the clouds, dotting away in the shape of a dragon or phoenix, were the only things that challenged them. Somewhere on the horizon, a bird serenaded the misty morning. The canvas was the definition of beauty.

  But Sathryn, standing at the peak of an icy hill with her frozen fingertips shoved in her pockets and her eyes cynically surveying her new home, knew immediately that something was wrong.

  Soot-gray smoke smothered the beauty of the mountaintops and smeared the white of the clouds. In the distance sat the source of the dismal portrait—a refugee camp that she would soon be a regretting member of, along with her mother and brother. For whatever reason, her father wasn’t there with them. She had given up asking her mother why a long time ago.

  The smoke came from the giant fire blazing in the middle of a ring of huts. People huddled around the fire ignored the gray—though with closer inspection, many were hardly people at all, but rather a variety of other creatures: Faeries, imps, Spades, Lynots, Tullies, and a plethora of others. It was hard not to miss their colorful skin and abnormal heights (too tall or too short) amongst the normal people around them.

  The sight made Sathryn shrink—not only would she be living in a refugee camp, but she would be living in a refugee camp with nonhuman creatures.

  That thought drew her attention to the huts around the fire: small, insubstantial structures made of thatched roofs and clay-brick walls. There were no doors or gates to the huts, but door-shaped holes chiseled out from the front wall and then covered by long streamers of withered grass. There was the ring of huts, and then from there, the huts scattered throughout the dry patch of land that hadn’t yet been charred away by the Beastmen’s flames.

  Her mother, leaping over ditches and patches of half-melted snow, was farther down the hillside despite Sathryn’s attempts to keep close behind her. It was hard, especially when she was aware of every stone, every stick, and every staggered edge of the mountain that clawed at the weak soles of her shoes. The mountain had already begun scratching her feet, which by this time, had bruised and bled to the point of numbness.

  Breathing, even, felt like a conscious effort, and for reasons other than the smoke. The feeling of dread in leaving her prestigious home in Pomek to live in a grimy, inhuman refugee camp in Deadland contributed to the breathlessness. Yet with one look at her mother’s sorrowful face, Sathryn willed herself to not complain and keep walking, keep breathing.

  It would be better if her father were beside her. He’d always been her rock, her knight in shining armor.

  Her foot slipped on a rock buried in the snow, yanking her from her thoughts. The jagged edge of the rock cut through her shoes and into her bare foot, causing her to squeal in pain. Closing her eyes, she prepared herself for contact with the cold, hard ground below her, but instead was pulled up by a strong hand.

  Etzimek, her brother, pulled her back with an irritated grunt and faced her. His features contorted as he guided her away from the rugged path toward one with fewer rocks.

  “Be careful,” he murmured before continuing. The look on his face was so like her mother’s—worried, miserable, regretful—so she pushed the pain of her foot to the back of her mind and stepped after him. Her foot should’ve been the least of her worries.

  “Wait—Etzimek!” She grabbed his arm to stop him. “Why are we coming here? Mother wouldn’t tell me, and it’s not like I could just ask our father . . . Where is he? Why leave him? Why leave Pomek if—”

  “I don’t know.” Etzimek’s face hardened. His hands twined within themselves, and his eyes avoided hers. “But I’m—I’m sure Father is fine.”

  He was lying.

  She wouldn’t play along.

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know anything.” Before she could argue, he rushed ahead of her and leapt over a river of snowmelt while his uncut black hair fanned out behind h
im, and he landed. “And even if I did know something, which I don’t, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “And why is that?” Sathryn leapt after him, but stumbled where her brother had so perfectly landed.

  “Because it would worry you. Distract you. You’re too young.”

  Etzimek was five years older. She snorted and turned away from him. By this time, her mother was far ahead of them. She turned now to call out to them, and Sathryn got yet another clear view of her weary and drained face. She looked much older than she had when the three of them first left a week previous. Her black hair, now threaded through with silver, hung like knotted ropes along her shoulder where it had once flown around her in waves. Her face was sunken in, her cheeks hollowed out. Her once crystalline eyes had dimmed to gray.

  At the call of her name, Sathryn rushed down the mountain to her mother’s side. As she gripped her hand, she didn’t once turn back, not even when Etzimek shouted her name over and over again.

  Two hours of trudging through snow and Sathryn was rewarded with a small, smelly, and smoke-saturated refugee camp. She stood at the entrance and eyed the crowded huts, bustling with human—and inhuman—creatures that smelled of stagnant sewer water. It was like looking at a painting; everyone was too stifled by the fog of their miserable lives to notice the three new people entering their camp.

  Sathryn followed her mother across the camp. Every so often, her staring led to unwanted eye contact, which she was quick to turn away from. Based on their sour expressions, these people didn’t welcome strangers.

  A thin, pale man stumbled along beside them, a cloth bag filled with cheap dragon eggs hanging from his wiry shoulders. His face, like everyone else’s, was pulled into a permanent grimace. He was muttering something in another language, but his words sounded angry.

  Someone shouted, and Sathryn swiveled her head toward the sound. A Faerie woman with purple hair that raked her waist stood behind a low table that read:

  CROANOA’S FORTUNE READINGS

  TAROT CARDS, PALM READS, TEA LEAVES, AND MORE . . .

  and shouted promises of honest and open foretellings.

  A vegetable vendor with skin as gray as his hair offered gray carrots to the crowd.

  A group of young boys with blue-tinted skin chased a deflated ball.

  A young woman cried.

  An old woman fell to her knees.

  And an imp no more than two feet tall gnawed on Sathryn’s leg.

  She hadn’t noticed it at first—she was too distracted—but when she looked down, its little orange face peered up at her, its teeth lodged into her now blood-soaked clothes.

  She screamed and kicked out, sending the imp sailing over the heads of the people and into a metal bucket hauled by an old Lynot woman with two scarlet horns peering from her greasy hair.

  Sathryn looked away and back down at her leg, now decorated in gashes and blood.

  Etzimek was the first to notice. He paused in the middle of the street and shot Sathryn an exasperated glare before pulling her aside. He ripped a strip of cloth from his shirt and wrapped it around her leg. “Didn’t I tell you to be careful? To pay attention? Some of these creatures do drink blood, Sathryn. They’re hungry, and they aren’t afraid to bite you.”

  Their mother was still moving away. Sathryn tried to follow her, but Etzimek pulled her back. “Are you listening to me? Sathryn—Sathryn! Sit. Down.”

  She tried to yank herself away. Etzimek always did this—acted like he could tell her what to do. His grip was tight around her arm, and she stopped struggling. “What? Do you want me to say thank you? Fine. Thank you, Etzimek, for bandaging my leg.”

  Etzimek still looked unsatisfied. “Can you stay out of everyone’s way? If you paid more attention, you’d stop getting hurt.”

  He let her go. She glared up at him before rushing back into the crowd to look for her mother, but her slate hair had been lost to the hundreds of other people around her.

  She turned again to look for Etzimek, but she was instead met with a pair of fiery-red eyes belonging to a tall older man behind her. He wore a long, tattered, gray shirt and a black cuff on his arm.

  “Lost?” the man asked. He grinned, and a pair of fangs poked out from his upper lip. Long claws sprouted from his fingertips, making their way to Sathryn’s coat.

  She stumbled backward, but the people around her formed a stone wall. “What—Get away!” She thrashed her arms against his.

  One of his hands crept up to her neck while the other neared her buttons. “We can smell your wealthy flesh from miles away,” the man whispered, “and we want a taste of it.” He pointed around the crowd. So many people mulling around ignored the man in front of her. The few glances she received were ones of equal wickedness as the man staring down at her, licking their lips like feral cats.

  His hands snapped up, one hand reaching into her jacket and grasping at the coins she kept tucked in one of the pockets, while the other hand grasped at her throat. She felt a prick at her neck and stumbled, a wave of dizziness washing over her. She could see the man robbing her, grinning like a fox as he did so, but she couldn’t move to stop him. Her head and limbs were heavy. Her eyes were just closing when a figure leapt from the crowd and shoved the man from her body.

  The man took one look at the figure and his eyes widened in fear. “Ajasek.” He held his hands up in submission, but the figure just dismissed him.

  His attention then turned to her. His face, Sathryn noticed, was younger than the man with fangs. If he was terrified of the boy, perhaps she should be too.

  The boy walked toward her, spreading his arms out. “No weapons.” He held out his hand for her to take. The adrenaline that had replaced the dizziness was now receding, leaving her feeling weighted again. She tried lifting her hand to his, but she could hardly hold it an inch from the ground.

  He eyed her, confused, until he knelt beside her and examined her.

  “Ah.” His brown hair whipped around his face, and he raised an impatient hand to wave it away. “He nicked you with his nails and injected a venom. Spades do that sometimes.” He smiled down at her—at least, she thought he did. She couldn’t tell at this point. Everything around her was distorted and unstable.

  And then the person above her was not the boy—it was her father.

  “It may cause . . . hallucin . . . Hello? Can—I have an antidote—you . . . hello?”

  She rose, the ground receding beneath her. She was flying. Or falling. She couldn’t tell which.

  “I was just trying to help.”

  “And how can we trust you, huh? What makes you different from everyone else in this place?” Someone was shouting. When Sathryn opened her eyes, there was a pointed roof above her head. It was brown, plain, and made of straw, and bound to collapse any minute.

  She turned her head. Etzimek was standing before the boy who had saved her. Etzimek was so much taller, yet the boy, dressed in a thick, fur coat and clean, thick pants, stared up fearlessly at him. “There’s medicine that will cure her.”

  Etzimek glared down at the boy as if he were mud beneath his shoe, regardless of what the boy said to console him.

  “The venom in her blood will take days to wear out without an antidote. She’ll be sick—nausea, fever, headaches—unless she’s given the antidote.”

  Etzimek was quiet for a moment. “Where can I get the antidote?”

  The boy smiled, pulling a vial of pale-yellow liquid from his pocket. “From me.”

  “I don’t trust you,” Etzimek muttered. “That could be poison . . . or . . .”

  As he spoke, the boy opened the vial and took a sip. “See? It’s fine.”

  Etzimek was quiet again. After a while, he nodded to Sathryn, watching the boy as he made his way to her side. Sathryn shut her eyes, but the boy laughed.

  “You aren’t asleep,” the boy murmured. Sathryn opened her eyes again to find the boy staring down at her. In the brighter light of wherever she lay, the harsh blue of the boy’s eyes fla
shed at Sathryn. They smiled down at her as well—as mysterious as they were kind.

  “Where am I?” asked Sathryn. Outside, people were talking and shouting.

  “A tent,” the boy said. “It belongs to a friend. When you collapsed, he let us in. I have an antidote.” He held up the vial. “It’ll wash out the venom, and it’s painless.”

  Sathryn made a face. Sleep had made her less dizzy, but the longer she stayed awake, the more she noticed the feeling of distortion rising back to the surface. She nodded at the boy, and in response, he brought the vial to her lips and tilted it back down her throat. It was warm and sour and tasted like how stagnant water smelled, but within a few minutes, the world around Sathryn sharpened.

  “Better?” the boy asked. Behind him, Etzimek stood alone with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. There was no sign of her mother.

  “Better.” She sat up. “I don’t even know your name . . . The man that attacked me called you Ajasek.”

  He nodded. “Julian Ajasek.”

  Sathryn didn’t recognize the name. “Sathryn Bassira.”

  The boy nodded. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Who was that man?” she asked him.

  “He’s part of a terrorist group here called the Red Arrows.” Julian wrapped the antidote in a cloth before stuffing it into a small, leather bag slung over his shoulder. “Nothing but a few poor Spades and imps trying to scare money from people.”

  Sathryn thought of the imp from earlier.

  “He said he could smell my flesh.” She grimaced.

  He smiled. “Because you’re an easy target. You look like you’re new here.”

  A sharp screech echoed through the small tent and she, Etzimek, and Julian quieted.

  It was coming from above them outside the tent. Julian exited, leaving Etzimek to help Sathryn from the blankets she was lying on. Outside, peering into the gray above, she spotted the dark-green body of a messenger Chlork dragon—a tiny creature with a long, narrow head covered in round scales, and a slender body that tapered into a wiry tail armed in knifelike barbs. Clenched between its teeth was a small, black box. As the dragon flew overhead, those standing in stationary masses followed it, including Julian. Sathryn caught the back of Etzimek’s coat as they were pulled forward by the roaring tide of people.